SEARCH
Setting Standards for Green and Good Jobs |
|
 |
|
If the nation’s economy is to truly recover, the funds from President Obama’s economic recovery package—the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act—must be spent in ways that keep working families’ needs in mind and create a foundation for their future.
To ensure the jobs created under the bill are family-supporting jobs, the AFL-CIO Working for America Institute (WAI) and its brand-new Center for Green Jobs have created standards to help community-level unionists assess the quality of jobs created under the recovery act. They also are urging the forming of new partnerships among employers, government, labor, community groups, environmentalists and other stakeholders to make sure the standards are carried out.
Green Jobs Center Director Jeff Rickert says standards are important because
we have to make sure that the idea of the green job is that it is a good job. The blue-collar job was the cornerstone of the golden era. We want to make sure the green collar job is the cornerstone of a platinum one.
The standards include:
- Jobs created by the legislation should be enduring, family-sustaining jobs, in work environments where employers remain neutral when workers seek to join a union. Construction jobs should pay the prevailing wage. And the jobs should provide family-supporting wages, health care and retirement security.
- Employers who receive funds under the act should demonstrate a proven commitment to sound stewardship of public dollars.
- Training and education programs that claim to help workers and future workers qualify for these jobs should be quality ones that offer portable credentials in the rapidly changing job market; have a record of achieving quality job placements; and prepare current and future workers with the education and skills to continuously improve energy and environmental practices.
- Jobs and training programs supported by the act should provide affirmative outreach to communities of color and to other disadvantaged job seekers.
- The benefit of investments under the bill should accrue to businesses that employ workers here in the United States.
- To the extent possible, the jobs created should lower overall greenhouse gas emissions and create positive environmental returns.
Speaking to the first meeting of Vice President Biden’s Middle Class Task Force in Philadelphia late last month, United Steelworkers President Leo Gerard emphasized that any new green job also must be a good job.
To rebuild our middle class, we must also be sure that the jobs created in this new, green economy are good jobs with family-supporting wages and benefits, that we maximize the number of jobs created in this economy, and that these jobs truly contribute to the protection of our environment for future generations of Americans.
1 Comment
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
There persists in this hopeful article a contradiction that is never considered. The contradiction is between the demand of any for-profit business to maximize profits (Capital).
In contradiction to the demands of Capital, are the essential needs of working people (Labor) to receive from their work sufficient income to pay for food, clothing, shelter, etc.
Under current conditions of the collapse of capitalism in the U .S., in which MILLIONS of workers are unemployed, in which hundreds of work places have been closed, in which millions of jobs have moved permanently offshore, the prospect of finding a “living wage” job has become impossible.
Under the current system, no investor will invest money into what is supposed to be a profit-making business, if the “liviing wage” demands of labor (”human resources”) are going to cost so much that profits are severely threatened and minimized, the investor will simply not open up that business. Instead they will invest in another more profitable (perhaps less labor intensive) business in this country or elsewhere.
Despite the EFCA law, despite union organizing, despite the attempt of working people to make the minimal demands to live, the for-profit business operates under the iron law of capitalism. It must make maximum profit or it will die.
Despite this contradiction between labor and capital, the U.S. labor movement has always considered itself a “business partner” to corporate capitalism, even when the business does everything possible to prevent, destroy and run away from trade unions. Organized labor persists in this simple “business partner” trade union philosophy EVEN AS CAPITALISM HAS COLLAPSED.
For a new strategy for working people and organized labor.
1. Working people need jobs NOW! We need to buy food, clothing, shelter, etc. NOW! We need health insurance NOW! We need quality public education for our kids NOW!
Our needs our NOW! If for-profit capitalism is now incapable of supplying the jobs necessary for working people to live…..
then capitalism should be bypassed, ended and a new system of economics must be demanded!
2. Employer capitalists don’t want to pay for health insurance, retirement benefits, Social Security, Medicare, or even any taxes
if possible! Again capitalists forever NEED to maximize profits.
Thus the essential needs of working people today are almost entirely being filled by local, state and federal government. Social Security (now helping 70 plus millions), government support to public education (now rapidly being destroyed), FOOD STAMPS, SECTION 8 HOUSING SUPPORT, etc. with federal laws for minimum wages, etc. are all being realized for working people NOT from employer capitalists but government.
3. The problem today is that government at every level is now controlled by CORPORATE interests who threaten to minimize and destroy the essential programs for working people.
4. The Democratic Party and Obama, controlled by corporate interests, have LOOTED the federal treasury. The labor movement, despite this massive assault upon the needs of working people, has fully supported the Democratic Party and Obama, while hoping for a few symbolic crumbs that will do little to solve the MASSIVE immediate or long term needs of MILLIONS of working people.
5. Thus a strategy to end the powerlessness of organized labor and working people is needed:
a. A new anti-capitalist and socialist political party is needed to break away from the corporate controlled Democrats and Repbulicans. A socialist party that demands an economy “of, by and for” the economic interests of the people.
b. Socialize (beyond nationalization to permanent social ownership and worker management of failed capitalism) the banking industry and the energy industry (oil, gas, nuclear, coal, etc.)
c. End foreign wars and the privatization of war for profit. Cut the “defense” budget by 50 percent (with worker transition to needed new industry), shut down the 700 plus foreign bases.
Cut out the massive profiteering and fraud from the military-industrial complex).
d. Use the funds and savings to fund national single-payer
health. etc.
6. Labor needs to establish new radio, tv, newspapers nationally that informs, educates and ORGANIZES working people to this new strategy of labor. Enough Rush Limbaugh and Fox News to forever brain-wash working people every day into submission to economic impoverishment and death.
b.