Three Roads: Labor, Music, Ecology
An Interview With Joe Uehlein

Come listen to, sing along with, and talk to on September 30, from 4:00-6:00 pm, at the Washington State Labor Council, AFL-CIO. Seattle is one stop on Joe’s national Three Roads Book and Music Tour.

Q: Joe, you grew up in a union house-hold. Tell us a little about how that shaped your life and your passion for the labor movement.

A: My dad was on staff with the United Steelworkers Local 1104 in Lorain, Ohio. Our family life and social life revolved around the local – summer picnics and holiday events. In 1959, the steelworkers went on strike for over 100 days.

About 500,000 workers struck and shut down about 90 percent of steel production in the US. To this day, it is still the longest steel strike in history. I was six years old and my dad took me down to the picket line all the time.

On the line we sang union songs and walked the picket line. As staff, my dad didn’t get paid while the strike was on either. I remember this created a scaled back holiday season – socks and underwear. Socks and underwear became a holiday tradition in our family.

My dad also played the guitar and sang and my mother played the piano and sang. We sang union and folk songs all the time. I also remember my dad bringing home a 35mm projector and a copy of an inspirational movie called “The Inheritance,” which traced the founding of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union.

Q: Music has been a part of your life from early on. Who inspired you, and why did you become a musician for working people?

A: Joe Glazier was a huge inspiration to me. Joe was the education director for the Rubber Workers Union out of Akron, Ohio. We had an album of his that we played all the time at home. Joe was invited to the Steelworkers Hall to sing at the victory party at the conclusion of the 1959 strike. My family was sitting in the first row and Joe came up to my dad and asked that he send me and my sister to the back of the auditorium because kids tend to be disruptive at shows. My dad said no and that, in fact, the kids would sing all the words to every song he played. I still have the songbook that Joe Glazier autographed for the Uehlein family. Over the years, Joe and I became friends.

In 1965 some buddies and I formed our first band. We wanted to play like the Beatles. We wanted to play at the Cedar Point Amusement Park in Sandusky, Ohio. We were told we could play only if we joined the American Federation of Musicians Union. We all came from union families, so we were happy to do so, I am a 60-year member of the AFM.

I was asked by the AFL-CIO to organize the music program for the First Solidarity Day in Washington, D.C. on September 19, 1981. I booked Pete Seeger and Florence Reese (“Which Side Are You On”) and a bunch of other folks, including my own band. I taped the music and the speeches from that day and released a selection of speeches and songs as an album entitled Solidarity Day.

Q: Joe, what led you to believe that climate change was a critical issue for labor, and why did you start Labor Network for Sustainability?

A: In 1988 the United Nations created the first Commission on Global Warming. I had never heard that term before, but this all sounded very serious, and I knew labor needed to be at the table. I was appointed to the Commission and served on it through 2003. I got to hear from union leaders from all around the world who were taking the issue seriously. It became clear to me that this was a defining issue for society and for the labor movement. But getting traction from US labor leaders was just not happening. I left my job as Secretary-Treasurer of the Industrial Union Department of the AFL-CIO and spent a year doing one-on-one interviews with union leaders about climate change. At the conclusion of this I wrote up my thoughts and presented them to the Union of Concerned Scientists, an organization I have been on the Board of for a long time. They passed my piece on to a philanthropic organization that then granted me $100,000 to continue working on these issues. With this, I hired Jeremy Brecher and some others and we created a 501(c)(3) – Labor Network for Sustainability (LNS). For 17 plus years, LNS has worked at the intersection of labor, environmental justice, and the environmental communities, building bridges in an attempt to build a sustainable planet.

Q: Given that our planet is literally on fire, do you still have hope for the future?

A: Yes. Though I worry about the time-line that we have to course-correct. When we started LNS, no union in the US was taking action on climate change. Today there are local unions, Central Labor Councils, and State Federations that are raising their voices and beginning to raise the LNS clarion call ”that there are no jobs on a dead planet.”