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Sweeney: Unions, Investors Must Push for Clean Environment, Green Jobs |
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The global community—investors, workers and government—must come together to create a stable climate and a strong global economy that creates good jobs. Anything else will lead to global disaster, AFL-CIO President John Sweeney said today at the Investor Summit on Climate Risk in New York City.
The global economy cannot prosper unless we secure a stable climate and sustainable sources of energy. 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 one-day summit, held at the United Nations, was sponsored by the United Nations Foundation, CERES and the United Nations Fund for International Partnerships. More than 450 investor, financial and corporate leaders—together controlling more than $20 trillion in investment capital—attended the summit.
Other speakers included Nobel Prize winner Al Gore, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and numerous investment and financial leaders.
Much of that investment capital, some $5 trillion, is in union members’ pension funds. Sweeney challenged the fund administrators to invest the money in ways that promote cleaner technologies and new forms of energy and create millions of jobs at the same time.
Timothy Wirth, president of the United Nations Foundation, said:
The next 50 years represent a unique chance to shift investments to a low-carbon, clean-energy economy. Investors are starting now to seize the economic opportunities of this new energy future, which will be as important as the computer revolution in generating new wealth and jobs.
Sweeney pointed out that at the recent U.N. meeting on climate change in Bali, Indonesia, the global union movement called for decisive action on climate change, especially global warming. But global warming is one of many challenges, he warned. With the world’s supply of cheap energy, especially oil, quickly coming to an end, we must find new ways to meet the growing demand for energy generated by the growing economies of countries such as China and India.
While these crises offer unique opportunities for investors and workers, Sweeney said, there must be rules and a strategy that includes everyone, not just the wealthy countries.
This global economy and the dire threat of a globally unstable climate requires global rules. We need common rules for all of us—worker protections, investor protections and environmental protections.
Those rules alone are not enough to address the global energy crisis, unless they are combined with strategies that work for all of us, that create wealth and share wealth broadly and combat climate change.
Sweeney said these rules and strategies are the pathway to a new economic reality that cannot operate on the principle, “Let our corporations make money and the rest will take care of itself.” This crisis is also an economic opportunity, the opportunity for a new economic strategy, he added.
Union pension funds can play a huge role in creating this new strategy, Sweeney says. For investors, the development and deployment of new energy technology that does not emit carbon is an opportunity to make money—to be in on the ground floor of the future. He called on investors to look at investments in new clean-energy ventures and projects.
Investors should be looking at new technologies for generating usable energy. New technologies like solar, wind, and geothermal. And if we are serious about dealing with carbon emissions, we must expand our use of older carbon free energy sources. Older sources like hydro and nuclear power. But we can’t stop there. We must pursue reengineering old energy sources such as carbon capture and sequestration for coal fired electrical generation plants.
Second, he said, investors need to demand the information necessary to hold corporations accountable. Investors should ask the companies they invest in if they are taking responsibility for addressing the crisis and are the companies taking steps to seize the opportunities created by this crisis.
Investors should be looking at new technologies for generating usable energy, he said, including solar, wind and geothermal power. In November, the AFL-CIO—together with the Apollo Alliance–convened a meeting of workers’ pension trustees and money managers to discuss opportunities in these clean-energy technologies. Through the Apollo Alliance, the AFL-CIO and some affiliated unions seek to create jobs with a public investment in sustainable energy such as hydrogen fuel systems and related transportation, construction and manufacturing.
At a first-of-its-kind conference next month, “Good Jobs, Green Jobs: A National Green Jobs Conference,” union members, environmental and public health advocates, policymakers, business leaders and others will launch a nationwide discussion on the benefits of a new green economy.
Said Sweeney:
The AFL-CIO is committed to a continuing effort to inform the stewards of our members’ money about the investment opportunities in energy transformation. We plan to have further meetings this spring to follow up on the progress we hope all of you will make.
We’re ready to ramp up, but we need business and government partners. Together we need to train workers in the poorest and most marginalized parts of our country to take part in the great task ahead. And together we need to improve our public schools, so that young people leave school ready to take part in advanced job-training programs.
Investors can lead and make money by leading. The labor movement expects those who have been entrusted with our members’ money to do just that.
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What the non-science global warning hoax is, in real scientifically definable terms, nothing but global fascism through technological apartheid! Fear and nothing but fear mongering Global warming (GW), as a flank of sovereign nation state destroying Globalization, we will yield what little remains of Industry to these Cayman Island carbon swapping hedge fund empire parasites and thus destroy the ability to build are way out of the present global breakdown crisis with great and necessary infrastructure projects FDR style, the real litmus test of what it is to be a true American patriot of a republic versus the treason implicit in the falsity of chasing big wind and blinding sun, passive sources fit for sheep, instead of real human progress. We need a Atoms For Peace foreign policy of cooperation and development, with a visionary perspective of fourth generation nuclear (full cycle) crash science driver program, hitched to Maglev high speed rail. We do not need or want to continue to depend on cheap labor coastal free trade zones. If we as with FDR stand upright again as Man, and not as slaves, we can build Inland corridors of development (as with Lincoln’s Transcontinental RR built and thus unified the USA) everywhere, by circumnavigating the Earth with high speed rail, there no longer exists immobile landlocked areas and enforced backwardness, with skills, wages and dignity, for ourselves and more important still, our posterity! Are we as one nation, still, under God, to be fruitful and multiply, or are we to succumb to GW and those sirens of Gaia, wither and die?
Boy is this a good idea - look around you Sweeney - there aren’t enough American companies involved in green energy to count on one hand - the majority of them being from Canada and Europe where they have to build Union, so when they come to America they go out of their way to ignore the Union contractors and use the rats.
Green construction means TIC. &/or Halliburton.
Some of our idiot good friends in government need to give us a hand here, for while they are raking in the government incentives theyse developers are refusing to use Union contractors for construction and fail to man the projects with Union workers during operation.
Of course how many workers does it take to watch the sun reflect off a mirror for solar energy or watch a wind mill turn for wind power.
Green energy is the NAFTA of tommorrow - we export the work to foriegn developers built by non-union contractors manned by under paid, no benefit workers.
Cliton tried to tell us NAFTA would help the economy too.
Hope you learned something from that Sweeney - get some guarentees of improved jobs and investment in the economy before you sell us down the river again like when you supported NAFTA, China preferred trade, CAFTA and everything else the idiot Clinton and his WALMART bride sold you on
Paul:
Here’s a response from Bob Baugh, Executive Director, Industrial Union Council and Chair, AFL-CIO Energy Task Force:
Paul needs to get his facts straight …
What president Sweeney said was: “Investors should be looking at new technologies for generating usable energy. New technologies like solar, wind, and geothermal. And if we are serious about dealing with carbon emissions, we must expand our use of older carbon free energy sources. Older sources like hydro and nuclear power. But we can’t stop there. We must pursue reengineering old energy sources such as carbon capture and sequestration for coal fired electrical generation plants.”
The AFL-CIO is promoting diversity in our energy resources. In Congress, we have demanded domestic investment language in the carbon emission bills under consideration. We believe that this country needs an environmental economic development policy. We want a cleaner planet and good jobs. We want more public and private domestic investment in energy. And, we will fight to make sure they are good union jobs.
There are more than a handful of green energy jobs. The two windturbine plants in Pennsylvania organized by the Steelworkers, the photovoltaic plant in Memphis represented by the IBEW, the wind farm under outside The Dalles Oregon on the Columbia Gorge being built with union contractors are just a few examples of investment and good job opportunities that we want to see more of. And, we see green energy as more than renewable energy. Modernizing the electrical grid, advanced automotive technology, building retrofits, clean coal, energy efficient appliances and more are all part of a jobs strategy for greening the economy.
This is what the AFL-CIO Energy Task Force is fighting for and this is the message President Sweeney was conveying to investors forum in New York City. See for yourself: http://www.aflcio.org/mediacenter/prsptm/sp02142008.cfm
One final point President Sweeney wasn’t the president of the AFL-CIO when NAFTA passed and AFL-CIO fought NAFTA, China PNTR, CAFTA and other trade agreements tooth and nail.
Capitalism, in it’s relentless drive to maximize profit and wealth for a few, is by it’s nature incapable of solving any of the crises humanity now faces. Global warming is exacerbated and caused by profit hungry polluters. Oil, auto, and the military-industrial complex corrupt politicians, destroy unions, and now wage war in the Middle East that has slaughtered over a million, to their historic profit levels today. Human beings exist to corporate capitalism as simply “human resources” to be exploited and then discarded.
Despite all this vast evidence, Sweeny continues to sing the same old song of “business partnership” between labor and capital. Whose side is organized labor supporting?
U.S. and Global capitalism is now discarding “unprofitable” humanity as fast as possible and by any means possible. No help to the victims of Katrina because there is no profit in helping poor people.
The only flicker of hope to humanity left is that capitalism must be ended before we the people and the planet are utterly destroyed.
Organized labor must re-focus it’s worldview and be against corporate capitalism that is destroying us all. It must create the mass-media to inform and educate the vast un-organized majority of working people seeking to understand what is happening to them. A new political party is needed, opposed to both corporate controlled Democratic and Republican parties to unite all working people in the terrible struggle facing humanity.
A new form of socialist economy is needed to promote the equal distribution of wealth and power to fulfill the economic needs of the vast majority. We must fight to retain Social Security, free quality public education, free health care, etc. We must demand new job training for ending pollution, using solar energy, building affordable housing, re-build the infrastructure, create public transportation, etc.
We must create a socialist economy designed for the survival needs of the people. We must create a new economy designed to combat the effects of and to end Global Warming. We must end wars for profit, reduce the war budget by 50%, shut down all foreign bases (over 700), and re-direct all the funds into filling the needs of the people.
Without this level of understanding and struggle, there is little hope for our children and grandchildren.
One source of thinking “outside the box” of corporate controlled mass-media: World Socialist Web Site: http://www.wsws.org
Well said, Bob.
Tula;
Point taken - lets see three examples of Unions involved in renewable. Are those American companies??? How much public money did they recieve in incentives???? How many long term jobs were created???? How many long time jobs will be eliminated when these renewable plants come on line???? What type of jobs are being generated to replace the long term high paying Union jobs which are being eliminated???
Those are the things you need to ask yourself. There is no on saying that renewable energy is wrong, what we are saying is that as long as the government allows foreign developers to use up the incentives and take the profits out of the country, these plants are not going to be good for labor.
Why are they being allowed to use federal monies for research and development and there are no davis bacon requirements??
As long as foriegn countries dominate the industry and the federal government continues to give incentives to them to mistreat workers, you can spin all the tales you want, and it will still be the latest form of NAFTA.
Paul,
I did give you three union examples. The IBEW is involved with all forms of renewable energy projects. So are many other unions in this small but growing sector. And, it is growing. Last year more than 6,000 MW of wind turbines were installed. The point is we want to generate new investment in the United States in these technologies. In 1980 we led the world in photovoltaics, battery, wind turbine and biofiel technology and our unions were involved then. But, we (the U,S) blew it on the R&D and investment side. President Reagan cut most of the R&D and investment initiatives. Germany, Spain, Japan and Brazil decided as a matter of economic strategy and industrial policy to target and invest in these technologies and now they are the world leaders. Today, there are over 600,000 German workers in good jobs in this sector.
We want to reclaim those technolgies as well as reengineeer older techologies like coal with carbon capture and sequestration. That is our point in requiring domestic investment in the cabon legislation … invest here, capture the new trechnologies, produce them here and build them here.
And, the example I cite have created new jobs. Your implication that the renewable energies displaced union workers and jobs is incorrect. These are new energy resources coming on line to meet growing demand. They do not shut down existing facilites. However, they do create good jobs. The Pensylvania exanple has created 2,000 Steelworker jobs that were lost from offshoring and inddustry restructuring. The Memphis jobs came from a conversion of a former televsion production facility and now employs 600 IBEW members.
Yes, we have to make sure this are good jobs. We do need to target this emerging sector and make sure it is organized. That is excactly what the Steelworkers did. they helped get the technology and production cited in Pennsylvania and then organized the plant. In the trades for example, the IBEW apprenticeship programs are training their apprentices and proving skill upgrading to their journeymen in these technologies across the country to make sure they are at the front of the line when it comes to skills and quality.
The 23 states that have passed renewable energy portfolio standards will drive investment into these sectors. We want to be there to capture the investment and work here and make certain these are good union jobs.