IUOE Project Shows Union Workers Ready for Green Jobs
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Many of the green jobs of “the future” already exist and are performed by union members who make energy-efficient products and teach others how to conserve energy.
Take Operating Engineers Local 49, which represents workers in Minnesota and the Dakotas. Members of the local recently built a wind turbine farm in the small town of Chandler, Minn. Crane operators from the local union hoisted the turbines into place as other members dug trenches for the transmission lines and did the grading.
Glen Johnson, business manager for Local 49, tells the Operating Engineers (IUOE) magazine, International Operating Engineer:
We’re green. We’ve been green a long time. When our operators are building roads and bridges, key environmental factors must be met.
On Earth Day, AFL-CIO Launches Green Initiative
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To celebrate Earth Day, the AFL-CIO, together with the leadership of its new Center for Green Jobs, announced a plan to reduce energy consumption, cut down waste and reduce the carbon footprint of its national headquarters.
With green jobs emerging as a top public policy priority, the AFL-CIO is pushing to ensure that the new green jobs created are also good jobs that provide a decent wage and benefits.
Says Jeff Rickert, director of the Working for America Institute’s Center for Green Jobs:
It’s like the old saying goes, the AFL-CIO is thinking globally and acting locally, but doing so in a way that demonstrates how to use strategic investments that help the environment while relying on high-skilled work.
Setting Standards for Green and Good Jobs
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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.
AFL-CIO Announces Center for Green Jobs
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As part of the AFL-CIO union movement’s commitment to fighting for green jobs, President John Sweeney and other union leaders today announced a major program to help working Americans prepare for the next generation of jobs by creating a Center for Green Jobs.
Starting with $1 million from the Working for America Institute, the AFL-CIO’s workforce and economic development arm, the center will partner with affiliated unions to help pave the way to good union jobs in a variety of the country’s unionized and greening industries. The center also will spread the lessons of AFL-CIO affiliates who have successfully joined the green economy, especially in manufacturing.
At a packed press conference this morning in Washington, D.C., Sweeney said the center is part of the AFL-CIO’s effort to “make progressive energy and climate change a first order priority.”
