Climate Change: Opportunity and Responsibility

ATU International Vice President Ron Heintzman

Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) Vice President Ron Heintzman is among union delegates taking part in the 12-day United Nations Climate Change Conference (UNCCC) in Poznan, Poland. The meeting is building upon the framework negotiated last year in Bali, Indonesia. Of the nearly 100 union delegates, Heintzman is among the more than 20 from North America and sends us this report.

Prior to attending the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Poznan, Poland, my knowledge and understanding  of the subject was limited. Like many of our members, I could see and feel our climate changing, associating it with the frequently used term “global warming.” I quickly learned that climate change and global warming were not one in the same. I also had little understanding of how encompassing and important the issue is and how it impacts nearly every aspect of our daily lives, now and much more so in the future.

What we as a world, a country and as individuals do, or don’t do now, will impact the degree of changes we will confront in the future. And for union members in many industries, this may mean their very jobs and livelihoods. Bringing more than 150 countries together in an ongoing effort to gain consensus on how to deal globally with climate change is not only a difficult undertaking, but an extremely complicated one at best. The large number of special interest groups trying to inject their own agenda makes the process itself  seemingly overwhelming.

What is plainly clear, however, is the fact that labor, and trade unions specifically, must take an active and prominent role in pursuing the creation of “green jobs” in providing sustainable employment for their members whose jobs and livelihoods become vulnerable as a result of climate change. Through the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), unions have developed a set of global priorities important to labor, and that are deemed necessary to ensure the creation and stability of “green jobs” for its members in light of global climate change.

We have a unique opportunity in pursuit of these objectives with the global economic crisis, particularly in the United States, and labor must insist that whatever the plan for recovery is, a “green economy and green jobs” agenda be included as an integral part of the plan. We have a real opportunity in the United States with a new president who is clearly smart enough to figure out that doing nothing about climate change will hurt virtually every aspect of our economy in the future. 

For the transportation industry and the members we represent, increased mass transit is a key component in almost every plan for a “green environment and green economy.” We have a real opportunity, and I believe an obligation as a union, to promote our industry and educate our membership on how each of us must take individual responsibility by making changes in our day-to-day lives that help promote a sustainable green earth.

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