publications

By Eric Blanc, Angelika Maldonado, Michelle Valentin Nieves, and Chris Smalls - Jacobin, April 11, 2022

* The video also features Bernie Sanders, and the original title headlines this fact, however, this video is mainly about the union and its organizing drive.

By Clark Williams-Derry - Montana Environmental Information Center, April 7, 2022

By Michael Eisenscher, et. al. - US Labor Against the War, April 7, 2022

By David Klein, Aditi Shakkarwar, and Stephanie Pincetl - DSA Los Angeles, March 30, 2022

By Workers' Voice, East Bay - Socialist Resurgence, March 28, 2022

On March 23, members of Workers’ Voice went out to support striking refinery workers at the Chevron facility in Richmond, Calif. This strike is taking place in the wake of the United Steel Workers’ national oil pattern bargaining agreement with the oil companies, which covers some 30,000 workers at refineries and chemical plants across the country. The pattern bargaining agreement now only covers those 30,000 USW-organized oil and chemical workers whose contract expired this year on Feb. 1, which union locals had to ratify.

In Richmond, over 500 oil workers represented by USW Local 5 rejected the tentative agreement, as it was insufficient to meet their needs. They are thus striking over wages, hours, and other workplace issues, including being forced to work during the peak of the COVID pandemic. They have set up 24-hour pickets, with six-hour shifts. The union has created a solidarity fund and will cover basic expenses of workers who can’t pay their mortgage or get health care or food costs covered.

When we visited, the workers were picketing in shifts of a few dozen workers in front of the refinery gate, keeping up an optimistic mood of camaraderie and humor on a chilly, foggy day.

Many of the drivers of vehicles passing by the picket line honked their horns in support. However, a bothersome Richmond cop and one or two surly truckers wanting to drive into the facility—which the workers were trying to block—attempted, unsuccessfully, to dampen the positive atmosphere.

The grievances of the workers relate to wages and to other grievances as well. They need a raise to keep up with cost of living increases, especially in the brutally expensive Bay Area. They’re also confronting increased health-care costs. A worker told us that their new health-care plan would barely be covered by the wage increase of 2.5% currently on offer. This increase would also not keep up with inflation, which was 7% last year alone. Shopping for groceries is much more expensive now, workers we talked to said. In fact, they added, everything is more expensive.

Workers also talked about a manager who got a 10 percent raise to move up from Los Angeles. This upset workers because that manager is already making a good salary. Moreover, Chevron recently reported billions in profits, the most since 2014; but the boss always says there’s no money for workers.

But workers say they’re not just striking about money.

By Dunja Krause, et. al. - United Nations Research Institute for Social Development - March 22, 2022

By Elena Bird, Sarah Holdeman, et. al. - Seaweed Commons, Spring 2022

We are an international collective of seaweed growers, lifelong harvesters, scientists and advocates. We believe that the seaweed aquaculture industry should be developed with a precautionary approach: conservation-minded, at an appropriate scale, and with local ownership and control. Farms should be small-scale until knowledge gaps can be satisfactorily filled and the impact on wild coastal ecosystems and coastal communities is shown to be minimal.

History has shown that allowing corporations to scale up without appropriate regulations often results in far-reaching detrimental effects on both the environment and the socio-economic health of the communities where they operate. Hence, allowing corporations to monopolize where and how seaweed is farmed risks devastating impacts on coastal ecologies, economies, and cultures. Without locally adapted and controlled regulatory frameworks, seaweed could become the next boom and bust crop that was supposed to “save the world.”

In order to support biodiversity, economically sustainable coastal communities, cultural vitality, and climate change resiliency, we ask collaborators to support the due process of scientifically evaluating best seaweed farming practices in North America. We seek regulatory frameworks based on those results before allowing corporations to build large-scale seaweed farms.

In the face of a rapidly growing seaweed industry, we are collectively issuing a warning call and demand for regulatory updates to mitigate risks to coastal ecosystems, the commons of the sea, the biodiversity of kelp forests, and the well-being of our human communities. We aim to achieve a more comprehensive understanding of how seaweed farming and harvesting impacts all of the above.

Download a copy of this publication here (PDF).

By Kay Brown, Carly Wier, et. al. - Alaska Climate Alliance, March 21, 2022

Alaska has a vast endowment of renewable energy resources that can be tapped in its transition to a renewable energy future. Benefits of accelerating the energy transition in Alaska include more jobs, lower energy prices, higher energy security and the potential for renewable resources to support zero carbon hydrogen-based fuels for the aviation and maritime industries.

The state has already begun to develop its renewable energy resources and continues to support renewable technology development for Alaska’s challenging environment. The scale of Alaska’s vast undeveloped renewable energy resource endowment remains more than 14 times the total U.S. energy consumption.

Renewable energy technologies, including wind, solar, geothermal, and ocean and river hydrokinetic, along with complementary energy storage technologies, are continuing to exhibit declining costs which make them increasingly attractive as a primary energy source to substitute for fossil fuels in the electric sector and to support the electrification of buildings and the transformation of the transportation sector to electrification and renewable hydrogen-based fuels.

As local fossil fuel costs escalate across Alaska, from 2.5X higher in the Railbelt to as much as 4X higher in Rural Alaska (as compared to the U.S. average), renewable energy technologies are increasingly attractive investments and are poised to affordably replace legacy fossil fuel energy systems in the 2030-to-2050 time horizon while providing greater energy security, increased energy resiliency especially in rural Alaska, and broad environmental, economic and health benefits.

Independent studies have confirmed that the development of Alaska’s renewable energy potential will generate thousands of jobs – at least comparable in magnitude to the fossil fuel jobs that may be displaced by the transition to a clean renewable energy sector.

Read the report (PDF).