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Working America, Sierra Club Call for Green Jobs |
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The AFL-CIO community affiliate Working America and the Sierra Club joined forces this week for two telephone forums on green jobs that drew participation from a total of 36,000 members of the two organizations.
On Sunday night, Pennsylvania Gov. Edward Rendell, United Steelworkers (USW) President Leo Gerard and Sierra Club Executive Director Carl Pope spoke to and took questions from Pennsylvania members, while on Monday, Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland and AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Richard Trumka joined Pope.
Working America members in Ohio and Pennsylvania received a recorded phone call inviting them to join the forum. They did so in astounding numbers, with 18,000—the equivalent of a small stadium event—participating each night and more than 100 submitting questions.
Rendell and Strickland emphasized the promise of green jobs for their states’ economies. In Pennsylvania, according to Rendell, a bill requiring 18 percent of energy sold by utility companies to come from alternative sources by 2019 very quickly yielded 1,000 new jobs in the wind industry, with 750 new manufacturing jobs represented by the Steelworkers.
Strickland pointed to the job skills workers were gaining building 350 LEED-certified schools in Ohio, as well as a requirement that 25 percent of the state’s energy come from renewable sources by 2025. (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design—LEED—are buildings that are environmentally sustainable.) Said Strickland:
I’m convinced that if Ohio’s economy is going to be revived,” it will be through alternative energy and other sources of green jobs.
During the previous phone conference, Gerard had voiced a similar sentiment, that is:
If there’s going to be an industrial base in America, it has to be clean, renewable, sustainable industrial base.
Trumka repeatedly emphasized the wide range of jobs that would be created in a green economy, “from production to construction in every industry,” and including architects, engineers, machining, fabrication, maintenance and sales jobs. The concrete early successes cited by Rendell and Strickland highlight the truth of Trumka’s contention that:
This is a choice for good jobs and a cleaner planet. They don’t walk on each other, they complement each other.
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Developing a strong renewable energy sector is the only way we’re going to bring back any decent-paying manufacturing jobs to the US. It’s high time the labor and environmental movements started working together but its going to require a lot of communication and cross education. In Missouri, we have a renewable energy portfolio standard initiative (Proposition C) on the ballot, but labor isn’t backing it.
Tune in next week to the Heartland Labor Forum on 90.1-FM KKFI Kansas City Community Radio and find out why Missouri workers should vote for it anyway. We’ll also be discussing how international trade contributes to global warming.
HLF airs Thursdays at 6pm, Central time. You can listen live online at http://kkfi.org The show will also be archived at our website http://heartlandlaborforum.org
Greenpeace produced a report in 1990 that laid this all out and warned about the consequences of global climate change and called for creating jobs in renewable energy development and conservation. It’s about time that Labor has finally gotten on board, after decades of ignorance and of unions pushing for bigger gas guzzling cars and rampant development. If we had had real leadership back then, we’d be far better off now. The next step will involve breaking from the corrupt two-party system and supporting Green Party candidates and socialists who have been talking about these issues for decades. Especially now that we have socialism for the wealthy corporations, shouldn’t Labor be demanding our fair share?