Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

By Jeremy Brecher - Labor Network for Sustainability, April 3, 2024

By Joe Uehlein - Labor Network for Sustainability, March 6, 2024

Good afternoon Chair Stauber, Ranking Member Ocasio-Cortez, and Members of the Committee.

My name is Joseph Uehlein. I’m the founder and Board President of the Labor Network for Sustainability (LNS). We are dedicated to making a living on a living planet. We believe that sustainability starts at the kitchen table, where working people every day worry about how they will secure health care, send their children to college, save for a family vacation, and maybe save for a pension. Advanced industrial societies around the world provide many of these things to their people. We do not.

I worked building the Texas-Eastern Pipeline as it wound its way through the rolling hills of Central Pennsylvania. I worked on the construction of the Three Mile Island nuclear facility near Harrisburg. I worked in an aluminum mill in Mechanicsburg, PA. As secretary Treasurer of the AFL-CIO’s Industrial Division, and Secretary to the North American Coordinating Committee of the International Chemical, Energy, and Mine Workers Federation, I have represented fossil fuel and manufacturing workers throughout my career.

In 1988 I began attending meetings of the United Nations first global warming commission. At that time 2c of warming was a level we never wanted to reach. Now it’s a goal, and we are ushering in a world of hurt for a lot of people. This has to stop, and be reversed. I have spent my life working on labor and environmental issues, with climate change at the core of my endeavors.

My experience tells me that climate change is the real job killer, not the answers to climate change. Climate is as much an economic issue as it is an environmental issue. The impacts of unchecked global warming and climate change will decimate our economy and ecology. Whether you work on the ports, or in the agricultural fields, or in a warehouse, or in transportation, manufacturing, health care ~ even nurses and public employees will all suffer job loss due to unchecked global warming and climate change.

Before 2010 we would have one, maybe two, one-billion dollar weather events a year. Then we had a dozen such events in one year. The earth was waging its own public relations campaign. The costs of dealing with forest fires has increased dramatically over the past decade, and that’s just fire. Hurricane Katrina destroyed 40% of the New Orleans economy. Over time, much of that has come back, but not all of it. Massive storms, massive fires, melting polar ice caps, melting glaciers, famine, water shortages, and more are ravaging the planet and the people on it are suffering and fleeing to find a more stable places to live. You think we have an immigration problem now? You ain’t seen nothing yet. We will see mass migration of starving angry people. What do we do then? Wage war on humanity?

Climate change is a budget-killer, and is also a dagger pointed at our jobs. The fossil fuel industry and its allies love to spin the jobs v environment frame. We not only can, but we must, provide good jobs for our people, and protect the only planet we know of that can support life. The costs of fighting wild fires in the west has grown astronomically in the past 20 years. And this is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg.

With all due respect to the UN Paris accords, 1.5c of warming is a mirage fading in the rearview mirror. We have no time to lose and we need all of the renewable energy options. It’s not about a 2c goal, beause that’s a horrible level of warming. We need to roll warming back, not adjust to higher levels of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

By Jeremy Brecher - Labor Network for Sustainability, February 2, 2024

Green New Deal initiatives at local, state, regional, and civil society levels around the country have drawn together diverse, sometimes isolated, or even conflicted constituencies around common programs for climate, jobs, and justice. How have they done so?

Transcript Follows:

By Nick French - Jacobin, September 26, 2023

Today President Joe Biden traveled to Detroit to join members of the United Auto Workers (UAW) on the picket line in their strike against the Big Three automakers. The move was Biden’s strongest signal of support yet, after a number of more equivocal statements about the ongoing contract dispute. He is the first sitting US president in history to walk a picket line.

Biden’s transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg, declared that Biden went to Detroit because he is “deeply pro-worker.” One might doubt Buttigieg’s assessment, given that — despite Biden’s admirably pro-labor National Labor Relations Board — the president intervened to stop railworkers from striking over eminently reasonable demands less than a year ago and has so far been content to fund a transition to electric vehicles (EVs) with little regard for workers. (Buttigieg himself went on to qualify his statement: the president, he says, wants “the auto sector to succeed as well” and is “pushing the parties to get to a win-win deal that does right by workers.”)

In any case, to look at Biden’s decision as simply reflecting his personal commitments is to miss the bigger picture. Biden is looking toward reelection, Michigan is a crucial swing state, and the president and his team almost certainly feel a trip to the UAW picket line will be a boon to his electoral odds. And considering union favorability is at an all-time high and a majority of Americans support the UAW walkout, they’d be right to think so.

By Ted Franklin - Labor Rise, September 18, 2023

Labor Rise members helped organize a contingent of rank-and-file union members to join hundreds of other demonstrations in the End Fossil Fuels march and rally in Sacramento, California, on Sunday, September 17, 2023. We marched under the banner of Labor Network for Sustainability, a national organization building Labor/Climate movement solidarity. The Sacramento action was one of many in the United States during the international week of action to end fossil fuels. In New York City, where the United Nations gathered for meetings on climate, 75,000 people marched.

In Sacramento, where hundreds gathered, Labor Rise member Martha Hawthorne spoke on behalf of Labor Network for Sustainability:

By Rebecca Solnit - Bioneers, April 25, 2023

By Ron Kaminkow - Jacobin, April 15, 2023

Congressional progressives, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have defended their railroad strike vote by pointing to rank-and-file support. Here, Railroad Workers United clarifies the group has always unequivocally opposed denying railworkers their right to strike.

On April 11, 2023, Jacobin published a transcript of an interview by editor at large David Sirota with Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. In the context of a general discussion about differences between the “progressive” wing of the Democratic Party and the Biden administration, the subject of the vote to break the strike of the railroad workers came up.

In defending her votes — one to approve seven days of sick leave for railworkers and one to support the president’s bill to block the strike — Ocasio-Cortez states that she was acting on the wishes of Railroad Workers United (RWU) and other groups of railroad workers. She states in the interview, “When you look after the vote, folks like RWU were saying, ‘This is what we asked them to do.” Later she says, “Because, for example, with the rail vote, the only partners that I had leading up to that were railworkers. And if that’s what they asked us to do, then that’s what we did.”

But Ocasio-Cortez is clouding the reality of the situation by referring to “the vote,” when in fact there were two separate and distinctive votes. One bill proposed seven days of paid sick time, while the other bill blocked railworkers from striking; these bills were completely independent of one another.

By Our Changing Climate - Our Changing Climate, April 7, 2023

By Jeremy Brecher - Labor Network for Sustainability, February 2023

For the past year I have been researching and writing about initiatives around the country to implement the core ideas of the Green New Deal at a community, state, and local level – what I call the “Green New Deal from Below.” I have discovered hundreds of projects, policies, programs, and new laws that embody the principles of the Green New Deal at a sub-national level. But as I begin to tell people about what I am finding, I often get a response that I could paraphrase as “The Green New Deal – isn’t that just last-decade’s fad?” That is often followed with the question, “What’s left of the Green New Deal?” That’s the question I address in this Commentary.

Green New Deal – the Backstory

The Green New Deal is a visionary program to protect the earth’s climate while creating good jobs, reducing injustice, and eliminating poverty. Its core principle is to use the necessity for climate protection as a basis for realizing full employment and social justice. It became an overnight sensation with a 2018 occupation of Nancy Pelosi’s office by the youth climate movement Sunrise supporting a congressional resolution by newly elected Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez calling for a Green New Deal. A poll released December 14, 2018 by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication found that 40% of registered voters “strongly support” and 41% “somewhat support” the general concepts behind a Green New Deal.[1]

Soon after the occupation of Pelosi’s office, a wide swath of public interest organizations endorsed the Green New Deal, which also instantly became a prime whipping boy for the Right. Its core ideas were embodied in legislation by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Edwin Markey, which divided the Democratic Party into pro- and anti-Green New Deal factions. Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden convened a Unity Task Force that included Bernie Sanders, AOC, and the head of Sunrise, which came up with a plan incorporating many elements of the Green New Deal but eschewing the name. Biden called his program Build Back Better, and after the 2020 elections this became the nomenclature of Democratic Party and allied climate, jobs, and justice programs. A broad coalition of organizations called the Green New Deal Network, for example, developed and promoted an extensive legislative program, described on its website as “in line with the Green New Deal vision,” which it dubbed the THRIVE Agenda.[2] Supported by more than 100 members of Congress and 280 organizations, the THRIVE Act was introduced in Congress in the fall of 2020.

By Dyanna Jaye and William Lawrence - Convergence, March 24, 2022

Sunrise melded mass protest, electoral work, and distributed organizing to great effect, but 2020 upended its plans and forced a reassessment.

Sunrise Movement grew from a labor of love by 12 young people, including the two of us, into the most prominent climate justice organization in the country. We put the Green New Deal on the map, strengthened the Left insurgency in the Democratic Party, and helped drive youth turnout to defeat Trump in 2020. Climate change became a political priority for the Democratic Party, and Sunrise directly influenced Biden’s Build Back Better agenda.

In the last year, though, despite a few impactful protests demanding ambition and urgency from Congress, Sunrise members and observers alike have noted a loss of strategic clarity and organizing power compared to 2017 through 2020. And it’s not just Sunrise: the entire Left has struggled to make the jump from punching upwards in the Trump era to winning material reforms in the Biden era.

In this essay, we’ll pull back the layers of Sunrise’s organizing model: how we actually recruited young people and united them in a structure for collective action. We’ll first discuss the major influences on Sunrise’s organizing and run through how it all played out in practice, the good and the bad.

We share a diagnosis that a central shortcoming in Sunrise’s organizing model was the absence of a sustained method of mass organizing at a local level, which left us nowhere to go once we could no longer rely on the fast-but-shallow growth of distributed organizing methods. We’re proud of the movement’s accomplishments while humble about its shortcomings. We offer our reflection in the practice of learning together in public; we hope our transparency can empower the next generation of movement builders—in Sunrise and across movements—to lead transformative organizing for the next era.