No Solar Sweatshops or Wal-Mart Windmills

by Tula Connell, Feb 19, 2009

When it comes to making the connection between how union membership can benefit low-wage workers, create green jobs and, ultimately, bolster the nation’s sinking economy, Ian Kim gets it.

Kim is director of the Green-Collar Jobs Campaign at the Los Angeles-Oakland-based Ella Baker Center for Human Rights. He says President Obama’s economic recovery package offers the opportunity to connect low-wage workers with quality union jobs—quality “green jobs.” In Kim’s words:

We’re not talking about solar sweatshops or Wal-Mart windmills.

Coalition-building is what Kim says he does best—although he also holds an MBA. In the Los Angeles area, with a limited number of jobs available in recent years, Kim says there had been tension between efforts to connect low-wage workers with building trades unions that couldn’t take new recruits because sufficient jobs weren’t available. The economic recovery package can change all that.

Now with the creation of many union jobs, we have access to building partnerships with unions so that disadvantaged workers can be funneled into good union jobs.

Jobs like creating solar panels, weatherization and, yes, windmills.

Kim was in Washington, D.C., this week at the Center for American Progress (CAP) for a panel discussion on how low-wage workers fit into the recovery package. He was joined by advocates for youth and the economically disadvantaged as wel as a CAP economist. When an audience member asked how wages can be improved in states where there aren’t a lot of unions, panelists said the solution is to make it easier for workers to join unions—through passage of the Employee Free Choice Act. In other words, enabling more workers to join unions is pivotal to improving our economy.

The union movement is pushing hard for passage of the act, which, in the words of a report by the U.S. House of Representatives Education and Labor Committee, would allow employees

to make their own decision about whether they want to bargain together—to advocate for fairer wages, benefits, and working conditions—without the threat or fear of harassment and retribution and fear of losing their livelihood.

Yesterday, CAP released a report showing how higher union wages benefit entire communities. The state-by-state analysis demonstrates that an increase in the rate of union membership of just 5 percent would increase total wages by $176 million in Nebraska, $503 million in Wisconsin and $852 million in Pennsylvania.

That’s not chump change, especially when states are sending layoff notices en masse to state employees and cutting services. As the report states:

One of the primary reasons why our current recession endures is that workers do not have the purchasing power they need to drive our economy…what is sustainable is an economy where workers are adequately rewarded and have the income they need to purchase goods. This is where unions come in.

Right now, 11.6 million U.S. workers are unemployed. In recent months, each time the Labor Department issues the jobs report, pundits and the media try to downplay the horrific numbers by saying the unemployment rate was higher in the early 1980s. Economist Heather Boushey puts that data twist to rest, noting that there are more unemployed workers now than in the early 1980s, and that

we’ve seen more jobs lost in the last three months than at any point since the end of World War II.

Back in California, in a state badly mismanaged by Arnie, Kim is eager to put the funds from the economic recovery program to work. As he sees it, they are a down payment on the future. The economic recovery package includes $500 million for green jobs training, training that will happen in partnership with unions to ensure the end-result is a family-supporting job. Also in California, where one-in-four students don’t finish high school—130,000 students a year—the future is hanging by a sweatshop.

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