public sector workers

By staff - Labor Network for Sustainability, January 30, 2024

“Bargaining for the Common Good” has become a crucial strategy for organized labor and a key means of forging broad coalitions for mutual support. For the past decade, unions and allies in Minnesota have developed powerful union and community alignments that have won victories at the bargaining table, in the community, and in the legislature.

In March, the union contracts are expiring for tens of thousands of Minnesota workers, and these allies are organizing in advance to align their demands and narratives.

You can watch a recorded webinar on “Minnesota Community and Labor Escalations” presenting an insider’s look at what it took to build this alignment over the last few decades, and what’s possible in this spring’s escalation. Speakers include Greg Nammacher, President of SEIU Local 26 Jennifer Arnold, Co-Director of Inquilinxs Unidxs por Justicia Veronica Mendez Moore, Co-Director of CTUL Marcia Howard, First Vice President of Minneapolis Federation of Teachers and Educational Support Professionals JaNaé Bates, Director of Communications of ISAIAH Phillip Cryan, Executive Vice President, SEIU Healthcare MN & IA.

By staff - Public and Commercial Services Union, October 25, 2023

The UK civil and public services have been under a decades old drive to reform in the name of efficiency savings and cost cutting. This is from both Labour and Tory administrations, and the ConDem coalition.

The reality of this for workers has been a relentless attack on their pay, jobs, terms and conditions. With increasing privatisation of public services and outsourcing, it has weakened the services they deliver and led to an ideological rolling back of the welfare state.

Today we have multiple crises facing us from the costs of living and energy crises, to public health and climate change. The twin impacts of Brexit and Covid-19 revealed two important things that were not surpising to those working in the UK civil and public services at least.

In the case of Brexit, the extent of which the hollowing out of expertise and experience showed that major transformations to our economy cannot be done on the cheap without both financial and human resources. In terms of the Covid-19 pandemic, the extraordinary commitment and adaptability of civil and public service workers illustrating just how vital they are to the economic, political, and social well-being of the nation.

Covid-19 gave a glimpse of what could be possible when the vital role of the civil and public services was briefly recognised. It also showed how the state can be transformative, act with urgency, and coordinate resources for the public good. Key civil service departments had to rapidly adapt for example in delivering the Coronavirus Job Retention or furlough scheme and benefit changes. Factory production lines, in consultation with unions, were quickly repurposed to produce ventilators or PPE equipment.

Now there is also the increasingly pressing challenge to respond to of climate change and biodiversity loss. Unfortunately we have politicians so hostile to public and democratic institutions, that it promotes inefficiency and profit making at the expense of organising the civil and public services in a way that can lead on the rapid and far reaching action that we need to address the climate crisis.

This is why we urgently need to develop an alternative vision and call for a radical rethink about how the machinery of government is configured to achieve our climate change and biodiversity targets. At the heart of this is the proposal for a National Climate Change and Biodiversity Service which for the rest of this pamphlet we will refer to simply as the National Climate Service (NCS).

Download a copy of this publication here (PDF).

By Michael Zonta, Melanie Issett, Celinda Ma, and Olaf Weber - School of Environment, Enterprise and Development (SEED), University of Waterloo, June 26, 2023

This report presents the results of analyses conducted on a group of pension funds that face popular demands to decarbonize their investment holdings (Climate Safe Pensions Network (CSPN)). A key argument made by advocates is that fossil fuel-free portfolios would have seen superior investment performance during the last decade. The scope of the analyses includes the historical public equity investments of the funds and are based on data provided by either Bloomberg or Capital IQ2. The analyses were conducted between 2013 and 2022 for the funds with publicly accessible data. Data for eight of the funds were available, including:

Data for eight of the funds were available, including:

• Alaska Permanent Fund Corporation (APFC)
• Alaska Retirement Management Board (ARMB)
• California Public Employees' Retirement System (CalPERS)
• California State Teachers' Retirement System (CalSTRS)
• Colorado Public Employees' Retirement Association (CoPERA)
• New York State Teachers' Retirement System (NYSTRS)
• Oregon Public Employees' Retirement Fund (OPERF)
• State of Wisconsin Investment Board (SWIB)

if six of the eight U.S. public pension funds had divested 10 years ago, they would have been $21 billion richer, an average 13% higher return rate. These six pensions collectively represent approximately 3.4 million people.

Download a copy of this publication here (PDF).

By staff - ASLEF, June 20, 2023

In March, Parliament's Transport Select Committee produced a report of their recent inquiry Fuelling the Future, which was looking at ways to decarbonise transport.

The committee took evidence from stakeholders across the industry, including ASLEF (click here to read our submission), asking about the viability of future fuels from electrification to batteries and hydrogen.

The report found that the only realistic way to decarbonise the railway is to electrify as much as possible of the network. While there is the potential for hydrogen and batteries to fill gaps, electrification remains the only way to power heavy freight and high-speed passenger services. 

This is not the first report that has come to the conclusion that rail electrification is essential for decarbonising the railway.

ASLEF has repeatedly called for the full electrification of the railway, through a rolling programme which would allow supply chains and project teams to be continually employed and therefore save money and retain institutional knowledge.

After publishing the final report of the inquiry the committee received a response from the UK government. Unfortunately the government did not commit to moving forward with some of the most important recommendations.

There was, for example, no full commitment to rail electrification, let alone a plan to do this. In addition the government stated that it would be running diesel trains on the new 'East-West Rail' line between Oxford and Cambridge. This is a new line which should obviously have been electrified from the beginning.

The Conservative MP who chairs the committee, Iain Stewart, commented:

“My colleagues also urged government to stay committed to electrifying railway lines, or introducing alternative low-carbon motive power where full electrification is not viable, so that we can look forward to the day that vast swathes of the country are free of diesel-guzzling trains. We want to see a long-term strategy with costings, milestones and a credible delivery plan. The Government’s response indicates there is still some way to go before they will be ready to put pen to paper on a detailed plan."

This indictment of the government's inaction from a member of their own party is in line with what ASLEF has been saying for many years. This is a government without a plan, without a strategy, and without the ability to deliver.

By Michael Levien - Historical Materialism, March 2023

Review of Matthew Huber, (2022) Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet, London: Verso.

The year-long American saga that culminated in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) underscored the difference between two ways of mitigating climate change at the national level. The first is elite climate policy in which wonks and technocrats come up with the smartest policies to incentivise private capital to invest in the right technologies. This is, ultimately, what we got with the IRA, which has been accurately characterised as the triumph of ‘green industrial policy’.¹ The second is popular climate politics which seeks to build a broad political coalition for decarbonisation by tying it to social programmes that directly improve people’s lives. This is the idea behind the Green New Deal, which to a surprising extent made its way into the initial Build Back Better bill before Joe Manchin got his hands on it. Matthew Huber’s book Climate Change as Class War provides a powerful critique of the first while advancing a labour-centred version of the second.

Huber lands many good punches against what he calls professional-class climate politics. Building on the Ehrenreichs’ concept of the professional managerial class (PMC),² Huber argues that PMC climate politics characteristically over-emphasises that class’ stock-in-trade: education and credentials. In their hands, climate politics thus becomes a matter of knowledge (communicating the science) more than one of power (tackling the class power of the fossil-fuel industry). PMC policy technocrats further internalise neoliberal logic with their obsession with pricing carbon – a policy that ultimately balances the carbon budget on the backs of working-class consumers. In its more radical manifestations, PMC environmentalism – degrowth being the main target here – espouses an ascetic ‘politics of less’ that has no resonance with working-class people who already do not have enough. This type of environmental politics, Huber argues, explains why the right has been able to mobilise the working class against the environment.

By way of alternative, Huber advances a theory of working-class climate politics which he dubs ‘proletarian ecology’. The starting point, developed over Chapters 1 and 2, is to recognise that industrial fossil capital is responsible for the vast majority of emissions. As Huber sketches with discussions of the cement and fertiliser industries – for the latter, Huber draws on some interviews with managers of a fertiliser plant in Louisiana – their carbon intensity is not a matter of greed but of the structural imperative to produce surplus value, and therefore will not be halted (as opposed to greenwashed) by any amount of shaming. Thus, ‘Climate change requires an antagonistic approach towards owners of capital in the “hidden abode” of production’ (p. 106). The problem is that ‘the climate movement today – made up of professional class activists and the most marginalized victims of climate change – is too narrowly constructed to constitute a real threat to the power of industrial capital’ (p. 69).

This brings us to the bold and controversial claim of Climate Change as Class War: it is the working class (and organised labour in particular) that must be the main agent of radical climate politics, not the diverse coalitions of ‘marginalised groups’ – which includes Indigenous movements against pipelines and Black-led environmental justice organisations – who are currently the vanguard of the climate justice movement. What Huber calls ‘livelihood environmentalism’ only sees the working class as having environmental interests when their communities’ land, water or health are directly threatened (p. 195). Huber’s theory of proletarian ecology, by contrast, proceeds from the broader recognition that ‘a defining feature of working-class life under capitalism is profound alienation from the ecological conditions of life itself’ (p. 188). Thus ‘a working-class interest in ecology will emerge not from the experience of environmental threats, but from a profound separation from nature and the means of subsistence’ (pp. 181–2). Rather than defending bodies or landscapes, it will focus on the working class’s material interest in decommodifying the means of subsistence (p. 196).

By Özlem Onaran and Cem Oyvat - International Trade Union Confederation, February 6, 2023

The study simulated the impact that public spending increases in the care economy, the green economy, and infrastructure could have across eight countries.

The report shows that a repeated annual increase in public spending by 1% of GDP within these three sectors would yield major economic returns that exceed the initial level of investments made. The findings reveal that:

• Investing an extra 1% of GDP in the care economy over five years would yield an average GDP increase of more than 11%, as well as a 6.3% increase in total employment levels.
• An extra 1% of GDP investment in the green economy over five years would yield an average GDP increase of 10%, as well as a 7.5% increase in total employment levels.
• An extra 1% of GDP on infrastructure investment over five years would increase both employment and GDP levels by 12% on average.

Owen Tudor, ITUC Deputy General Secretary, stressed: “The lingering employment effects of Covid-19, as well as a rapidly changing world of work, have underscored the urgency of addressing employment deficits and inequalities. Governments must step up their investments to support the creation of quality jobs – especially in strategic sectors that are good for both people and the planet including care, infrastructure and the green economy.”

At the global level, trade unions are calling for the creation of 575 million jobs and the formalisation of at least one billion informal jobs by 2030, to enable delivery of the United Nations’ 2030 Agenda commitment for full employment and decent work under Sustainable Development Goal 8.

Read the report (Link).

By Michael Sainato - The Real News Network, September 12, 2022

Workers at the Environmental Protection Agency are calling on President Joe Biden to issue a climate emergency declaration at the same time they’re calling for improvements in staffing and resources for the agency in their next union contract. 

The largest union representing workers at the EPA, the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) Council 238—which represents nearly 7,500 EPA employees around the US—voted to declare a climate emergency in May 2022 and are calling on Biden to do the same. AFGE is the largest union representing federal government and District of Columbia employees (currently the membership is about 700,000), though other smaller unions do represent professionals at the EPA. 

“The climate emergency allows the president to deploy a lot more resources and attach a lot more solutions to the problems that the federal government has at its disposal,” said Nicole Cantello, president of AFGE Local 704 based in Chicago, Illinois, and an attorney who has worked with the EPA for 30 years. “From our standpoint, the Biden administration needs to do a lot to make sure that we have the best and brightest scientists, engineers, and lawyers working on this.”

In the wake of West Virginia v. EPA, the June 2022 US Supreme Court ruling that severely limits the EPA’s authority to cap emissions from existing power plants, EPA workers are also pushing the the Biden administration to expedite measures to strengthen the agency so that it can more adequately address the climate crisis. 

By Ted Franklin - Capital and Main, July 1, 2022

Recently, former President Obama launched a Netflix series celebrating national parks and their breathtaking views. One of the parks he zoomed in on was the 2.2 million acre Yellowstone National Park, describing it as a park that is “fundamental to our national identity.”

But underneath the beauty of Yellowstone lies an ugly history of union-busting and intimidation by government contractors of National Park Service workers, the ones who labor to keep the park beautiful — a legacy that Obama failed to curb as president and one that Joe Biden has yet to address as the current occupant of the White House.

“I never had anyone spit or threaten to beat me up until I tried to unionize at Yellowstone,” says former Yellowstone tour guide Ty Wheeler.

In February of 2020, Wheeler and six of his co-workers were fired when they attempted to organize a group of 80 tour guides at Yellowstone National Park employed by the giant contractor Delaware North. Workers were paid only $12 an hour plus tips with infrequent scheduling, leading some into poverty while trying to get by in an area known for its generally high prices and expensive housing. In addition, Yellowstone had begun reporting cases of COVID, and workers were concerned about what they claim was the lack of training and personal protective equipment.

However, when the workers attempted to unionize, they claim they were not only fired but kicked out of company housing in West Yellowstone, Montana, during the middle of a frigid Yellowstone winter. The next month, the workers filed an unfair labor practice complaint with the National Labor Relations Board, which ruled in a settlement that all of the workers should be rehired and that organizing activities should not be prevented in the park.

But Delaware North broke the agreement and to this day has never rehired the workers, say the former employees, who are currently appealing to the NLRB about the failure to enforce the settlement.

Union organizers are citing their firings and forced eviction from company housing to help build momentum for Biden to take executive action and strip companies like Delaware North of federal contracts for violating the National Labor Relations Act, now that the PRO Act — which would penalize employers for violating workers’ rights, and force employers to disclose how much they spend on union busting — is stalled in the Senate. Similar rules, including the High Road policy, which would boost labor-friendly companies’ chances of winning federal contracts, and an order that federal contractors disclose two years of political donations, faltered during the Obama administration.

Union organizers are pushing Biden to call out Delaware North’s union-busting activity in the national park, just as he did recently with Kellogg’s and Amazon’s efforts to halt organizing efforts by their workers.

“Biden should get directly involved and do something about this,” says union organizer Wheeler. “These are our national parks, our national treasures, and these private contractors are treating them like company towns.”

By staff - Fossil Free California, June 2022

As the impacts of climate change begin to wreak havoc on our bisophere, the fossil fuel divestment movement has gained remarkable momentum. Globally, 1,500 institutions representing over $40 trillion in assets have already committed to some level of divestment from the fossil fuel industry.

Despite over a decade of pressure from their members, the California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS) and the California State Teachers’ Retirement System (CalSTRS) continue to invest billions in the fossil fuel industry on behalf of their beneficiaries. Studies have shown that if CalPERS and CalSTRS had divested from fossil fuels in 2010, they would have generated an estimated additional $17.4 billion in returns by 2019.23 So why do California’s public pension funds remain invested in the fossil fuel industry?

CalPERS and CalSTRS claim they are engaging with the fossil fuel industry as stakeholders to mitigate climate change by affecting the conduct of oil, gas, and coal companies. However, a review of their 2022 proxy votes reveals that their shareholder engagement efforts are not only ineffective—they’re undermining climate action.

Download a copy of this publication here (PDF).

By staff - Duluth News Tribune, March 10, 2022

DULUTH — The union representing many midwest employees of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency have asked the Minnesota Supreme Court to take up a PolyMet case challenging the proposed copper-nickel mine's water permit.

The American Federation of Government Employees Local 704 and other groups filed briefs urging the court to reconsider a January decision by the Minnesota Court of Appeals affirming a 2020 decision by a State District Court judge who said the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency broke no laws or procedures by asking the EPA to keep comments on the permit private. It acknowledged such a move was made to prevent comments from reaching the public and leading to "bad press."

In 2019, AFGE Local 704 said it learned from a whistleblower that comments by the EPA Region 5 office in Chicago on a draft of PolyMet's National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System, or NPDES, were left out of the public record.

“Simply put, when a government agency acts in secret — or deliberately obscures its motives or reasoning — it becomes difficult to tell whether the agency’s actions were lawful or fair," the union wrote in its brief.