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‘You Can Have Clean Environment and Good Jobs’ |
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The United Steelworkers (USW) have been fighting for clean workplaces and communities since the 1960s. The union helped pass landmark U.S. legislation regulating air and water pollution and toxic waste, as well as “right-to-know” laws, which require companies to tell the public how much pollution they are releasing.
Now, the USW is taking the struggle to a new level. Writing for Sierra magazine, Joan Hamilton notes that USW President Leo Gerard joined last year with the Sierra Club to form the Blue Green Alliance, a partnership committed to mobilizing public support for policies that create good jobs, a cleaner environment and a safer world.
Says Gerard:
We need to put an end to the lies, the myths, the hysteria, that say you can have either a clean environment or good jobs. You can have both, or you have neither.
Last year, the alliance made the clear connection between global warming and the excesses of the global economy. Gerard said the union movement’s vision of addressing global warming is fundamentally at odds with global policies that allow corporations to make huge profits by buying and trading the rights to emit carbon without ever addressing the basic inequalities in our global economy.
We need to use regulation of global warming and trade to lift 2 billion people out of poverty around the world. To do that, we’ll need to regulate a lot of economic activity, from power plants to fuel efficiency to energy efficiency, and we’ll need to use this regulation as a powerful tool to improve workers’ lives, both here in North America and across the globe.
Gerard sees his alliance with the Sierra Club as a step toward a new political majority. He and Sierra Club Executive Director Carl Pope already have met with members of the new Congress to discuss ways to develop clean-energy alternatives.
With the backing of USW and the Sierra Club, states such as Minnesota and Pennsylvania have passed legislation this year to build wind–driven power to parts of the states and create new jobs in the process. As Gerard says:
We are not promoting some kind of fuzzy, left-wing, feel-good stuff that Rush Limbaugh will love to attack. This is sound social and economic policy. This gives my grandkids a shot.
Click here to read the entire article.
The USW also has joined with the AFL-CIO and affiliated unions to form the Apollo Alliance to create jobs with a public investment in sustainable energy such as hydrogen fuel systems and related transportation, construction and manufacturing.
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Congratulations to Leo Gerard and the United Steelworkers Union for taking a leadership role. There are many opportunities for labor to partner with the environmental movement; solar power, water conservation, the list goes on and on.
It’s good to see someone taking the experiences of our history to heart and planning for a different future.
As I recall, Tom Edison got rich after he discovered the key to electrifying a house. And those oil-barons, didn’t they just think that black stuff was messing up the pasture before autos came along?
It seems to me that the time for clean energy is at hand. Now that everyone (mostly) knows its a matter of life-and-death for our children and not just high prices at the gas pump, we’ll probably be bombarded with new methods and new products.
Getting in now with the unions could be best idea for future employment.
Good for everyone involved in this alliance.
The myth that links strict environmental regulation to loss of manufacturing jobs is just a trick used by the US Chamber of Commerce to stir fear among the American electorate. The FACT is that millions of manufacturing jobs were lost AFTER the Bush Administration refused to sign the Kyoto pact. For the last seven years, millions of manufacturing jobs were lost to Mexico and China because the labor over there were simply cheap. Thousand of American companies laid off its domestic workers and hired workers in these countries to avoid complying with the labor standards of a highly advanced country like the United States.
Furthermore, for the last 7 years, the domestic automobile industy which continued to build environmentally unfriendly vehicles kept losing ground to Japanese automakers which built excellent and clean vehicles.
So the question is. Is it true that strict environmental regulations lead to job loss? The answer is NO! The United States, Europe, and Japan (the G-8 nations) have higher standards in the quality of life than Mexico, China, and India. The people in the latter countries are now living in a toxic environment worse than Chernobyl, just for the sake of economic growth. In time, their societies will realize that the costs of treating sick workers will outstrip the benefits of getting jobs.
Energy independence from the Middle East is a high priority with me. Therefore, I support all the green energy sources which don’t put carbons in the atmosphere: wind, solar, hydro, geo-thermal, and nuclear. All these energy sources would create jobs for Americans.
I support building docking facilities so we can off-load liquid natural gas. Clean energy and more jobs.
I also support drilling in ANWR and building more refining capacity in our country. I remember reading a few years ago that the AFL-CIO once said drilling in ANWR would create 750,000 jobs spread across all 50 states.
I support more development in technology so we can reduce pollutants from coal-fired generators. Let’s also use the clean-burning coal currently locked up inside national parks in Utah.
I also support building electrical power generators on or near our national forests. Dead and dying trees not suitable for milling into lumber products could fire these generators, producing electricity and jobs while reducing the risk of catastrophic wildfire.
I support burning garbage and shredded tires in electrical power generators. This has the added benefit of protecting our ground water by reducing the amount of waste entering our landfills.
I support finding a way to build more fuel effcient vehicles without reducing their size. When we make cars shorter and lighter, we always see an increase in serious injury and death.
I don’t however, support converting corn into bio-fuel. In the first place, it seems unethical to use food for fuel when there are starving people in this world. In the second place, the unintended consequences are that the cost of food sources based on corn and corn by-products is on the rise.
There isn’t one magic bullet that will make us energy independent, but development on all these fronts just might do the trick and in the process, put many Americans back to work.