Politicizing
the Treadmill of Production:
Reshaping Social Outcomes of "Efficient Recycling"
David N. Pellow, Allan Schnaiberg,
and Adam S. Weinberg
Abstract
Much contemporary environmental policymaking shifts our political
focus away from ecological goals towards creating "economically
efficient" programs. Most social scientists have also paid limited
attention to the social distributive outcomes of such policies,
despite the reality that these outcomes can expand or contract political
constituencies for environmental protection. We trace this shift
and its impacts in a "tale of two cities" in the U.S. - Chicago
and its northern suburb of Evanston, Illinois - as they constructed
and implemented curbside recycling programs. Although both cities
implemented programs in the same decade, the rationale, goals, and
means were dramatically different in the two municipalities. Although
both communities recruited unskilled labor for the actual sorting
jobs, the Chicago facility offered a repressive and regressive mode
of labor control, essentially reducing low-income workers to a day-labor
category of contingent worker. In contrast, Evanston offered both
life-skills training to its workers, and assistance in getting employment
at the end of their recycling jobs.
In addition to explaining the differential outcomes of these two
programs, we explore the factors that led each community's decisionmakers
to select their parameters of "curbside recycling." This led to
quite different technologies - capital-intensive in the case of
Chicago, and labor-intensive in the case of Evanston - and even
more sharply different managerial protocols. These differences suggest
the necessity of more political involvement in the actual policy-making
process in environmental policies.
David N. Pellow,Department of Sociology,
Northwestern University Allan Schnaiberg, Department of Sociology, Northwestern University Adam S. Weinberg, Department of Sociology and Anthropology,
Colgate University
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