School custodians and green cleaners: Labor-environment coalitions and toxics reduction

In the fall of 2003, the Boston Urban Asthma Coalition (BUAC) and the Massachusetts Committee on Occupational Safety and Health (MassCOSH) launched the Green Cleaners Project, a coalition of organizations, including labor unions and school administrators, to address well-documented problems of environmental quality in Boston schools. Coalition participants wanted to ensure that discussions about environmental health problems in Boston schools and their remediation would include the broadest possible array of stakeholders, including parents, teachers and other school employees, school administrators, and community health advocates. Despite the expensive and capital-intensive nature of solutions to many of the environmental health problems documented in the schools, the coalition quickly won a major victory on one component of its short-term agenda: the replacement of common cleaning products with less toxic “green” alternatives.