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How the Green New Deal from Below Integrates Diverse Constituencies

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?

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Workers are dying from extreme heat. Why aren’t there laws to protect them?

By Jana Cholakovska and Nate Rosenfield - Grist, October 19, 2023

This story is co-published with The Guardian and produced in partnership with the Toni Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism and the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University. It is part of Record High, a Grist series examining extreme heat and its impact on how — and where — we live.

Jasmine Granillo was eager for her older brother, Roendy, to get home. With their dad’s long hours at his construction job, Roendy always tried to make time for his sister. He had promised to take her shopping at a local flea market when he returned from work. 

“I thought my brother was coming home,” Granillo said. 

Roendy Granillo was installing floors in Melissa, Texas, in July 2015. Temperatures had reached 95 degrees Fahrenheit when he began to feel sick. He asked for a break, but his employer told him to keep working. Shortly after, he collapsed. He died on the way to the hospital from heat stroke. He was 25 years old. 

A few months later, the Granillo family joined protesters on the steps of Dallas City Hall for a thirst strike to demand water breaks for construction workers. Jasmine, only 11 years old at the time, spoke to a crowd about her brother’s death. She said that she was scared, but that she “didn’t really think about the fear.” 

“I just knew that it was a lot bigger than me,” she said.

Report on LNS Just Transition Convening

By Oren Kadosh and LNS staff - Labor Network for Sustainability, September 30, 2023

Over July 21st and 22nd, the Labor Network for Sustainability hosted a two-day convening in Denver, Colorado entitled: “The State of Transition: Lessons from Colorado and Beyond!” LNS convened labor, climate, environmental justice, and social movement allies to broaden and deepen an understanding of existing just transition efforts and to gain insights on how we can better support labor-climate organizing on the ground. 

Native nations, women in construction, scientists, teachers, Black parents advocating for clean air, ski patrollers, and many others attendees from a range of unions, sectors, and communities came to share their experiences, learn from each other, and educate LNS on critical topics such as: how different types of labor are being affected by the transition; the legacy and continued struggle of Indigenous and frontline organizing for environmental justice; and how public funding to implement green projects is being organized for by unions and community organizations. Union workers and officials from locals representing many sectors of work in Colorado attended, including IBEW, SEIU, AFSCME, LIUNA, SMART-TD, and many more. 

During the convening, it became clear that Colorado workers and surrounding communities have made incredible strides toward a renewable energy economy and a just transition. But it was also clear that there is much left to do, both for transitioning fossil fuel workers, but especially for Indigenous and frontline environmental justice communities still being too often marginalized and their urgent needs delayed. Challenging but important truths were surfaced about the lack of inclusion and meaningful collaboration between the labor movement and the environmental justice movement. As the private sector is infused with billions in taxpayer dollars to boost the energy transition, one big takeaway from the convening has been that de-siloing our movement spaces, and meaningfully addressing the needs of all stakeholding communities, is absolutely critical to building the people power necessary to win the urgent change we need. 

Nighttime Harvests Protect Farmworkers From Extreme Heat, but Bring Other Risks

By Amy Mayer - Civil Eats,September 27, 2023

In the summer months, Flor Sanchez and the members of her harvest crew rise before dawn and arrive at a cherry orchard in Washington state’s Yakima Valley when there is only the slightest hint of daylight.

“We use headlamps,” she says, to carry ladders to the trees. Climbing up into the branches to harvest the ripe fruit in near-darkness, she says, “seems a little dangerous.” Headlamps cast shadows that can make it difficult to see the fruit. Setting up ladders in the dark also poses a danger.

Elizabeth Strater, director of strategic campaigns with United Farm Workers, says for field crops like onions and garlic, harvesting at night by headlamp or flood lights poses less risk than picking tree fruit because ladders aren’t needed, the short plants don’t create shadows, and workers know exactly what to pick even if they can’t completely see what they’re doing. The produce itself is also more durable. Winegrape harvest also often takes place at night.

Across super-hot regions, nocturnal harvest, as Strater calls the practice, has become increasingly common. As climate change pushes summer temperatures higher on more consecutive days, and scientists are forecasting even warmer years ahead, more workers may find themselves in the field at night and in the early morning hours. And while some safety measures have been put in place, more data is needed to assess the challenges workers face.

During Some of the Hottest Months in History, Millions of App Delivery Drivers Are Feeling the Strain

By Gina Jiménez - Inside Climate News, August 15, 2023

Around 4 million people in the U.S. work as contractors for app services like DoorDash delivering pizzas, salads and pad thai. Those in areas with extreme heat are taking new measures to keep working through it.

Jessica Fawcett wakes up at 5:30 a.m. so she can deliver groceries and take-out orders throughout Tempe, Arizona by 6:30 a.m. She has been working 12- to 14-hour shifts for Instacart and DoorDash since December, but lately, the heat in Tempe has been making them harder. 

Some days, Fawcett must walk 20 minutes or climb four floors of stairs in a 116-heat index just to deliver one order. “I joke and say I don’t need to go to the gym because I already walk a lot with this heat,” she says, “I have lost so much weight.” 

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported this year’s June was the hottest the Earth has ever registered, and last week the Copernicus Climate Change Service said July was the hottest month ever recorded. High temperatures have continued this month, and over 100 million Americans were under an extreme heat alert at some point during July.

Nevertheless, app delivery workers in states with extreme weather, like Arizona and Texas, have kept working. Some feel the consequences on their health, and others are changing their working hours and carrying around cold water to survive long shifts in the blistering heat. 

“It feels like you are standing in an air fryer or a microwave,” says Hector Mejía, a 30-year-old who has been working doing DoorDash deliveries in Phoenix for around a year. He compares heat these days in Arizona with standing next to a campfire. “It’s almost hard to breathe.” 

The number of people working for app delivery platforms in the U.S. has exponentially increased in the last few years, from just over one million in 2018 to over four million in 2021, a recently published study found. That represents almost three times Amazon’s global workforce. 

While some platform workers like the flexibility of the job, they are especially vulnerable to inclement weather, sickness or any situation that keeps them from working since as independent contractors, their livelihood depends on them being on the streets.

In New York City, app delivery workers have been fighting to get an hourly minimum wage, but in the rest of the country, organization efforts are scarce, said Ligia Guallpa, the executive director of the Workers Justice Project, an organization that has supported app delivery workers in New York. 

Amid a record heat wave, Texas construction workers lose their right to rest breaks

By Hannah Levitan - NPR, July 21, 2023

A week after construction workers in Austin, Texas, learned they were about to lose their right to rest breaks, the city reached a record-high heat index of 118 degrees. From July 9 to 19, the state capital saw an unprecedented, 11-day streak of temperatures reaching 105 degrees or more.

The Austin-Travis County Emergency Medical Service has responded to 410 heat-related incidents just since June 1, according to a spokesperson, Capt. Christa Stedman. Among them: A middle-aged man, working outdoors, who called for help after experiencing signs of heat exhaustion.

"It progressed so quickly into heat stroke that, between the time he called 911 and the time that the paramedics arrived on scene, he was fully unconscious and his core temperature was over 106," Stedman said.

Construction worker Mario Ontiveros risks the same outcome. Because he works in Dallas, a local ordinance gives him the right to at least a 10-minute rest break every four hours. But this is the last summer he'll get to claim it.

On June 13, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed HB 2127 — the Texas Regulatory Consistency Act — which bars cities and counties from passing regulations that are stricter than state ones. It also overturns local rules such as ordinances in Austin and Dallas that mandate rest breaks for construction workers. The law takes effect Sept. 1.

Protecting Workers and Communities, From Below Part 2: There Ought to Be a Law

By Jeremy Brecher - Labor Network for Sustainability, April 30, 2023

As key states start reducing their use of coal, oil, and gas, what will happen to the workers who produce, transport, and burn those fossil fuels? The previous Commentary, “Protecting Workers and Communities – From Below: Part 1: On the Ground” described local programs to protect workers and communities from side effects of power plant closings and other climate protection measures. This Commentary portrays state-level programs to guard workers and communities against loss of livelihoods and income from climate protection policies.

While the transition to climate-safe energy will create far more jobs than it will eliminate, that is cold comfort for those whose jobs may be threatened – after all, every job is important if it is your job. So many of those who are advocating for state policies for climate protection are also advocating protections for workers and communities that may be adversely affected by climate measures. And many of the states that are transitioning away from climate-destroying fossil fuels to climate-safe renewable energy are developing policies and programs to protect workers and communities from damaging side effects of that transition. While such provisions are still far from adequate, they provide initial experiments that can lay the groundwork for expanded protections at both state and national levels.

Fossil Fuel Industry Phase-Out: Three Critical Worker Guarantees for a Just Transition

Climate-Safe Energy Production–From Below

By Jeremy Brecher - Labor Network for Sustainability, February 2022

Climate-safe energy is being produced locally all over the country in ways that also produce jobs and increase racial, social, and economic justice – fulfilling the basic principles of the Green New Deal.

Protecting the climate requires meeting the original Green New Deal proposal’s goal of 100% of national power generation from renewable sources within ten years.[1] That requires greatly expanding climate-safe sources of energy. It involves an unprecedented transformation of the energy system, and that requires national investment and planning. But much of the transformation will actually be composed of local building blocks – and those can begin right now. Indeed, hundreds of local initiatives around the country, ranging from community solar to municipal ownership to local microgrids, are already expanding renewable energy production.

Sunlight, Jobs, and Justice

Solar gardens are sprouting up all over Denver.

On November 3, 2020, Denver voters overwhelmingly approved Ballot Measure 2A, the Climate Protection Fund, to raise approximately $40 million per year dedicated to climate action. As stated in the ballot measure, the intent of this fund is to “fund programs to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions and air pollution and adapt to climate change. Funding should maximize investments in communities of color, under-resourced communities and communities most vulnerable to climate change.”[2]

Community solar gardens use photovoltaic (PV) panels to produce electricity from sunlight for an entire neighborhood. Now such solar gardens are dotting sites owned and financed by the City of Denver, including rooftops, parking lots, and vacant lands. The power generated from the solar gardens will be shared between city facilities, income-qualified residents, and publicly accessible electric vehicle charging stations.

In accord with the principles of the Green New Deal, Denver’s solar garden program has a strong justice dimension. Since Denver owns the project, it can set its own standards. Ten percent of the energy generated by the solar gardens is allocated to low-income housing through the Denver Housing Authority. An additional 10 percent will be allocated to low-income households through Energy Outreach Colorado, and will be exempt from subscription fees. A paid workforce training program available to Denver residents will provide 10 percent of the city and county’s solar workforce.

The solar gardens are designed to contribute to the goal of Denver’s “80 x 50 Climate Action Plan” to transition Denver to 100 percent renewable electricity for municipal buildings by 2025; achieve 100 percent community-wide renewable electricity by 2030; and reduce Denver’s greenhouse gas emissions 80 percent, as compared to a 2005 baseline, by 2050.[3]

Letter Carrier: Air Quality Is a Union Issue

By Malachi Dray - Labor Notes, August 24, 2021

On August 7, Denver, Colorado—suffocated with smoke from the massive California wildfires—topped the chart of the world’s most polluted major cities.

The Air Quality Index (AQI) reading that day reached 179, in the unhealthy red zone of the Environmental Protection Agency's rating system. The concentration of fine particulate matter was 11 times the World Health Organization’s recommended maximum exposure level for pollutants. Not just wildfire smoke but also everyday consumer pollutants like shampoo residue, sunscreen particles, and auto emissions combined into a toxic brew of irritants that left many in the city feeling ill with headaches, or wheezy.

Delivering mail under these conditions was sickening, and certainly threatened long-term respiratory health consequences. Yet at our station, postal management made no mention of air quality during safety talks throughout the week. And when I looked for the basis for a grievance or some other action, there were almost no resources to speak of from either the national union or from management.

Postal management has an environmental policy which only specifies indoor air quality as part of its purview. This is a major omission for hundreds of thousands of letter carriers who work outside all day—but it’s part of a longstanding pattern of neglect for basic climate conditions on the part of management. It took decades for postal management to provide bottled water to the carrier workforce on a regular basis, and only since the 2010s has management faced citations from OSHA for indoor heat-related safety violations.

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