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Figuring out how to respond to global warming has been difficult for organized labor. The issue can pit union against union and unions against environmentalists. Now, however, a new alliance is developing around the idea of "green jobs"--the jobs that will be needed to rebuild our economy and drastically reduced greenhouse gasses.
Seemingly from nowhere, "green jobs" have emerged as a key issue in the presidential election. Barack Obama calls for a $150 billion investment in green-collar jobs. Hillary Clinton refers to renewable energy employment as "jobs of the future" that can create five million jobs. Even John McCain calls for research and development of green technology, calling it the "path to restore the strength of America's economy."
The stealth "green jobs" issue did not emerge from nowhere. Its prominence in the presidential debates results in good measure from the commitment of some, though by no means all, environmental and labor leaders to building an alliance for jobs that fight global warming.
In 2006, the Sierra Club and the United Steelworkers initiated the Blue-Green Alliance under the banner of "Good Jobs, A Clean Environment, And a Safer World." This "strategic alliance" would focus on "those issues which have the greatest potential to unite the American people in pursuit of a global economy that is more just and equitable and founded on principles of environmental and economic sustainability."
Linking jobs and the environment, Steelworker president Leo Gerard said, "Secure twenty-first century jobs are those that will help solve the problem of global warming with energy efficiency and renewable energy." Sierra Club executive director Carl Pope added, "Our new alliance allows us to address the great challenge of the global economy in the twenty-first century--how to provide good jobs, a clean environment and a safer world."
As the presidential primaries approached, the Blue-Green Alliance called on all candidates to commit to reducing carbon emissions by 2 percent every year, increasing green-energy based manufacturing jobs by 2 percent, and rewriting American trade laws to advance labor and environmental standards.
The politically savvy Alliance began organizing in Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Washington and Wisconsin--states that would be critical in the presidential primaries--a year before the primaries would be held. Almost all the Democratic candidates agreed to their program, and even John McCain is finding that he must echo it.
The coming-of-age party for this coalition may well be the Blue-Green Alliance's "Good Jobs, Green Jobs: A National Green Jobs Conference" scheduled for March 13-14 in Pittsburgh. The conference will bring together advocates representing labor, business, the environment and public health, economic and workforce development specialists, investors, scientists and technology experts, and local, state and federal policy makers. Its aim is to launch a nationwide dialogue about "moving our country rapidly toward leadership in promoting a new green economy."
Participants in the conference include heavy hitters from organized labor, including some who have previously kept away from actions addressed to global warming. Both U.S. labor federations, the AFL-CIO and Change to Win, are listed as conveners. So are such unions as the Service Employees, Industrial Division of the Communication Workers, Operating Engineers Local 95, United Food and Commercial Workers and United Steelworkers. It also features groups like the national alliance Green for All, which has been promoting "green-collar jobs" as a way to build a route out of poverty for the most deprived, and the labor-backed Apollo Alliance, which campaigns for energy independence.
Efforts to combat global warming present dilemmas for organized labor. Some unions may face immediate job losses: Coal miners may lose jobs when coal power plants are phased out and some auto workers may lose their jobs if high-mileage autos start to be eliminated. Some members of organized labor also fear that carbon regulation could lead to energy shortages and that high energy prices will aggravate economic stagnation and unemployment.
But some unions have an immediate interest in combating global warming. Boilermakers and sheet metal workers, for example, are likely to gain jobs from the expansion of solar and wind energy. Some unions can be hurt by the immediate consequences of global warming--witness those in the hospitality industry in New Orleans.
In the past, organized labor has played an ambiguous role in the global warming debate. Labor unions from Europe, Canada and elsewhere supported the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, in which 172 countries agreed to reduce their emissions of greenhouse gases by 5.2 percent below 1990 levels by 2012, but the AFL-CIO opposed it. The Clinton administration signed the agreement, but the Bush administration refused to submit it for ratification.
Unions from much of the world, represented by the International Trade Union Confederation [ITUC], which represents 168 million workers in 153 countries, participated actively in their countries' efforts to cut greenhouse gases in accord with the Kyoto Protocol, and to ensure that protection of employment and workers rights were included in that process. A few U.S. unions, notably the United Steelworkers, supported the Kyoto Protocol and efforts to cut greenhouses gases in the U.S.--and argued that doing so could create new jobs. But the AFL-CIO reaffirmed its opposition to Kyoto and rarely if ever acknowledged that global climate change was a significant threat.
Fortunately, all that has begun to change. At the end of 2006, the AFL-CIO formed a new Energy Task Force and began to engage with the issue in new ways. Its 2007 report, Jobs and Energy for the 21st Century, acknowledged that "human use of fossil fuels is undisputedly contributing to global warming, causing rising sea levels, changes in climate patterns and threats to coastal regions."
According to Bob Baugh, head of the AFL-CIO's energy task force, "Over the past year, the AFL-CIO's position on climate change has moved much closer to the ongoing efforts of the ITUC." Twenty U.S. trade unionists joined the ITUC delegation to the global climate change conference in Bali--a first. AFL-CIO president John Sweeney told the UN Summit on Climate Risk last month,
"The global labor movement is proud to have been among those who called for decisive action at Bali... Global warming means global depression, food and water shortages and drowned cities. I have stood in New Orleans' Ninth Ward and seen that future."
The change in organized labor's approach to climate change, however, has yet to be fully realized at a policy level. As Bob Baugh notes, "The ITUC has called for aggressive targets for cutting carbon emissions... the AFL-CIO has concerns about the level and timing of some of the specific ITUC recommendations with respect to emissions targets."
This disagreement is not trivial. The ITUC has strongly backed the greenhouse gas reduction targets established by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), whose scientists recently received the Nobel Peace Prize along with Al Gore. In a statement prepared for the Bali conference, the ITUC urged governments "to follow the IPCC scenario for keeping the global temperature within two degrees C and reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 85 percent by 2050." It further urged developed countries to use as a benchmark the EU's commitment to a 30 percent cut below 1990 levels by 2020.
The AFL-CIO, in contrast, has been actively lobbying against such limits on greenhouse gases. For example, in a letter to the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works last November, the AFL-CIO condemned the "overly aggressive Phase 1 emissions reduction target," to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 15 percent from 2005 levels by 2020, in the proposed Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act.
A few unions like the Steelworkers have supported the changes that climate scientists say are necessary. SEIU supported the national "Step It Up" demonstrations, which received massive participation from American youth. Now it's time for the AFL-CIO, Change to Win and individual unions to consider their responsibilities to their members' future--and the planet's.
If what matters most is "to know what game you're playing," global warming promises to be history's most radical game-changer. While it is an unmitigated disaster, it also provides an incentive to face up to problems that the country has been avoiding for generations. It underlines the necessity to reconstruct the economy on the basis of our common needs, including our need to save the ecosystem, rather than just individual greed. It provides an opportunity to address synergistically the problems of jobs, poverty, destructive metropolitan growth patterns and corporate irresponsibility. Global warming provides labor with an opportunity to become the advocate for all those who would gain from a new social economy.
Jeremy Brecher, Tim Costello and Brendan Smith are co-authors of the new book Globalization From Below: The Power of Solidarity.
Copyright © 2008 The Nation
17 Comments so far
Show AllFor David Logsdon - when a lot of us think of globalization we think of the ferocious reign of investers and lenders across international borders in such a way that people and their ways of life do not count for anything. Many of the free trade agreements prohibit or make impossible labor rights and environmental protection. Under globalization, water is privatized, seed is made sterile, South American forest plants are patented by American pharma etc. unless there is intense opposition by heretofore quiet societies.
Noam Chomsky puts it this way: "No sane person is opposed to globalization, that is, international integration. Surely not the left and the workers movements, which were founded on the principle of international solidarity - that is, globalization in a form that attends to the rights of people, not private power systems. "
David H.- your arrogance is exceeded only by your ignorance. There - I've gotten my gratuitous slam at you out of way and can move on...
We have burst neither the upper ranges of temperature nor CO2 over time. (I'm not sure what the particular relevance of 250K years is. It is, after all, a blink or two in the geological record.) Check here for a longer view that might add some perspective.
http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/Carboniferous_climate.html
Then check out references to the "Medieval Climate Optimum". And the "Little Ice Age". Which is better for humankind - warm or cold? Most rational folks opt for the former.
So, David. I ask you to tell us what the "correct" global temperature is? How did you determine what it is? (200 words or less, please.) And how will changing to a mercury filled lightbulb get us to this edenic temperature?
This is the second time I've read the "global warming on Mars" canard in these pages, and I would contend the argument is specious for the following reason: We have no knowledge of the historical cycles of climate change on the red planet to tell us whether there is anything out of the ordinary about it.
We do, however, have the evidence demanded by g l tirebiter, in the form of Antarctic ice cores which show that over the past fifty years we have burst the upper bound of the ranges for temperature and CO2 concentration established over the previous 250,000 years. This is just one of many types of "scientific testing" that's established the reality of man-made climate change.
My apologies to Davis Logsdon ... I thoroughly agree that separating the science from the unfounded opinion and propaganda is an important task, and there is, quite obviously, no equivalence between contemporary scientists and late medieval clerics. These climate change deniers would be laughable if they weren't such dangerous fools.
"There is no commonality here at all."
Oh, really? What "evidence, what scientific testing can you point to? Computer models - imperfect vessels if there every were one?
My point is that the "science" is not "settled" - the earth does not have a man made "fever" and the protests of climate hysterics cannot make it so.
The Pope was not basing his position on a "fictional book". He was using the best "science" available to him at the time - or so he thought. Calling AGW sceptics "deniers" is the same argument the Pope used when he called Galileo a "heretic".
It's an ad hominem that withers in the warm, warm sunlight.
To clarify my first post, I did not intend to imply that I do not believe in global climate change. I am simply stating that we have our work cut out to convince people that it is real and that the rate of change is really the concern we should have.
"Yeah - and the folks who buy the man made global warming story and say the science is "settled" are just like the Catholic prelates who tried to muzzle Galileo and Copernicus."
This is not the same situation at all. Whereas the Catholic prelates were basing their argument on their belief in a fictional book, for which they had no verifiable evidence, global warming/climate change proponents are basing their arguments on documented, testable concepts. There is no commonality here at all.
What possible nefarious purpose could uniting the world (aka globalization) have? Wouldn't strengthened economic, social, cultural and political ties decrease warfare and increase collaboration? Wouldn't the alternative to globalization be an American Empire, whereby the Third World lives in serfdom? Isn't protecting the environment and saving the planet positive? I don't really follow your argument.
Most scientists are utterly dependent on grants from government and the tax free foundation who are behind the globalization movement, so do not put them on a pedestal.
They are cooperating with the globalists out of necessity. Do not blame them.
http://oldthinkernews.com/Articles/oldthinker%20news/global_warming_hysteria_serves_a.htm
" In a report titled "The First Global Revolution" (1991) published by the Club of Rome, a globalist think tank, we find the following statement: "In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill.... All these dangers are caused by human intervention... The real enemy, then, is humanity itself."
snip
Richard Haass, the current president of the Council on Foreign Relations, stated in his article "State sovereignty must be altered in globalized era," that a system of world government must be created and sovereignty eliminated in order to fight global warming, as well as terrorism. "Moreover, states must be prepared to cede some sovereignty to world bodies if the international system is to function," says Haass. "Globalization thus implies that sovereignty is not only becoming weaker in reality, but that it needs to become weaker. States would be wise to weaken sovereignty in order to protect themselves..."
snip
Gordon Brown, {Prime Minister of the UK}, stated .... that a 'new world order' must be created in order to combat global warming."
Mars is showing signs of global warming, its polar ice caps are melting, Last I checked, they do not have man made greenhouse gasses, unless our little mars probes have gas. Solar radiation has been increasing for 100 years. Man made CO2 accounts for 3% of the worlds entire atmospheric CO2. Nobody knows for sure, one way or another, but when you follow the money, you find the globalists are behind the movement.
Peak Oil, Global warming, the GWOT on terror, all are HOAXES by the same people who are globalizing you and lowering your standard of living. The left focuses on Green, the Right on Terror, and both sell peak Oil. The elite on the left and the right are on the same side.
Wake up or your children will live a life of serfdom. Time is running out, but if a critical mass reach awareness soon enough, they may back off.
"And some people believe that the world is only 6,000 years old and that a god answers their prayers."
Yeah - and the folks who buy the man made global warming story and say the science is "settled" are just like the Catholic prelates who tried to muzzle Galileo and Copernicus.
I stand corrected and apologize.
"Not everyone sees a problem or agrees with the scientists who say changes are needed. Step on over to Townhall.com and you'll see some articles and many, many people who say global warming is a liberal myth." --- Davis Logsdon
And some people believe that the world is only 6,000 years old and that a god answers their prayers.
In any case, fresh water depletion is the real sustainability issue. We're likely to die of thirst and starvation (or as a result of war over water resources) before we have to spend our first dollar adapting to climate change.
And before Bush refused to send Kyoto for ratification, Clinton also declined to do so for two years, because the Senate was already on record as being opposed to it in principle. In June 1997, before the Kyoto Protocol was even out of draft stage, the Senate voted 95-0 to adopt the Byrd-Hagel Resolution. That resolution made it a condition of Senate ratification of any climate accord that it require ALL countries be included in any emissions control or reduction scheme. Kyoto exempted the developing countries, which for years gave the US its excuse to remain uncommitted.
The Apollo Alliance is mentioned in the 9th paragraph.
The last two posters imply that global warming is not real. I guess they don't get immunizations or have insurance policies for their cars or health or lives because accidents, illness and death are statistically unlikely to happen to them.
me, I worry about the future my kids are going to live in - climate models by reputable scientists show that the Central Valley in California, a major source of agriculture and economic wealth to the state and nation - is likely to be as hot as the Mojave Desert - and as barren - in the future. Think Death Valley. And coastal CA is supposed to eventually be as hot as the Central Valley is now.
Even if global warming didn't exist, we would still have problems with air, water and ground pollution, getting rid of our trash, nuclear waste disposal, epidemic asthma, lead-poisoning in kids etc - and a need for environmentally friendly well-paid jobs.
We don't need the threat of global warming to encourage us to stop fouling our own nest. we are all in this together. Hurricanes and tornadoes don't care if you are labor or management, they blow your house down and kill your family, especially if you are a poor service worker and live in the 9th Ward or a floodplain.
that's a lot scarier to me than the occasional earthquake. I wonder if Nature was trying to send us a message with the tragic tornado deaths that occurred on Super Tuesday?
If labor works against Global Warming, it is making the same sort of strategic mistakes from its' past that aided its' nosedive towards irrelevance. Said mistakes include voting for Republicans due to cultural and race issues, allowing the Mafia to infiltrate its' ranks, and forgetting to keep doing its' core mission, organizing. Almost every time Labor has teamed up with Management, they've been shafted. It would be a grave mistake to work with them now.
Not everyone sees a problem or agrees with the scientists who say changes are needed. Step on over to Townhall.com and you'll see some articles and many, many people who say global warming is a liberal myth.
This is really the best news on global warming in years. Finally a large group with some real clout both in the US and around the world is on board. Its the start of a foundation for change.
This is a fine piece, but can we get rid of the phrase, "War on..." every time people come together to try to act? It's a deadening phrase with profound implications in the current political climate.
How about "Labor Works for..." Or "Labor/Greens Come Together to..." since this is a piece primarily about blue/green work?
Kudos to the Steelworkers, and it is shame the Apollo Alliance was not mentioned, especially since the Steelworkers and Sierra Club are prominent in that effort.
As a member of a corrupt union with a leadership that is as quiet on the war and all the other economic policies that effect workers, I strongly recommend Jeremy Brecher's book Strike!
Please tell everyone about this book or the Labor Unions will continue to fly to Bocca and lunch with our entirely Mummified Majority Leaders.
Strike! by Jeremy Brecher.
Also have you spread one of these articles onto a mainstream big newspaper web site today? if no you are only helping THEM SEEM "mainstream" Spread truth or it means nothing. THIS IS WHY NONE OF OUR ISSUES ARE IN THE PRESIDENTIAL DEBATES. NO COMMON DENOMINATOR!
No mention of www.apolloalliance.org in this article. I'm surprised. It is a group of trade-unionists working on environmental projects. And if Labor is really interested, let them send some people to Germany, Iceland, Sweden, Norway and Finland and find out how their labor unions are helping to solve the problems.
I'll give you another website for free; www.treehuggers.org and see the products and eco-friendly building concepts they have designed.
The AFL-CIO and Change to Win need to stop playing pattycakes with the Democratic Party who exploit us year after year for money and votes while doing literally nothing for the working people in our trade groups.