Webinar: Investing in Workers for a World Beyond Fossil Fuels

By Dr. Robert Pollin, Veronica Wilson, and Norman Rogers - The Climate Center, April 28, 2022

This webinar is the fifth in The Climate Center’s Investing in Climate Action for Jobs, Health, and Equity webinar series.

As we move towards a cleaner and more equitable future, we need to ensure that workers who make a living extracting and refining oil and gas, and maintaining the aging fuel and transportation infrastructure, are able toto continue to support their families and communities. We will hear from labor leaders and economists about what investments are needed to protect workers as we phase out fracking and oil extraction in California.

Dr. Robert Pollin is Distinguished University Professor of Economics and Co-Director of the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. His books include A Measure of Fairness: The Economics of Living Wages and Minimum Wages in the United States (co-authored 2008), Greening the Global Economy (2015) and Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal: The Political Economy of Saving the Planet (2020). In May 2017, he co-authored Economic Analysis of the Healthy California Single-Payer Health Care Proposal and in November 2018, he co-authored Economic Analysis of Medicare for All. He has worked as a consultant for the U.S. Department of Energy, the International Labour Organization, the United Nations Industrial Development Organization and numerous non-governmental organizations in several countries and in U.S. states and municipalities on various aspects of building high-employment green economies. He was selected by Foreign Policy magazine as one of the “100 Leading Global Thinkers for 2013.”

Veronica Wilson joined Labor Network for Sustainability in 2018 when she organized the network’s first Los Angeles Labor Convergence on Climate Change. She now supports unions across the state that are strengthening the labor-climate movement and advocating for an equitable transition for workers and communities. She has been a union member as a teacher and an ocean lifeguard, and is currently a member of UPTE-CWA 9119.

Norman Rogers is Second Vice President of United Steelworkers, Local 675, an amalgamated union representing workers which include the oil, chemical, bedding, carwash, paper and electric bus manufacturing industries. He currently works in Storage and Handling at the Marathon oil refinery in Los Angeles County. He has spent the majority of his twenty two year career facilitating gasoline blending and the shipping and receipt of finished products. He has been active on multiple committees in his local, in particular health and safety but also contract negotiations. Following the Chevron refinery fire in 2012, Norman provided testimony to the Department of Industrial Relations on the importance of strengthening Process Safety measures working in coalition with environmental organizations to improve safety regulation for refineries and chemical plants. Norman is now deeply engaged in the struggle for a Just Transition for fossil fuel workers whose jobs will be lost in the move to a green economy.

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author.