By COSATU - July 2014

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’s.

Introduction

The discussions on shale gas extraction in South Africa (SA) have incited lively debates amongst activists, government officials and communities. These are all informed by divergent ideological paradigms and competing interests. The president and minister of finance have provided the South African citizenry with a clear picture of government’s stance on this contentious matter. This perspective was captured in both the state of the nation address and the budget speech of 2014. For example, in the budget speech delivered to parliament in February, Gordhan (2014:21) stated that “we will pursue the exploration of shale gas to provide an additional energy source for our economy”. His sentiments were echoed by the president when he told South Africans that: “Nuclear has the possibility of generating well over 9000 megawatts, while shale gas is recognised as a game changer for our economy. We will pursue the shale gas option within the framework of our good environmental   laws (Zuma 2014).

The above-mentioned quotes indicate that the South African government supports shale gas extraction. This position has produced two contending reactions from the population. The first supports government’s position on the basis that it will improve energy security and decrease dependence on imports (Warren 2013; Zhenbo et al 2014). Proponents also argue that shale gas exploration will create employment, and replace other harmful sources of energy (Considine et al 2010; Turner 2012).

The second perspective argues that shale gas extraction will produce a number of negative environmental and socio-economic effects. Advocates highlight the externalities that are associated with this form of energy source. The emphasis is placed on the carbon footprint; water contamination and usage; negative health effects on both humans and livestock.

This discussion paper will contribute the debate on the shale gas exploration in SA. It will use the existing research and data to determine whether this form of energy generation will produce positive socio-economic outcomes. This analysis will be guided by the COSATU resolutions which will be summarized in the following sections.

1. Brief Background on COSATU Resolutions and Policies

All COSATU policy must be read within the broader context of the federation’s paradigm on the political economy. There is a dialectical relationship between socio-economic, political and environmental phenomena. Thus, the debate on shale gas exploration cannot be confined to the natural sciences. Conservative analysts discuss shale gas exploration within the limited scope of ecological and environmental degradation. We oppose this perspective on the basis that it ignores the intersecting relationship between environmental destruction and socio-economic underdevelopment. In our view, it is unscientific to separate socio-economic issues from environmental trends. These are all interlinked and should be viewed as connected parts of a wider discourse on sustainable development. This logic is captured in COSATU’s Growth Path towards Full Employment which states that:

“Economic growth and development must support sustainable environments.  Industrial and social processes must minimize the disruption of natural processes; limit environmental degradation, adverse changes in bio-diversity, soil erosion and desertification, the emission of greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide, and pollution of water streams and ground water.  Patterns of consumption must also be aligned towards products that optimize environmental regeneration ” (COSATU Growth Path 2010).

The above-mentioned statement captures the tools of analysis that will be used in this paper. These will complimented by the following resolutions on climate change and energy.

Read the entire document as a PDF File.

By the IWW Mobile Railworkers Union - YouTube, February 28, 2014

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’s.

Multiple Locations of Mobile Rail were audited in July 2013 by OSHA. The initial fines were well over $20,000 for Safety Hazard Violations. They have not certified and abated all of the hazards. The employees have requested a meeting to discuss safety issues and Mobile Rail has refused repeatedly. This is a video demonstration of one of the safety hazards at many of their locations that Mobile Rail has not certified to OSHA or their employees that they have eliminated the Hazard. It has been almost 8 months and there has still been no meeting with the employees about the safety hazards. This video will be posted online and forwarded to OSHA in reference to Inspection Number 922049.

By Tamanna Rahma and Brendan Smith - Labor Network for Sustainability, October 26, 2014

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’s.

Nurses are asking all Americans to sign a petition demanding protection for frontline health care workers who are protecting us all from the threat of Ebola. Tamanna Rahman and Brendan Smith tell us why:

As the Ebola outbreak continues to dominate headlines, so too do the stories of health care workers fighting to contain the disease. The climate crisis is morphing into a public health crisis, forcing nurses to join the ranks of other workers on the front lines of climate change: firefighters battling ever more destructive fires, farmers struggling to coax crops from drought-ravaged fields, fishermen hauling empty nets from warming waters. The nature of work is changing and we’re not prepared.

For nurses, the risks became strikingly clear when news leaked out that Amber Vinson and Nina Pham, two nurses at Texas Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas, had contracted Ebola while caring for Thomas Eric Duncan, a Liberian national infected with the disease. While both nurses thankfully recovered, their situation highlights nurses as a new generation of “climate workers” exposed to expanding dangers on the job.

Stunningly, instead of celebrating the bravery of a profession the nation regards as its most trusted and respected, politicians and media reacted to the Ebola outbreak by blaming nurses for their carelessness. In fact, it’s the policy makers and hospital administration, not nurses, who are being “careless” by failing to take the measures necessary to protect healthcare workers and patients.

After the Ebola outbreak, the NNU surveyed 3,000 nurses from 800 health facilities in 48 states and the District of Columbia. They report that “a shocking 84 percent say their hospital is still not holding the essential, interactive training programs, and more than a third cite inadequate supplies of protective gear.”

In California not one hospital is adequately prepared. According to RoseAnn DeMoro, executive director of the California Nurses Association and National Nurses United: “We cannot name a hospital that we feel comfortable with, for patients in the state…to attempt to have the appropriate response in an Ebola situation.” Last week the NNU put out a statement demanding action to protect healthcare workers and patients:

[N]ot one more patient, nurse, or healthcare worker should be put at risk due to a lack of healthcare facility preparedness. The United States should be setting the example on how to contain and eradicate the Ebola virus.

The World Health Organization has called Ebola “the most severe, acute health emergency seen in modern times.” But can the outbreak be directly linked to the climate crisis? While a relation between Ebola and global warming is already hotly being debated, study after study shows that infectious diseases are becoming more virulent, and spreading faster, as a result of conditions directly related to a changing climate. The Ebola outbreak is a harbinger of the future.

Many of the most deadly diseases on earth — malaria, dengue and yellow fever, encephalitis and cholera — are highly climate sensitive, and are thriving as patterns of temperature, precipitation, and sea levels shift in their favor. They are spreading to new parts of the globe, including the U.S.

Dengue fever, which was wiped out in the U.S. in the World War II era, has now made a dramatic reappearance in the Florida Keys. Commonly called ‘breakbone fever’ because it causes pain so severe it feels like one’s bones are breaking, dengue is expected to spread over the next 60 years, exposing an additional two billion people.

Rodents, insects and other disease host populations are also exploding. Parasites and microbes are marching steadily northward, with infections such as Lyme disease increasing tenfold in the past 10 years.

As climate diseases escalate so does the need for global first responders. Nurses organizations, like the NNU, have stepped up to play this role. In the wake of Typhoon Yolanda, for example, over 500 RNs traveled to the Philippines to volunteer their skills. When Haiti was hit by a devastating earthquake, 12,000 RNs from across the nation responded in a matter of days.

The climate crisis has changed the world of health care. Nurses have been at the forefront, and their role will only continue to expand. It is critical that we as a society figure out how to protect our health care workers as they step into the breach.

Tamanna Rahman is a registered nurse and former labor organizer. She is currently a graduate student in advanced practice nursing at Yale University. Brendan Smith is the co-founder of the Labor Network for Sustainability.

By Al Engler - Rabble.Ca, October 24, 2014

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’s.

In the 2013 provincial election, Christy Clark's Liberals promised that exporting liquefied natural gas (LNG) to Asia would provide jobs and expand government revenues.

A year and a half later this boom is nowhere to be seen.

Fifteen liquefying plants and pipelines have been promoted. Six were reported to be on the verge of starting construction. But in early October, Petronas -- the company closest to seeking regulatory approval -- announced that it was considering shelving its proposal.

The Malaysian government-owned corporation wanted assurances that provincial and federal taxes and royalties would be kept low and that the company could bring in workers from abroad to construct and operate its facilities.

Then on October 21 the provincial government announced that tax rates and royalties on LNG operations would be slashed, and that the public should understand that if these projects proceeded, significant public revenues could not be expected for 15 years.

All of the proposed projects have faced strong opposition from Indigenous people and local communities to pipelines, liquefying plants and increasing tanker traffic.

The most widely promoted LNG terminal in Kitimat is in doubt after a substantial majority in this industrial city voted against the proposal. (People living in the adjacent native reserves who were expected to vote overwhelmingly against the LNG project did not get a vote in this referendum.)

Kitimat showed that when issues are openly and thoroughly debated, the communities most dependent on industrial employment will vote against projects that damage the environment.

The B.C. and federal governments as well as the corporate media continue to promote LNG as the key to future employment and increased public revenues. But even without the prospect of blockades, lengthy public hearings and litigation, the profitability of LNG exports is dubious.

By Shane Burley - LibCom.org, October 12, 2014. A shorter version of this article was originally published at In These Times.

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’s.

Outside of coffee shops and bookstores, crowded Whole Foods stores and worker-run co-ops nationwide, you‘re bound to find canvassers asking for donations or signatures in support of a host of causes. They’re often young people shaking the can for high-profile nonprofits. But as we get deeper into the post-crash precarious economy, the image of canvassers as idealistic college students making a few extra bucks on summer break quickly disintegrates. People are turning to this occupation as their primary source of income, according to many active campaigners. They are hired by independently contracted companies to canvas for nonprofits. The quotas are demanding, making the work one of the most difficult low-wage jobs to hold on to.

In Portland, Oregon, one union local as formed precisely to take on this precarious world of street canvassing, and they are growing at a pace no one could have predicted.

Last week, the United Campaign Workers union, an affiliate of the Portland Industrial Workers of the World, announced its second organized workplace in its less than two months of existence. (The first was the Campaign for the Restoration and Regulation of Hemp.)

Canvassers working for Grassroots Campaigns Inc. (GCI), a third-party contractor that does street canvassing and fundraising for progressive nonprofit organizations such as Planned Parenthood and the Southern Poverty Law Center, informed management of their unionization drive two weeks ago. The union drive began in response to what workers say were unsustainable turnover rates from firings and overly complicated pay scales.

By Noam Chomsky - Alternet, October 21, 2014

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’s.

A previous article I wrote explored how security is a high priority for government planners: security, that is, for state power and its primary constituency, concentrated private power - all of which entails that official policy must be protected from public scrutiny.

In these terms, government actions fall in place as quite rational, including the rationality of collective suicide. Even instant destruction by nuclear weapons has never ranked high among the concerns of state authorities.

To cite an example from the late Cold War: In November 1983 the U.S.-led North Atlantic Treaty Organization launched a military exercise designed to probe Russian air defenses, simulating air and naval attacks and even a nuclear alert.

These actions were undertaken at a very tense moment. Pershing II strategic missiles were being deployed in Europe. President Reagan, fresh from the "Evil Empire" speech, had announced the Strategic Defense Initiative, dubbed "Star Wars," which the Russians understood to be effectively a first-strike weapon - a standard interpretation of missile defense on all sides.

Naturally these actions caused great alarm in Russia, which, unlike the U.S., was quite vulnerable and had repeatedly been invaded.

Newly released archives reveal that the danger was even more severe than historians had previously assumed. The NATO exercise "almost became a prelude to a preventative (Russian) nuclear strike," according to an account last year by Dmitry Adamsky in the Journal of Strategic Studies .

Nor was this the only close call. In September 1983, Russia's early-warning systems registered an incoming missile strike from the United States and sent the highest-level alert. The Soviet military protocol was to retaliate with a nuclear attack of its own.

The Soviet officer on duty, Stanislav Petrov, intuiting a false alarm, decided not to report the warnings to his superiors. Thanks to his dereliction of duty, we're alive to talk about the incident.

Security of the population was no more a high priority for Reagan planners than for their predecessors. Such heedlessness continues to the present, even putting aside the numerous near-catastrophic accidents, reviewed in a chilling new book, "Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety," by Eric Schlosser.

It's hard to contest the conclusion of the last commander of the Strategic Air Command, Gen . Lee Butler, that humanity has so far survived the nuclear age "by some combination of skill, luck and divine intervention, and I suspect the latter in greatest proportion."

The government's regular, easy acceptance of threats to survival is almost too extraordinary to capture in words.

In 1995, well after the Soviet Union had collapsed, the U.S. Strategic Command, or Stratcom, which is in charge of nuclear weapons, published a study, "Essentials of Post-Cold War Deterrence."

A central conclusion is that the U.S. must maintain the right of a nuclear first strike, even against non-nuclear states. Furthermore, nuclear weapons must always be available, because they "cast a shadow over any crisis or conflict."

Thus nuclear weapons are always used, just as you use a gun if you aim it but don't fire when robbing a store - a point that Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers, has repeatedly stressed.

Read the entire article here.

Contributed by Emma Hartley - October 21, 2014

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’s.

There are key sectors of the economy and workforce where unions--like the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW)--are rarely present, due the isolated or remote nature of some workplaces that effectively function as camps. Yet the need for union representation in some of the most difficult and dangerous working conditions is perhaps the greatest, especially where temporary and contract labor is widely used. Those contract workers, for instance who are employed in oil refineries often get only minimal safety training and were sent from one work site to another by the employment agencies who hired them out at far below union rates to major multinational oil companies. One such worker told the IWW of how at his work site, even his team's supervisor was unclear about safety regulations concerning hazardous materials and expected workers to evacuate the work site using a path and area that were both heavily contaminated. The oil industry, as well as those sectors of the economy that rely on employment agencies to offer cheap, temporary labor are often black holes for workers, where there remains much work to be done in terms of workers' rights.  

By Chuck Collins - American Prospect, October 13, 2014

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’s.

It has been a tough couple of years in the effort to unite labor, community, and environmental groups, an alliance that has always been strained.

The extractive energy sector—coal, gas, oil—has historically had strong union representation and well-paying jobs. Tensions rose in 2011 after the Sierra Club escalated their campaign to close coal plants and 350.org, the climate protection group led by activist Bill McKibben, called for a halt to the Keystone XL Pipeline project.  Even Obama’s relatively mild order this past June on reducing pollution from power plants was opposed by the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) and the Mineworkers.

At a February 2013 meeting of labor and environmental activists, Damon Silvers, the AFL-CIO’s director of policy and special counsel, yelled and pounded the table, “Where is the transition plan for workers? Why isn’t this part of your demands?”

Divisions will increase in the coming years, as two competing urgencies collide. Labor and community justice organizations will demand jobs, economic growth, and reductions in inequality. And environmental activists will increase pressure to curtail fossil fuel production in the face of climate disruptions. Both the politics and the policies of these goals seem to diverge. But must they?

“Pitting jobs versus the environment is a false choice,” says Joe Uehlein, a longtime trade unionist, now board president of the Labor Network for Sustainability, which builds alliances between environmental and labor sectors. “We need to figure out how to make a living on a living planet.”

By Dr Joanna "Jody" Boehnert - EcoLabs, October 16, 2014

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’s.

Web Editor's Note: The IWW Environmental Unionism Caucus is featured on the climate map as one of the "climate justice" organizations.

The Mapping Climate Communication Project illustrates key events, participants and strategies in climate communication.

1) Climate Timeline visualizes the historical processes and events that have lead to various ways of communicating climate change. Key scientific, political and cultural events are plotted on a timeline that contextualizes this information within five climate discourses. These reveal very different ideological, political and scientific assumptions on climate change.

2) Network of Actors displays relationships between 237 individuals, organizations and institutions participating in climate communication in Canada, United States and the United Kingdom.

Details about this project can be found in the Mapping Climate Communication: PosterSummary Report. This report can be downloaded here:

The maps reveal how specific details in climate communication are contextualized within complex debates. For example:

• How does a climate march impact the volume of media coverage of climate change?
• How does the work of the climate denial industry potentially impact climate policy?
• Do popular movies and books on climate result in activity in the climate movement?
• What are the relationships between organizations active in climate communication?

By illustrating key events and actors over time and within five discourses this work makes links between disparate factors and reveals dynamics that contribute to public understanding of climate change.

The project also explores politicised issues in climate communication by using a discourse approach to analyse the various strategies and ideologies held by those organizations, institutions and individuals participating in climate communication in the public realm. This report describes the impact of neoliberal dogma and modes of governance on climate communication as one of the central problems preventing a global response to climate change. Theorizing the impact of neoliberalism on climate change communication and policy is key to an understanding of why emissions continue to rise despite the significant work by the climate science community and the environmental movement over the past four decades.

By Martin Zehr - IWW Environmental Unionism Caucus, October 14, 2014

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’s.

“Every union should have a vision of the future,” stated Jock Yablonski as he announced his candidacy for the UMWA presidency. “What good is a union that reduces coal dust in the mines only to have miners and their families breathe pollutants in the air, drink pollutants in the water, and eat contaminated commodities?”  

This presentation by Jock Yablonski presents a concise analysis of the relationship between the working class and the environment. Because the environmental issue has been dominated for so many years by NGOs and advocacy groups, there remains a fundamental schism in substance and politics between the working class and sound environmental and resource planning advocates. The much celebrated blue-green unity of Seattle is a fading memory. In the age of the increasing role of the AFL-CIO in promoting corporate profits for jobs, we have seen how unions like the Mineworkers, Boilermakers, Steelworkers and others have adopted a pro-corporate militarization stance. This significance of this collaboration goes beyond simply environmental issues. In fact, it threatens an independent class role for all unions, whether it's quality of life issues or shop floor issues.  

To date, the IWW’s reputation remains in geographical locales and in small retail or commercial local unions. Our presence within the labor movement remains marginal. The re-emergence of an active IWW presents a new stage for workers in the class stage. More than a revival of the sixties mass struggles and beyond the single issue advocacies of the late 20th century, the IWW can play an leadership role given our willingness to consciously analyze our role, our strategies  and our tactics. For example, the drive to organize in basic industry is a task that remains ahead of the IWW. The service economy will provide certain in-roads needed to establish our validity and are important in establishing real credentials that workers can see. But, the task ahead remains in steel, electrical, maritime, auto and other industries that have become open shops, or even non-union (such as auto). Likewise, organizers and political education of organizers need to be developed to a generation that has minimal experiences in the class struggle.