Scheduled for publication in Randy Hodson, ed., Research in the Sociology of Work, Volume 8 (Stamford, CT: JAI Press, 2000)

Acknowledgements: I would like to thank the following persons for providing helpful feedback on various versions of this paper: Jean Ait Amber Belkhir, Robert Bullard, Randy Hodson, Albert Hunter, Glenn Johnson, Aldon Morris, Lisa Sun-Hee Park, Allan Schnaiberg, Ira Silver, Dorceta Taylor, and Adam Weinberg. This research was supported by a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Scholars in Health Policy Research Postdoctoral Fellowship.

Abstract:

This paper has three aims. The first is to highlight a dimension of marginal work that is often overlooked. That is the fact that millions of people in this nation labor in hazardous occupations. I underscore this issue by asking: what are the social mechanisms that produce hazardous work? The second task is to place this question within a sociological framework at the intersection between research on marginal work and the environment. The third goal is to develop a model I term 'environmental inequality formation' that offers clues as to how hazardous work in particular and environmental inequalities in general are produced.

The vast majority of research on the links between marginal work and the environment emphasizes the occupational maldistribution of environmental hazards across race and class. This literature is therefore limited in that it focuses mainly on unequal outcomes. In this paper, I propose an environmental inequality formation (EIF) model to capture the sociological dynamics that produce and shape environmental inequality in marginal workplaces. The EIF perspective synthesizes three major points, largely neglected in research on environmental inequalities: 1) multi-stakeholder interactions; 2) socio-historical factors producing inequalities; and 3) worker agency and autonomy in shaping and resisting environmental inequalities. I illustrate the model's utility with ethnographic data from a case study of African Americans working under hazardous conditions in a midwestern city’s recycling plant.

Introduction

There are a number of ways that sociologists have examined the marginality of workers in our society. Studies of the absence of work, for example, reveal that many members of society are marginalized because they do not hold down a regular job or have no job at all (Wilson 1996). Other research reveals that, as much as work seems to count for a great deal in our social system, there are millions of working people who never achieve an existence above the poverty line (Levitan and Shapiro 1987). Finally, a great number of persons working in this nation are battling against the marginal status of involuntary "temporary employment" (Parker 1994) and the everyday indignities of laboring in a service economy (Paules 1993). Individuals and groups of people in these situations are unified in their experience of social marginality.

This paper is an effort to accomplish three things. The first is to highlight a dimension of marginality that is often overlooked. That is the fact that millions of persons in this nation experience marginality through their work in dangerous or hazardous occupations. Second, I frame this type of marginality in the workplace at the intersection of research on work and environmental quality. And third, I develop a conceptual model to explain how hazardous workplace environments are socially produced--environmental inequality formation.

Research on Environmental Inequality and a Road Map for Reaching Clarity

Scholars researching environmental inequality (EI) have produced empirical studies of workers who remain at society's margins by virtue of their exposure to environmental hazards.1 With regard to the workplace, this literature has focused on a number of pressing questions such as: what is the probability that a workforce of a particular ethnic composition will be disproportionately burdened with toxic waste or other hazards (i.e. environmental racism) (Johnson and Oliver 1989; Robinson 1991; Wright and Bullard 1993)?2 How do residents, workers, and social movement organizations respond to these crises (Hurley 1995; Pulido 1996; Taylor 1997)? What policy changes will address the problem of "unequal protection" (Bullard 1994) against toxic and other hazardous threats in marginal workplaces (Bryant 1995; Roberts 1993; Robinson 1991)?

Thus the vast majority of this literature emphasizes the maldistribution of environmental hazards and the organized response to these toxic burdens. In other words, this research is focused largely on unequal outcomes. The assumption is often that a perpetrator (corporation or state agency) unilaterally imposes hazards on a target population--what I term a 'perpetrator-victim scenario'. In most cases, however, environmental inequalities emerge in a much more complex fashion. As such, this literature remains in need of a theoretical model grounded in empirical data that might provide clues as to how environmental inequalities are produced in workplaces. That is, what are the social mechanisms that produce hazardous workplaces where people of color are concentrated? The importance of understanding this process cannot be overstated: when we can explain how environmental inequalities are produced, we can develop better models of causation and improve theory-building in this area. Furthermore, once we know how these phenomena emerge, we can also propose policy recommendations to address these ills.

In this paper, I propose an environmental inequality formation (EIF) model to capture the sociological dynamics that produce and shape environmental inequality in marginal workplaces. The EIF perspective synthesizes three major points, largely neglected in research on environmental inequalities: 1) the need to understand that environmental inequality involves multiple stakeholder groups with contradictory, shifting interests and allegiances, rather than simply viewing EI as the result of 'perpetrator-victim scenarios'; 2) the need to redefine environmental inequality as a socio-historical process rather than simply viewing it as a discrete event (for a discussion of racial inequality from this perspective, see Omi and Winant, 1987); and 3) viewing those groups experiencing environmental inequality as agents who can shape this process.³

A growing number of scholars have begun laying the groundwork for understanding many of the dimensions of EIF, namely issues of agency and historical processes (Hurley, 1995; Krieg, 1995; Pulido, 1996; Szasz and Meuser, 1997; Walsh, Warland, and Smith, 1997). However, these recent studies remain in need of a synthetic theoretical basis for analyzing environmental inequality's causes and consequences. The environmental inequality formation model achieves this end and suggests that environmental racism and inequalities originate and emerge in a much more complex process than previously considered.

I ground the theoretical model in a case study of hazardous work in a recycling plant. Following the model proposed above, I argue that environmental inequalities in the city's recycling industry are the result of a confluence among the following factors: 1) multi-stakeholder relationships and the socio-historical evolution of these relationships; 2) managerial decision-making regarding health hazards in the labor process; and 3) the degree of worker autonomy, organization, and resistance.

I first provide an overview of the methodological approach and data sources used in this research. Second, I present a review of the scholarly literatures on the relationship between work, health, and the environment as they relate to social inequality. Third, I present an ethnographic case study, highlighting the plight of African Americans engaged in hazardous work in a Midwestern city’s recycling plant.⁴ Finally, I demonstrate how this case informs both the environmental inequality formation model and our understanding of the social mechanisms that produce hazardous work where marginal members of society are concentrated.

Methods

Data for this study were gathered between the spring of 1994 and summer of 1996. I employed both participant observation and interview methods in a recycling firm in a midwestern city. I conducted semi-structured interviews with 9 managers and 25 workers in order to ask questions about the nature of the labor process, health and safety hazards in the workplace, and workers' coping strategies. These workers and managers were drawn from all levels of the shop-floor and managerial ranks. Some (mostly managers) were interested in dispelling any "bad press" that recycling in this city had received, while others (mostly workers) wished to expose some of the company’s misdeeds. Therefore this sample is non-random. Rather, the informants are individuals who agreed to be interviewed because they felt personally motivated to "set the record straight". In order to protect the identities of subjects, all names used in this paper are pseudonyms. Finally, I gathered secondary data through analyses of organizational documents, newspaper articles, and a half-dozen recycling trade journals.

Work, Health and the Environment in the Occupational Ghetto

Men and women of color are over-represented in dangerous and 'high risk' jobs (Johnson and Oliver 1989). African Americans and Latinos in particular face greater health threats in the workplace than the average white worker of the same socioeconomic status. For example, in the state of California in 1986, Latino men were "80% more likely to suffer a disabling injury or illness than whites, while black men were 40% more likely" (Robinson 1991: 97). While women in California suffered lower injury rates, the proportionate ethnic differences are also present. Latinas "were almost 60% more likely than their white co-workers and black women were almost 40% more likely than their white co-workers to suffer a disabling injury or illness" (Robinson 1991: 97). Nation-wide, African Americans have an injury rate that is 37% higher than the rate for white workers (Kotelchuck 1979).

While racial inequality is pervasive in these dangerous labor markets, other research on the relationship between work and health proposes a more class-oriented thesis of occupational health and safety. Several scholars argue that the practice of maintaining bad working conditions must be understood within a broader theory of capitalist exploitation of the working class (Nelkin and Brown 1984; Roberts 1993). For example, Navarro (1982) develops a class theory of health and stress under advanced capitalism and argues that the capitalist class engages in the "absolute expropriation of health from workers" (cf. Roberts 1993).

The workplace hazards literature generally reaches consensus on one issue: that one of the most frightening experiences workers confront is not simply the hazards they face, but rather the uncertainty about what the effects of exposure will be over time (Nelkin and Brown 1984; Roberts 1996). Whether the result of exposure to dust, chemicals, or a variety of other hazards, workers are often aware of the dormant, cumulative nature of occupational illness. For many laborers it is not a question of whether they will become sick but when. Workers often liken this uncertainty to a "time bomb ticking inside you" (Nelkin and Brown 1984: 181). As one recycling worker I interviewed put it, "working here is definitely going to shorten your life. The only question is just how much." This uncertainty haunts workers on the job and at home. It is especially hard on workers with few mobility options. An understanding of the limited degrees of freedom workers have is crucial in the study of hazardous secondary labor markets. Both of these forces--health hazards and limited mobility--exacerbate their experience of marginality.

Thus marginality has a psychosocial dimension and this manifests itself in workers' concern over the amount of control they have in the labor process. Control over one's work environment is often cited as a central factor in explaining worker stresses (Roberts 1996). Karasek and Theorell (1990) propose a Job Demands-Control (JD-C) model of job stress wherein the most stressed workers will be those whose jobs place the most demands upon them without a commensurate amount of control. Scholars have only recently recognized the issue of control as a driver of occupational health problems. Control (or lack thereof) is of great concern because it often exacerbates the already physically stressful nature of dangerous work.

Other research on hazardous work argues persuasively that each worker's position in the social structure of a firm is strongly correlated with his or her perception of--and exposure to--hazards (Roberts 1996). These scholars make the case that the workplace must be viewed as a "complex structure within which individuals have differing amounts of skills, prestige, decision latitude in solving problems, and amounts of control over their own time and the actions of others" (Roberts 1996). Not surprisingly then, managers under pressure to maximize profits typically have an understanding of workplace safety that differs markedly from that of laborers working on the front line. Within the firm used for this case study, for example, workers informed me that the labor process hazards are at times lethal, while their managers felt no need to prioritize health and safety practices on the shopfloor.

In sum, hazardous work is marginalizing partly because it is correlated with being a member of a subordinate class or racial group. But it is also marginalizing because workers laboring in hazardous occupations are more likely to be underpaid, more likely to experience greater job insecurity, and more likely to feel their jobs stifle their creativity (e.g. alienation via monotony, and no control over duties or work hours) than are workers holding non-hazardous jobs (Robinson 1991: 84-89). Marginality for workers in dangerous jobs is the accumulation of daily assaults on one’s physical, social, and psychological integrity; it is the additive and combinatorial effect of working and living at the bottom of the social structure inside and outside the workplace. These workers are on the receiving end of social and environmental insults and are physically taxed in the process. This marginality places such workers in "multiple jeopardy" (King 1988) as persons with low status, low-income, and high risk jobs with little-to-no-future. And although collectively they enjoy virtually no formal political power, at the subaltern level they may often regain some of their dignity and agency. Thus marginality for any single group is neither fixed nor inevitable; it is created, contested, and continuously transformed.

This brings us back to the intersection between environmental quality and social inequality at work. Social inequality must remain at the core of any discussion of worker safety and health. And while marginal work is continually changing, society has always required that certain groups perform "dirty work" in unsafe, low-wage, and low-status occupations. Thus marginal employment remains a fundamental part of the social structure. However, it continues to change in ways that require new theoretical lenses for analysis.

The next section contains data from a case study of a recycling plant. This is not just a presentation of findings from the shopfloor, but also an examination of how the plant was socially and physically constructed before the workers were even hired.

Environmental Inequality at TWI: Stakeholder Efforts

In 1995, this Midwestern City embarked upon a large scale municipal recycling program called the 'Green Bag'. While many curbside recycling programs are characterized by source-separated recyclables put into bins for pick up by recycling trucks (not municipal waste trucks), this program was different. Through the Green Bag program, residents place their recyclables in green plastic bags, which are then collected along with trash in the same garbage trucks. The trucks then dump their loads at Materials Recovery Facilities (MRFs)--operated by Transnational Waste Inc. (TWI)--where the bags will be pulled out of the garbage and their contents separated manually. Recyclable materials found in garbage (non-green) bags are also pulled out for processing. The manual sorting of trash and recyclables was performed by dozens of African American workers standing along large conveyor belts in a MRF the size of several football fields.

The Green Bag was introduced for several reasons. First, the role of environmental organizations. In 1984, a strong environmental movement campaign produced a moratorium on building new landfills and forced the City to seek new waste disposal options. The City also needed a system that would bring it into compliance with new local and state recycling laws, which had also been pushed by local environmental organizations. Finally, there was a case brought before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit by environmental organizations that ruled that the city's incinerator ash constituted hazardous waste. This meant that the tons of waste produced every day at the Northside Incinerator (the city's principal waste management system since 1971) were now subject to regulation under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA), and hence expensive to dispose of. The City's response was to propose a $150 million retrofit of the incinerator that would produce cleaner waste. Seizing this opportunity, a coalition of environmental and social justice organizations called Nine Organizations on the West Side for a Safe and Toxic-free Environment (N.O.W.A.S.T.E.) challenged the city's efforts to keep the incinerator open by arguing that recycling was a better option. N.O.W.A.S.T.E. advocated alternatives to the incinerator, including a comprehensive urban recycling system. N.O.W.A.S.T.E. eventually mobilized a large number of supporters and succeeded in closing down the city's main incinerator.

The Second influence on the City's decision to adopt a new recycling system was the availability of a willing corporate partner. When the city agreed to shut the incinerator down, industry stepped in to support recycling. Unfortunately, for the environmentalists who were still celebrating their victory over the Northside Incinerator, Transnational Waste, Inc. was awarded the municipal recycling contract. TWI was actually the parent company of the firm that had operated the city's incinerator, and was in this way maintaining control over waste disposal in the city.

The third major reason for the choice of a large-scale recycling program was the need for job creation. The city council was eager to explore the prospect of new recycling centers in this city that has faced a continuous exodus of jobs for its working-class residents since the early 1970s. Many local neighborhood and environmental justice groups have had a long history of organizing around this issue as well. The Mayor's administration was interested in virtually any new economic development scheme. As one city official declared: "we estimate that the recycling industry can support at least 1,000 jobs in the city at a 25% recycling level."

At the time, TWI was the largest waste hauler in the world. Averaging annual revenues in the neighborhood of $11 billion, TWI had operations on five continents. TWI was probably the one corporation most vilified by the Environmental Justice movement in recent years, stemming from its ownership of thousands of landfills, incinerators, and hazardous waste facilities in poor communities and communities of color. What is curious is that several local organizations that had been fighting TWI in this Midwestern City for years decided to support the Green Bag program. For example, a nationally-recognized environmental justice organization, Communities United for Justice (CUJ), had been fighting what they viewed as environmental racism associated with TWI's operations since 1982. Specifically, CUJ was up in arms about the location of TWI's landfill and chemical waste incinerator in African American neighborhoods and even held several public protests against the company. For years, CUJ's diagnosis of the problem was "too much pollution and not enough good jobs"--a mantra taken up by the rest of the Environmental Justice Movement as well. When TWI announced that it was finally going to address the "jobs versus the environment" dilemma by building a recycling plant that would hire local residents, CUJ and several other organizations lent their support. TWI made an arrangement with these organizations to recruit and interview local residents, many of whom later went to work for the company and were exposed to myriad hazards on the job. In this way, many environmental justice movement organizations ironically have complicity in the reproduction of environmental inequality among workers from their own communities.

Thus, the hazards associated with TWI's recycling plant were not imposed unilaterally by the company. Rather, through a complex history, environmentalists, the state, community groups and industrialists supported a large-scale recycling program by "collaboratively framing" (Pellow 1999) recycling as a policy that would meet each other’s needs. It would please the environmental community, make profits for private industry, and provide jobs in some of the City's most depressed areas. This ideology of job creation with environmental benefits was then appropriated by TWI's management in ways that focused more on production and less on ecological issues.

Managerial Decision-Making and its Impact on Environmental Inequality Formation

Once the recycling centers (MRFs) were built, decisions made by managers at Transnational Waste, Inc. had direct impacts on the nature of environmental inequality at the MRFs. In this section, I discuss how both the structure of the Green Bag system and the MRFs in which they were processed were the result of decisions made by managers with a range of options available to them. These decisions were made with the general support of neighborhood organizations, environmentally conscious citizens, and the financial and political support of the City. The stakeholders generally left out of the debate over the Green Bag were the workers. Two principal decisions contributed to environmental inequality at the MRF: 1) the policy of accepting certain types of waste and 2) the use of oppressive social relations of production

Managerial Decision #1: Accepting Certain Types of Waste

A distinction must be made between the kind of MRF where only source-separated recyclables are sorted and the type of MRF where both recyclables and municipal solid waste (MSW or garbage) are sorted. The latter type is where the city’s Green Bags are processed and is commonly known as a 'dirty MRF' because the majority of the material volume is household garbage. This is important because the use of municipal solid waste was the result of a managerial decision about how to run the MRF. There are hundreds of MRFs across the nation that only receive source-separated materials and do not accept MSW; Transnational Waste, Inc. departed from this model in an apparent effort to innovate and reap greater value from the entire waste stream. This managerial decision is also important because of its direct impact on the nature of occupational safety and health at the MRF. MSW is material that a Danish inspection service ruled "presents a very high health hazard, and must not be sorted by hand" (Ritter 1996).

The stories Green Bag workers and managers recounted to me resemble those told by laborers in the sweat shops, steel mills, coal mines, textile mills, and meat factories of the nineteenth century U.S. and the contemporary Third World. Under the rubric of health and safety hazards fall a myriad number of threats to worker well-being. While recycling sorting centers (MRFs) are not normally viewed as workplaces that process or produce chemical toxins, in fact, workers regularly handle toxic substances on the job. This is because household hazardous waste is unregulated and often contained in recyclable plastic and metal containers that recycling centers sort. As one worker explained, he comes into close contact with "anything and everything that people just normally throw out in their garbage." This includes bleach, battery acid, paint and paint thinner, inks, dyes as well as razor blades, and homemade explosives. Recycling firms are also not intended for medical waste processing, but MRF workers routinely handle these materials. Darnell, one employee, explained,

There are tons of medical wastes and construction wastes. Say, for instance the red bags that have biohazards would drop down the chute. I said 'damn, that looks like asbestos, a cloud of asbestos dust just hanging there!'

Workers getting stuck with syringes and hypodermic needles or sprayed with battery acid are some of the most common and potentially lethal accidents that occur in materials recovery facilities (Ritter 1996). The needle sticks are particularly frightening given the widespread fear among workers of contracting HIV.

Workers experienced shock and stress on a routine basis. For example, Edward, an ex-MRF employee, told of a particularly grisly experience during an evening shift:

I worked in the primary department. That's where the trucks dump raw garbage right there. One time a dead lady was dumped on the floor in front of me....One woman [employee] fainted and everybody else was screaming. A couple of guys were just wandering around on the catwalk [a 40 feet tall structure] looking like they was dazed.

In the span of two weeks time, Ferris, a line sorter, told me he witnessed

...about six of 'em [accidents]. I got cut on my finger with some glass, because the glass went through the glove. And then this other girl, she got stuck in the arm with needles, but they sent her to the company doctor. And they put her back to work the next day when her arm was still hurting. They gave her some medicine and she was still hurting, so I feel that wasn't right. Then this one guy fell down a chute and broke his arm. And then this one guy got burnt with some battery acid.

Psychological and physical hazards intermingled at this plant as people desperate for gainful employment and job security continued working in the face of gross health and safety violations. In a city where the African American unemployment rate in many neighborhoods exceeds 50 percent (Wilson 1996), it is not difficult to understand why one worker explained, "You never turn down work when you're looking for it." However, he also reasoned that "you also have to think of your safety because that job might be there next year, but if you contracted some disease, you might not be there next year."

Thus, decisions made by management routinely produced an unsafe working environment for TWI employees. And while these hazards are both physical and psychological in their impact, they originate and are mediated through social structures or the relations of production. This is the subject of the next section.

Managerial Decision #2: Maintaining Oppressive Social Relations of Production

Louise Lamphere's (1993) study of women's factory work in the American Sunbelt examined two types of firm cultures, "participative" and "hierarchical." Within a hierarchical structure, there are multiple systems of control over workers whose only role is to produce a product and comply with managerial directives. In contrast, a participative shopfloor involves the "debureaucratization" of control, where employees have a vote in job rotation, holiday schedules, and other aspects of work culture. TWI's culture was entirely hierarchical, as are most secondary labor markets where African Americans are concentrated. A firm's culture is part of what sociologists call the social relations of production. The social relations of production generally include the ownership, command and control of production (Braverman 1974). Managerial control is one of the key components of the relations of production.

Richard Edwards' classic book Contested Terrain outlined three types of managerial control of labor: simple, technical and bureaucratic. While Edwards' typology is helpful for analyzing manager-employee relations, we also need an understanding of how these forms of control impact the nature of environmental inequality on the shop floor. TWI managers made use of all three forms.

Simple control generally includes direct supervision of labor. TWI managers made the decision to use a disciplinarian management style. For example, workers regularly complained of being harassed by foremen and managers who rarely let them leave the sorting lines to use the bathrooms, and arbitrarily instituted mandatory overtime. Thus, as one ex-manager explained, simple control often meant direct intimidation:

Dan Johnson was the supervisor and he walked around the plant with a pistol in his holster. His philosophy was 'whenever you get a disgruntled worker you have to slap them and shut them up.'

These contested social relations of production had direct impacts on the state of occupational health in the TWI MRF. Collins, a worker at the facility, told of the following experience between the MRF managers and workers who were determined to keep their jobs:

One lady I know cut her foot. This was in where they pick the trash off the conveyor belts--it's upstairs. She had cut her foot and she was bleeding. And I was thinking you know, if you hadn't had a tetanus shot and you don't know what you stepped on... I thought the company should have took her right away to get her a tetanus shot. They didn't. They gave her a piece of toilet tissue, put it back in her shoes and sent her right back to work. When she got injured, that was part of her 15-minute break. She used her 15-minute break to take care of it.

A traditional battle between workers and management throughout this century has been over the control and speed of the assembly line (Braverman 1974). In Edwards' (1979) typology of forms of managerial control, the assembly line represents the classic example of technical control. Like many workers on contemporary assembly lines, however, some recycling workers had the power to stop the process for emergencies and certain quality control purposes (although strongly discouraged). However, the speed of the line was inflexible. One female worker noted,

There was no way you could control the speed [of the line]. You could control it if you wanted to stop it, but not control how fast or how slow it went.

Another sorter, Ana, recounts her memory of this part of the job: "The line went by fast. It just goes like that." Like all components of the social relations of production, the assembly line as technical control impacted the state of occupational safety and health in the TWI MRF. In the case of the sorting line in the recycling centers, 'safety' may also mean "ducking for cover" if the material coming down the line was hazardous to your health. A male worker recounted the following experience:

On my part of the line you're where sticks and branches would come from up under there and you can't see everything, even with the goggles. And with the belt constantly running, you're reaching for one thing and by the time you turn your head back there's something in your face....You couldn't see what was actually coming and that made it real dangerous for you.

The relations of production also directly impacted workers' social psychological stability with regard to their status as 'temps', or temporary workers. All TWI employees were temps, a status that made one’s work experience and quality of life problematic. Being a 'temp' worker is psychologically and economically marginalizing. Temporary status and the informal managerial practices that often accompany it are in this context used as a form of bureaucratic control (Edwards 1979). That is, the presence or absence of company rules, regulations, and procedures can place many barriers to a worker's remuneration, safety, status, power, and job advancement. Jason remembers being laid off with no notice:

They got our hopes up so high. They didn't tell us that we was experimental guinea pigs. They just had us psyched all up like we was gon' be there for a while and they just dropped us like that.

Bureaucratic control at TWI also included a structure of rules and procedures that nearly guaranteed that African Americans would remain at the lowest-ranking, most dangerous jobs in the plant.

Thus managerial decisions in the TWI MRF had direct impacts on the state of environmental inequality. Specifically, these decisions included 1) creating a hazardous work environment through the use of mixed waste processing and 2) maintaining oppressive social relations of production.

Most workers I spoke with wanted better pay, job security, and more attention to occupational safety. Many of them drew on a range of strategies in this effort. This is the subject of the next section.

Shaping Environmental Inequalities from Below: Worker Autonomy and the Culture of Resistance Against Occupational Hazards

The nature of hierarchy and the oppressive relations of production directly influenced the degree to which TWI workers experienced autonomy and agency on the job. Workers responded to social subjugation and multiple occupational hazards through a variety of tactics.

Some workers gave 'voice' to their concerns. In one worker's letter to the press--in which he pleaded for journalists to exercise "that constitutional freedom I do not [have]"--he noted that he and his co-workers experienced "constant colds, flu, diarrhea and coughing." He went on to write that

Several people have been stuck by discarded hypodermic needles. Air quality is bad. Others, including myself, have been injured by battery acid, muscle strains, lower back pain, pinched nerves, contusion, various types of trauma, including emotional or psychological from witnessing dead bodies, parts of animal carcasses, live and dead rats, etc. And let's not forget the supervisors' bogus tactics....[we have been] threatened to be fired by voicing your opinion...Being talked to loud in front of other people. Not being able to take a day off even if you are sick or a family member dies.

This worker was later fired for this action and immediately pressed for Occupational Safety and Health Administration and Department of Justice investigations at his former workplace.

During the Green Bag’s first several months of operation, workers and managers had contacted the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. OSHA finally agreed to inspect the plant and fined TWI $10,500 for labor violations. A year later, OSHA representatives made a follow-up visit to the TWI MRF and found that TWI engaged in the "willful violation" of previous orders to follow labor law and inoculate its employees against the Hepatitis B vaccine. The penalty this time was more substantial at a total of $112,500.

Several workers articulated their circumstances and grievances through their experiences as people of color in an unequal society. One female worker referred to her manager as a "prejudiced, chauvinistic, racist." Another female worker declared

...it was all black folks [working in the MRF]... and no white folks. Yes they had us slaving, we was back in slavery.

Critiquing the racially biased authority structure at one firm, one man said,

I would love to see more people of color in positions of authority over there because all the big wigs are white. Black folks are the peons over there. And if you ever go down to the facility you'll see what goes in and out of there...nothing but garbage and Blacks.

Many workers exercised their option to "exit" (Hirschman 1970). The coercive social relations combined with occupational hazards were generally cited as the reasons for this type of response. As a female co-worker told me,

After one girl's accident she just didn't come back! So that a lot of people were saying 'we ain't coming back'. Like that Friday I told my brother- in-law [who also worked at the plant], I said on Monday 'I ain't coming back! I'm not going to go through all this for them!.'

Worker response to hazards and coercion many times included "everyday forms of resistance" (Scott 1990). Some common forms this 'hidden resistance' took were muted character assassination directed at management and the silent refusal to touch things on the line that were perceived as "too nasty" or "dangerous." This refusal frequently angered management because it had a direct negative impact on the plant's productivity. A worker named Seela explained:

Seela: Well if something [a pile of garbage] was too high I just let it go. Plain and simple. That's what everybody else was doing. They were like 'hey, if you can't see nothing just back away from it and let it pass.'

In one instance, worker response included an extreme form of resistance. One ex-manager I spoke with inquired:

Did you ever hear about the riot at TWI? You know, it was the week of Christmas and people had been working a lot of overtime. But management didn't keep track of their hours so people were getting checks for like $1.05 and $1.50 for two weeks of work. So the workers rioted. They tore the hell out of the dining room, knocking over tables, breaking out windows and all kinds of stuff.

Despite these efforts, workers remained embedded in a larger social and political process that continued to support and ignore these environmental inequalities.

Within a market economy, workers generally have an interest in maintaining high levels of production, given that their wages are believed to be tied to productivity. This interest frequently conflicts with the goals of occupational safety and environmental protection. This is because productivity gains are often correlated with rising levels of pollution and resource extraction. Productivity concerns are also generally prioritized over health and safety issues, and thus workers are encouraged to ignore dangerous conditions for a wage. In fact, most of TWI's employees were forced to choose between their safety and a job.

Discussion

Environmental inequality formation at TWI occurred when 1) environmentalists, neighborhood groups, the state, and industry "collaboratively framed" recycling as a policy that would achieve resource conservation (i.e. solve the landfill crisis) and job creation; 2) managerial decision making at TWI contributed to a dangerous work environment (through the use of mixed waste processing and maintaining oppressive social relations of production); and 3) workers at TWI drew on a range of resistance strategies in response to #1 and #2.

Research on environmental inequality in the workplace will be strengthened by the environmental inequality formation model in three ways, as illustrated by the TWI case study:

1) First, the environmental inequalities at TWI were not simply the result of TWI perpetrating injustices upon the workers. Rather they were part of a larger, multi-stakeholder process that involved dialectic and cross-cutting allegiances among stakeholders. Attention to multi-stakeholder activity is important because it moves us beyond the dyadic models of EI that are so prevalent--what I call the 'perpetrator-victim scenarios'--to a model where EI involves and impacts many actors, institutions, and organizations, or stakeholders. For example, the classic perpetrator-victim scenario is that a corporate polluter dumps waste on a community or brings hazardous jobs to a neighborhood that has relatively little power to prevent this injustice. However, when one studies EI from a multi-stakeholder perspective, it becomes clear that environmental inequalities are not always simply imposed unilaterally by one stakeholder on another. Rather, like all forms of inequality, environmental inequalities emerge through a process of on-going change involving negotiation and conflict among many stakeholders. In the case of the TWI recycling plant, environmentalists, community groups, residents and the city government all played a role in attracting the new facility to the area. These stakeholder groups collaboratively framed recycling as a policy that would address solid waste problems while creating employment opportunities. Such a policy appears to lie at the intersection of each groups' interests. Producers wish to maintain access to natural resources for inputs into production; environmentalists seek to reform or slow down production processes that pollute; community groups desire job creation for local residents; and the state wishes to balance these often conflicting needs while maintaining its own authority and legitimacy. Recycling is a policy that each of these groups had an interest in supporting, despite the myriad hazards workers faced. Thus the one stakeholder group left out of the initial negotiations was labor. This was in large part because TWI planned to hire a non-union work force. Hence no organized labor organizations were involved. The irony is that while TWI workers struggle against the marginality of low-pay and high hazards, they are also at the center of this transnational giant's production engine.

2) Second, and closely related to the first point, is the improved understanding we have of environmental inequality formation when we view it as a socio-historical process. Much of the research on environmental racism and environmental inequality in the workplace and communities is cross-sectional and therefore ahistorical. That is, many empirical studies produce data on the distribution of hazards from one point in time. But this belies the reality that environmental inequality struggles occur among stakeholders interacting over lengthy periods of time. For example, although the Green Bag recycling centers opened in 1995, their origin can be traced as least as far back as the community protests against TWI's landfills and the 1984 moratorium on landfill construction in the city.

Environmental inequalities are continually evolving over time as both hazards and people shift their spatial location and visibility. Environmental inequalities are also often subjected to on-going social constructions by different stakeholders. In the case of TWI, the hazards shifted from an incinerator's emissions to the occupational dangers of the recycling center that replaced the incinerator. This hazard-shifting occurred when TWI's subsidiary had to close the Northside incinerator and TWI then opened the Green Bag recycling centers almost immediately. In this way, TWI was maintaining control over waste management in this city. This was also a way of socially constructing incinerators as "dangerous" while recycling centers were defined as "safe". Again, this change in the definition of risk was the result of "collaborative framing" with other stakeholders. The environmental community had a hand in this process. For example, the same environmental organizations opposed to the Northside incinerator lent strong support to a recycling program that eventually produced environmental inequalities confronting African American workers. Furthermore, if one analyzes the history of this city's environmental movement, we find that many environmentalists who helped shut the incinerator down due to its risk to human health, were among the same activists who supported incineration's waste-to-energy potential in the 1970s. Contrary to popular perception, environmentalists were not always opposed to incinerators. During the 1970s and 1980s, many environmentalists endorsed the growing waste-to-energy (WTE) incinerator industry as a way of converting trash into a useful form (Gottlieb 1993:189-90). These shifting allegiances and evolving constructions of risk offer a deeper appreciation for the socio-historical dimensions of environmental inequality.

3) Third, the dimensions of worker autonomy, agency, and a culture of resistance play a key role in understanding the emergence and shaping of environmental inequality at TWI. For example, despite the lack of an organized labor presence, once the recycling plant was sited, worker resistance to managerial coercion and occupational hazards on the shopfloor produced a dynamic that shaped environmental inequalities inside and outside the plant.

Thus, even those stakeholders with relatively little power as compared with TWI played a role in shaping environmental inequality in this case. Workers shaped EI when they were able to periodically change the degree to which they were exposed to hazards. In this way workers altered some of the conditions under which they worked. This "soldiering" among the working class has been documented elsewhere (Burawoy 1979) and is among the repertoire of "everyday resistance" tactics African Americans have used at least as far back as the labor process under slavery in the U.S. (Genovese 1972: 597). Additionally, because of worker resistance, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration inspected and fined the facility (although both times whistle blowers paid for their actions by losing their jobs).

Workers at TWI resisted and therefore shaped environmental inequalities as they emerged at the plant. Through a variety of strategies workers responded to managerial decision-making through tactics that may have empowered them in not insignificant ways. This resistance should be qualified in that workers were never able to organize collectively in a formal sense, particularly since union eligibility was routinely denied them. Thus despite the range of resistance strategies workers drew on, most reported that the job at TWI remains highly undesirable and unsafe.

Other stakeholders in this case include the City administration and TWI's management. Their actions must also be analyzed from a stakeholder perspective. A number of researchers maintain that the state often acts on its own behalf and enjoys considerable autonomy from private interests (Evans, Rueschemeyer, and Skocpol 1985). However, as the world’s economies become increasingly linked and the power of multinational corporations has grown, this "state autonomy" view has been questioned. For example, a number of scholars find that the state often acts as an "ambassador" to industry and exercises its authority more often on behalf of corporate interests than for the citizenry (Gould, Schnaiberg and Weinberg 1996). In this paper I do not make the assumption that government and corporations share a natural alliance, although this is often the case. In the case presented here, the state and industry are often in conflict with each other and are frequently internally divided. In the case of TWI's recycling facility, while the City was TWI’s partner in this endeavor, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the Department of Justice have confronted the City and TWI over occupational safety violations. Furthermore, many City Council members have publicly criticized the Green Bag program’s shortcomings. These examples reveal that various arms of the state were in conflict with each other over this issue. Furthermore, because many TWI workers and managers have acted as "whistle blowers" against the company, TWI has had to address its own internal divisions over the Green Bag program. Ironically, it was these voices of dissent emerging from within TWI that first focused attention on the environmental inequalities embedded in the company's recycling program. In this way, members of the very organization accused of committing acts of environmental injustice were able to shape those actions.

Conclusion

Environmental inequality formation occurs when different stakeholders struggle for access to scarce resources within the political economy, and the benefits and costs of those resources become distributed unevenly. That is, those stakeholders who are unable to effectively mobilize resources are most likely to suffer from environmental inequality. Conversely, those stakeholders with the greatest access to scarce resources are able to deprive other stakeholders from that same access. This perspective captures the dynamic nature of environmental inequality. 'Scarce resources' stakeholders struggle for can include clean living, recreational, and working environments. They can also include power, wealth, and status. Thus, the inability to access these resources often means living and working under dangerous conditions, with very little power, wealth or status. Conversely, those stakeholders with the ability to access these resources live and work under safer, healthier conditions with more power, wealth, and status.

I have sought to achieve three goals in this paper. The first was to highlight a dimension of marginal work that is often overlooked--the fact that millions of persons in this nation labor in hazardous occupations. I approached this topic analytically by asking: how is dangerous work socially produced? The second task was to place this question within a sociological framework at the intersection between research on work and the environment. The third goal was to develop a model I term environmental inequality formation that offers clues as to how hazardous work in particular and environmental inequalities in general are produced.

The vast majority of research on the connections between marginal work and the environment emphasizes the occupational maldistribution of environmental hazards across class and racial groups. This literature is therefore limited given its focus on unequal outcomes. In this paper, I proposed an environmental inequality formation (EIF) model to capture the sociological dynamics that produce and shape environmental inequality in marginal workplaces. The EIF perspective synthesizes three major points, largely neglected in research on environmental inequalities: 1) multi-stakeholder interactions; 2) socio-historical factors producing environmental inequalities; and 3) worker agency and autonomy in shaping and resisting environmental inequalities. Future research on this topic should continue to explore new links in the relationships among labor, social inequality, and the environment. Further, the sociological notion of marginality is ripe with potential for development and theorizing about its cumulative effects on groups contending with multiple forms of "jeopardy" and inequality.

1. Environmental racism generally refers to the unequal burden of toxic and other hazards that people of color shoulder. Environmental inequality occurs when any subordinate social group is burdened with environmental hazards.

2. While the vast majority of this literature focuses on the community (neighborhood, census tract, or zip code) as the primary unit of analysis (see Bullard 1983), other studies have considered the importance of the workplace as central to understanding environmental inequality (Hurley 1995; Johnson and Oliver 1989; Wright and Bullard 1993).

3. Elsewhere (Pellow forthcoming), I have included a more explicitly ecological dimension to the EIF model&endash;a "life cycle analysis".

4. Most studies of dangerous occupations tend to center on historically hazardous work, such as chemical factories (Roberts 1996), agriculture, and other traditionally risky green collar occupations (Johnson and Oliver 1989) such as steel and coal (Hurley 1995). From an environmental inequality perspective, however, it is helpful to also examine labor conditions and social inequalities in industries that emerged in response to environmental degradation. For example, recycling is an industry that developed in large part due to pressure from a powerful social movement whose intention was to reduce waste being sent to landfills and incinerators (that were often being built in low-income neighborhoods and communities of color [see Bullard 1990]).

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