just transition

By Mayeta Clark - ABC (Australia), April 2, 2022

On a mild March day in a brown bike shed at Eraring, the biggest coal-fired power station in Australia, 19 men in high-vis work gear crouch on a low bench around the shed walls. It’s lunch time. The men are contractors and they are looking up at their union leader, Cory Wright, for certainty.

Employed by labour hire companies, they are among the most vulnerable workers caught up in the Lake Macquarie power station’s impending closure. Many have worked at Eraring for years, some decades. But they are only entitled to a fraction of the redundancy payout that their colleagues directly hired by the station’s owner, Origin Energy, will get.

When Cory asks the workers if they want to share some thoughts, some say they don’t believe Eraring Power Station will really shut down. A bald man at the back is first to speak. “I can’t actually see them closing as yet,” he says. “That’s my thoughts personally.” Another man sitting two seats along agrees. “I don’t know. I just can’t — we can’t see it closing, not by ’25 anyway,” he says referring to the new closure date of 2025 — seven years earlier than expected.

Union officials say this denial is a form of shock that they’ve heard often since the recent announcement of Eraring’s closure. Each time they hear it, they remind the workers to take the closure date seriously.

Newcastle organiser Tim Jackson jumps in. “If we just go on the face value that it may not occur, we’re just walking down a grey path of an unknown,” he says. “So if it’s 2025, it is what it is.”

By Casey Williams - In These Times, March 31, 2022

Can South Africa transition from a reliance on coal to clean power while maintaining jobs? The energy workers fighting for a just transition think so.

The lights went out around Johannesburg on a Monday morning in November 2021, not to flicker back on until early that Friday in some areas. It marked the last rolling blackout of a year troubled by more outages than any in recent memory. The fate of Eskom, the beleaguered power utility behind the crisis, is now at the center of South Africa’s struggle for a just energy transition — a break from fossil fuels without leaving behind frontline communities or energy workers.

As a public company, Eskom has a constitutional mandate to guarantee electricity as a basic right. But the utility struggles to meet that mandate with its aging equipment, staggering debt, corruption and rules that require it to break even, which drive exorbitant rate hikes. Moreover, the electricity running through Eskom’s wires comes almost entirely from coal, smothering the country’s eastern coal belt in deadly pollution and adding planet-warming emissions to the atmosphere — and putting the utility at odds with South Africa’s decarbonization commitments and global calls for renewable energy. South Africa, the 26^th-largest country by population, ranks 14^th in carbon output worldwide and is responsible for 1% of global emissions, because of this reliance on coal.

Few believe Eskom will survive in its current state, and what comes next is the subject of a high-stakes debate — and is about more than the climate. The state-owned company employs 45,000 workers and supports 82,000 coal jobs in a country where more than a third of the population is out of work. Eskom is a union shop, as are South Africa’s biggest coal mines.

The government’s plan, already underway, is to invite private companies into the energy sector on the dubious grounds that clean energy is bound to win in a competitive market. The powerful miners and metalworkers unions oppose privatization, which they worry will hobble their organizations, if not eliminate the jobs they’re entrusted to protect. 

The unions have reason to worry. European multinationals have installed most of South Africa’s wind and solar capacity so far, importing technicians and hardware. The local jobs that come with them are often low-paid and temporary, vanishing once plants get up and running. Workers with permanent jobs, meanwhile, have struggled with for-profit energy companies over the right to strike.

While some union leaders and workers have responded to the threat of privatization by defending coal mines and the union jobs they offer, unions also say they support decarbonization efforts. There are currents within the labor movement organizing for a just transition to turn Eskom into a unionized, public and clean power utility, run by and for the South African people.

This tug-of-war holds lessons for workers everywhere: The South African labor movement has largely succeeded in making the public debate about ownership and power— about who owns energy resources and who decides how they’re used — rather than simply about renewables versus coal. Still, the temptation for labor to double down on coal jobs remains strong as the South African economy flags and unemployment spikes, emblematic of how hard it can be to fight for long-term goals if jobs are under threat.

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

By various - COP26 Coalition, March 29, 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.

Resolution Urging Support of SB 1173 (Gonzalez) Fossil Fuel Divestment Act
Adopted by the ILWU NCDC – March 26, 2022

WHEREAS, climate change, through rising sea levels, drought, heat waves, and increased wildfires is already negatively affecting human wellbeing, ecosystems and biodiversity; and 

WHEREAS, climate change is an issue of environmental justice, disproportionately impacting Indigenous communities, communities of color, and low income communities due to historical oppression, inequity of power, and lack of access to resources for prevention and relief; and

WHEREAS, the World Economic Forum recognizes the climate crisis as “a child-rights crisis” and says “the adverse weather events caused by a warming planet affect children first and worst”; and

WHEREAS, an analysis from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health indicates that the effects of heat, wildfires, storms, floods, and droughts can negatively affect both the physical and mental health of children. The negative effects on children’s physical health from the burning of fossil fuels and climate change include impacts on allergies, asthma, brain development, low birth weight, and preterm birth; and

WHEREAS, the American Academy of Pediatrics recognizes that the physical and mental impacts of climate change “not only directly threaten the lives and safety of children, they put them at risk of mental health problems—and can also cause lasting effects when they destroy their communities and their schools”; and

WHEREAS, a review of the psychological effects of climate change on children finds that “effects of climate change place children at risk of mental health consequences including PTSD, depression, anxiety, phobias, sleep disorders, attachment disorders, and substance abuse. These in turn can lead to problems with emotion regulation, cognition, learning, behavior, language development, and academic performance”; and 

WHEREAS, independent studies by financial consulting firms Blackrock and Meketa found divestment reduces risk, and improves, not weakens, investment returns; and

WHEREAS, a Corporate Knights study found if CalPERS and CalSTRS had divested in 2010 they would have gained $11.9 and $5.5 billion respectively by 2019; and 

WHEREAS, the International Panel on Climate Change concluded in 2018 that we have 12 years to make dramatic cuts in the use of fossil fuels (coal, oil, gas and tar sands) if we are to keep warming to 1.5o C and avoid more catastrophic change; and

WHEREAS, the fossil fuel industry is the single most powerful obstacle to addressing climate change, using their immense lobbying power in Washington D.C. and Sacramento to block climate legislation; and 

WHEREAS, fossil fuel companies' own scientists knew their products were causing climate change, but the companies kept it secret; and 

WHEREAS, to effectively address climate change, most fossil fuel reserves must remain in the ground, never to be used. This makes fossil fuel stocks a risky investment; and

WHEREAS, divestment in specific segments or business operations by CalPERS and CalSTRS is already standard practice and is specifically allowed by the California Constitution; and

WHEREAS, divestment means selling directly held or commingled assets including fossil fuel public equities and corporate bonds; and

WHEREAS, the California Climate Jobs Plan provides a comprehensive roadmap for decarbonization and just transition from a fossil fuel based economy; and

WHEREAS, The ILWU Northern California District Council has endorsed the California Climate Jobs Plan (in February 2022);

THEREFORE LET IT BE RESOLVED, that the ILWU NCDC strongly supports SB 1173 (Gonzalez) the fossil fuel divestment act. And upon passage, a copy of this resolution will be sent to Senator Lena Gonzalez’s office requesting that the ILWU NCDC be listed as an official supporter of the bill.

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.

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

By staff - GMB Union, March 18, 2022

Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves met GMB member as she visits the Northern Gas Network’s model hydrogen house in Gateshead to discuss energy security and the cost of living crisis.   

Rachel Reeves MP will travel by hydrogen bus to a Northern Gas Network model ‘hydrogen house’, where she will fry an egg on a hydrogen-powered stove. 

GMB has long called for more investment in hydrogen fuels, which could use the existing gas network, protecting well paid, unionised gas jobs and save the planet.