Green Labor Journal - A Just Transition to Good Green Jobs

A Just Transition to Good Green Jobs

Bob Baugh and Jeff Richert examine labor's struggle for good green jobs

By Bob Baugh Jul 07, 2010

A just transition to a greener economy requires an aggressive, sustained commitment of national resources to create and retain good jobs, increase per capita income, modernize industry, develop and deploy technology and educate and train workers. It requires assistance for any workers, families or communities that may be adversely affected by the transition, and a democratic voice for workers in their workplaces and their communities.
   - AFL-CIO Resolution on Creating and Retaining Sustainable Good Green Jobs

Delegates filled the microphones at the 2009 AFL-CIO Convention to make their point loud and clear that our nation needs to create good sustainable green jobs. At the heart of the Green Jobs resolution is the belief that addressing global climate change, achieving energy independence and assuring a just transition for workers and communities are critical to the economic, environmental and security interests of the United States. The desire for a cleaner planet and good jobs is a vision one shared by unions across the globe. Labor rights, including workplace and community standards, are fundamental to achieving it.

Déjà vu All Over Again
This isn’t the first time that American unions and the U.S. government have taken up the issues of energy independence and job creation. In the late 1970’s the U.S. adopted an aggressive set of programs for wind, solar, biomass, shale oil and other forms of energy. A number of unions gravitated to ones specific to their industry or craft and sought to build bridges between unions, environmentalists, and communities. But, the presidency of Ronald Reagan brought all of this to a screeching halt.

He saw big government as the enemy, unions a roadblock and the free market as salvation. Deregulation became the rule of the day, union busting the law of the land and privatization often turned the public sector over to a non-union private sector. The end of the oil embargo and cheap gas hastened government’s move out of the energy business. Union efforts to fashion a new energy policy failed and the blue-green initiatives collapsed.

Today, after decades of wage stagnation, neoliberalism has failed leaving behind economic devastation, manufacturing in ruins, and private sector unionization at its lowest point since the early 1900’s. Unions across the world are confronting an international economic crisis and what the UK’s 2006 Stern Commission report identified as “the greatest market failure in history,” climate change. These intertwined crisis demand a bold new strategy, an aggressive environmental economic development agenda that will lead to a cleaner planet, create good jobs and rebuild the labor movement.

Just Transition and Labor Rights
Over the past three years the Federation and its affiliates have made enormous strides domestically and internationally in developing new policy, promoting research, building alliances, and having a clear union voice on climate change. The AFL-CIO and the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) are fighting for a just transition with green jobs and labor rights. The fight for good jobs in the U.S. mirrors the “decent work and quality jobs” policies sought by the ITUC.

The U.S. labor movement and the ITUC were a vocal visible presence in Copenhagen where they worked with governments and other organizations to get just transition language incorporated into the agreement. These efforts paid off when the Shared Vision Working Group reached agreement on two paragraphs. One identified the need for stakeholder (civil society-unions) participation in decision-making.

The second identified a just transition: "Realizing that addressing climate change requires a paradigm shift towards building a low-emission society that offers substantial opportunities and ensures continued high growth and sustainable development, based on innovative technologies and more sustainable production and consumption, while ensuring a just transition of the workforce that creates decent work and quality jobs."

The identification of stakeholders and acceptance of “quality jobs and decent work” language represented a major breakthrough for the labor movement. These words provide a seat at the table and a direct reference to ILO labor conventions on the rights of workers to organize, form unions and bargain collectively. Asserting these rights will be critical as governments move to invest trillions in climate change.

But, the immediate struggle is to assure that the Copenhagen Accord, an interim document that did not incorporate the working group language, will do so in the end. Indications are positive but our trade union experience tells us we must press our demands until the contract is signed. The same is true in the U.S. as we shape just transition policies for the 21st century.

A Cleaner Planet and Good Jobs
The evolution of the AFL-CIO policies began with its embrace of the Apollo Alliance (a labor-environmental coalition) agenda for energy independence. It complimented the Federation’s labor rights initiative, the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) and a set of trade, tax, health care, and other policies designed to revitalize manufacturing and create jobs in construction, transportation, and the service sector.

Recognizing the challenge of climate change, the Federation developed an environmental economic development policy that placed manufacturing, construction, utilities, transportation, trade and jobs at the center of a green economy program. It called for new investments in a sustainable energy infrastructure.

It supported a regime that would protect American workers with effective trade policies and a system that would ensure stable energy prices and moderate the impact on utilities during the transition to a low-carbon economy. Without these key elements, there was a serious risk of driving good jobs offshore into nations without labor rights or environmental regimes and far less carbon efficient production.

The development of a legislative agenda paralleled a growing dialogue between labor and the environmental community. The Apollo Alliance helped lay the groundwork for an investment agenda. This helped create the foundation for an explicit labor rights agenda embodied in the 2006 formation of the Blue-Green Alliance (BGA) by the USW and the Sierra Club. Their principles include support for EFCA and climate legislation. People were shocked to see the nation’s largest environmental organization work so openly on a core labor rights issue.

With the annual market for environmental products and services projected to double from $1.37 trillion currently to $2.74 trillion by 2020 (1), jobs and environment is an obvious unifying theme.

AFL-CIO unions and the Environmental Defense Fund financed the Manufacturing Climate Solutions (2) studies to demonstrate how clean technologies such as high-performance windows, auxiliary power units, LED lighting and concentrated solar power contribute to job creation as did additional union supported reports on advanced coal technology (3), modernizing the electric grid and converting to advanced auto technology. (4)

The ITUC Green Jobs study showed that improvements in energy efficiency in buildings could generate an additional 2 million to 3.5 million green jobs in the United States and Europe. (5)

The AFL-CIO has moved on this agenda by promoting the $80 billion green investment portfolio in the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) and by proposing a long term investment agenda for climate legislation. But, a just transition cannot just be on the supply-side of the labor market.

It must also be a transition from one good job to the same quality job or from a lower quality one to a higher quality one. Workers need to be equipped to participate in the clean energy economy and they need policies that guarantee that the jobs being created are quality jobs. Recent U.S. experience shows that getting there will not be easy.

The Fight to Invest In Good Jobs
Ensuring that public investments in workers and technology are fully recycled in your own economy is a common sense economic, political, and environmental decision for any country. But, when the U.S. applied its legal domestic procurement rights to the ARRA, the free trade fundamentalists in governments and multinationals howled in protest. In their world one nation’s investment becomes another’s accusation of illegal subsidy.

This experience portends a coming conflict over international environmental, economic and trade policy. As countries move toward massive climate investments, unions will be confronted by a free trade orthodoxy that cares little about labor rights or other standards.

While job creation will almost certainly occur from investments in a clean energy economy, having adequate wages and benefits is not a given. In the U.S. a recent report by Good Jobs First found that low pay is not uncommon in environmentally friendly sectors of the economy. (6) Wage rates at many wind and solar manufacturing facilities are below national averages for manufacturing. Few workers at wind and solar manufacturing plants belong to unions.

Nor is it a given that a domestic investment will lead to entirely U.S. job creation. In 2008, the U.S. actually ran a green technology trade deficit. Some U.S. wind and solar manufacturers offshore production of components for U.S projects to countries such as China and Mexico that have few labor rights. Recently, a proposed Texas wind farm exposed tax policies that support this behavior. This project, financed by the Chinese Export-Import Bank, will create 3,000 manufacturing jobs in China, but qualifies for a $450 million DOE grant.

Another challenge is assuring that an opportunity of this magnitude achieves its full potential by opening pathways for those in poverty and underserved communities. The labor movement has always been a pathway for working people to the middle-class. Building the clean energy economy under the right policy supports and with the engagement of the stakeholders will include those who were excluded from the old economy.

The AFL-CIO has been aggressive in demanding the investments, labor rights, employment and employer standards, and worker and community support and access for good green jobs.

Ensuring Green Jobs Are Good Jobs
The Federation’s environmental economic development policy seeks to increase the per capita income and protect the interests of working families. Workers exercising their free choice to form unions and bargain collectively and the respect for legal standards protecting workers' wages and benefits are fundamental to this goal.

State and local governments also play a critical role because the ones that attach strong enforceable labor standards to economic development investments pay wages that support middle class lives, as well as provide the benefits necessary to attain self-sufficiency. (7)

Employment standards are part of the ARRA and proposed climate and infrastructure legislation. Prevailing wage laws will apply on federally funded construction projects. We have also proposed construction and manufacturing employer standards such as: training programs, health care, pensions, worker safety programs and community outreach to facilitate employment opportunities. And, labor rights tops our list for contractor selection criteria -- compliance with the National Labor Relations Act, Occupational Safety and Health Act, environmental laws and anti-discrimination laws and that they be required to remain neutral in union organizing campaigns.

Access to quality training and education programs with portable credentials and registered apprenticeship is a labor right unions have sought to expand. We want programs with solid job placements that provide skills and provide affirmative outreach to communities of color and to other disadvantaged job seekers.

That is why the AFL-CIO helped develop the 2007 Green Jobs Act and ARRA funding for apprenticeship programs, labor-management partnerships, community organizations, and competitive job training grants that lead to self-sufficient employment. Building Trades unions have been working to align partners around these goals to meet the Federal initiatives.

At the local level unions have actively promoted the use of "Community Workforce Agreements" between all stakeholders in public projects including contractors, labor unions, and community groups. They legally guarantee the successful completion of projects while providing tangible outcomes for the community, including job quality expectations, local hire obligations to employ those most closely impacted, environmental outcomes and apprenticeship utilization requirements.

Finally, a fundamental labor right under a just transition is assistance to workers and communities adversely impacted by climate change. In the U.S, unions are fighting for a safety net for workers that includes up to three years of wages, health care, retirement bridges, extensive training and education, family assistance and community development resources.

The Bottom Line
The AFL-CIO knows that “the nation stands at the crossroads of opportunity for domestic investments in innovation, new technology and energy efficiency that will save jobs, create new jobs and new industries and revitalize American manufacturing.” We also know that “there is no guarantee that these will be good jobs or that the investments will be made here unless we fight to make it so.” (8) A just transition is our fight - a road for labor rights, good jobs and a cleaner planet.

Bob Baugh is Executive Director of the AFL-CIO Industrial Union Council and Jeff Richert is Policy Director for Green For All.

Notes

(1) UNEP, ILO, IOE, ITUC, “Green Jobs: Towards Decent Work in a Sustainable, Low Carbon World, Suitable Work” (Fall 2008).
(2) AFL-CIO IUC, BCTD, IBB, UA and Environmental Defense Fund, Center on Global Governance and Competitiveness, Duke University, “Manufacturing Climate Solutions: Carbon-Reducing Technologies and U.S. Jobs” (Fall 2008).
(3) BBC Research, “Employment and Other Economic Benefits from Advanced Coal Electric Generation with Carbon Capture and Storage (February 2009).
(4) Apollo Alliance, “The New Apollo Program: Clean Energy, Good Jobs” (Fall 2008).
(5) UNEP, ILO, IOE, ITUC, “Green Jobs: Towards Decent Work in a Sustainable, Low Carbon World, Suitable Work” (Fall 2008).
(6) Good Jobs First, “High Road or Low Road: Job Quality in the New Green Economy” (February 2009).
(7) Ibid.
(8) AFL-CIO Executive Council statement , Greening the Economy, February 2008