Leo the Linchpin: Steelworker President Leo Gerard looks like an old-time union leader, but he's put together a labor-environmentalist alliance that bridges some growing Democratic fissures.

LEO GERARD IS CENTRAL CASTING'S IDEA OF A LABOR leader: tough and big. Really big--6 feet 2 inches tall and barrel-chested. He's just the kind of guy you'd expect to be the president of the United Steelworkers. So what's he doing palling around with Sierra Club Executive Director

Carl Pope? "Good jobs and a clean environment are important to American workers," Gerard proclaimed last year. "We can't have one without the other." The occasion was the kickoff of the Blue/Green Alliance, a joint project of the Steelworkers and Sierra Club to promote "Good Jobs, A Clean Environment, and A Safer World." Pope describes the effort as "one of the most important initiatives undertaken by the environmental movement in decades." To underscore this point, last November he and Gerard barnstormed through Minnesota, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, spreading the word that clean-energy technologies and conservation can yield millions of new jobs.

Gerard is hardly the first labor leader to join forces with the environmental movement. A generation ago, United Auto Workers President Walter Reuther asked, "What good is another week's vacation if the lake you used to go to is polluted?" But to Reuther, then leading a UAW at the peak of its strength, environmentalism was one more cause a socially responsible union ought to be supporting. To Gerard, it's more than that.

Gerard is outraged by melting ice caps, rising sea levels, and killer hurricanes--but he sees these catastrophes through a trade unionist's eyes. The overarching issue for him is corporate accountability. Companies that belch out greenhouse gases are driven by the same avarice that he first saw when he started work as a nickel smelter in Sudbury, Ontario. He argues that a more democratic economy would create jobs that don't endanger the environment. And, if the Steelworkers believe in anything, it's creating jobs.

Though still one of the country's largest unions, the United Steelworkers (USW) has been hemorrhaging members for years. By some counts, barely 30,000 of the USW's 850,000 members now work in the nation's depopulated steel industry. To make up for that loss, the union has engineered a series of mergers that have taken it far beyond the largely shuttered mills of Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Gary. Today, you're as likely to find USW members working at oil refineries, paper mills, or tire plants--industrial venues that neither provide the kind of job security they once did (not, for instance, with Goodyear's U.S. employees compelled to compete with Chinese tire workers who earn 56 cents an hour), nor point the way to a conspicuously cleaner environment.