green unionism

By Liam Fitzpatrick - California Environmental Justice Alliance, January 2024

At CEJA, we’re building a just transition away from our current extractive society and towards a sustainable future. We believe the lives of human beings should not be dictated by antiquated colonialist labor practices. So in keeping with our anti-capitalist, anti-white supremacist values, we’re thrilled to be launching a four-day work week pilot, starting this week.

Our full-time exempt staff will now work Monday through Thursday each week. We will not be reducing pay, extending hours, or cutting benefits. Instead, CEJA is adopting the 100-80-100 model – staff will receive 100% of their salaries, work 80% of current time, and maintain 100% of CEJA’s current impact.

To put it another way, we’re not doing less work, we’re working less. We will be innovating new workflows, developing tools for prioritization, and testing state-of-the-art technology to ensure we continue to represent the best interest of our communities. CEJA is committed to continuing its fight against structural environmental racism and injustice, and building a sustainable, just future for all Californians. 

This was not a simple decision. CEJA spent months researching and developing our four-day work week program before the launch of this pilot. We worked with 4 Day Week Global, a global organization dedicated to prioritizing productivity over working hours and improving work/life balance. And as the pilot continues, members of CEJA staff will continue to evaluate, iterate, and implement new benchmarks and strategies. 

So, why are we putting in this level of effort? 

A sustainable future requires a sustainable workforce – too often, burnout is accepted as the norm in environmental justice spaces. As CEJA continues to seek radical environmental justice solutions while operating in a capitalist system, we can challenge that structure by providing our team with the labor justice everyone deserves. We believe we can serve frontline environmental justice communities better than ever as we liberate our work force from the constraints of industrial-age work schedules.

By Todd E. Vachon - American Federation of Teachers, January 2024

On Sunday, October 28, 2012, teachers across the Northeast were glued to their television sets to watch the latest weather forecast about the approaching hurricane. Schools would be closed Monday. Emergencies were declared, line crews were summoned, shelters were prepared, and command centers were opened. New York City made the unprecedented decision to stop all subway service.

As feared, Superstorm Sandy arrived with a vengeance the next evening, knocking out power for eight million people across 17 states, destroying countless homes, rendering the NYC subway system nonoperational, and closing all 1,750 of the city’s schools for a week. Dozens of damaged schools remained shuttered even longer, forcing students to share buildings with other schools, sometimes in distant boroughs of the city. Over 100 deaths were attributed to the storm, including at least one teacher. As with previous extreme storms such as Hurricane Katrina that hit the Gulf Coast in 2005 or later storms like Hurricane Maria that ravaged Puerto Rico in 2017, it was the working class and poor—the frontline communities—who were hit first and worst.

Nine years later, New York and New Jersey were devastated again by Hurricane Ida while still continuing to shore up infrastructure ruined by Sandy. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration places the total cost of Superstorm Sandy at over $70 billion—possibly the costliest to ever hit the region, making it the most economically devastating event to hit New York City since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

While individual weather events like Sandy cannot be directly attributed to climate change, their likelihood, frequency, and intensity are all increased by climate change. As the Earth warms, storms that used to happen once a century are now happening more frequently, and the impacts on students, teachers, and communities are devastating. This article explores some of the causes of the climate crisis, including its relationship to social and economic inequality, and what educators can do—and many already are doing—through their unions to promote climate justice and equity in their schools and communities. Perhaps your local union will be the next to take bold climate action and become a part of the solution by helping to forge your own local Green New Deal and joining the national effort.

By Jessye Waxman, et. al - Sierra Club, et. al., January 2024

Climate-driven heat waves, droughts, floods, hurricanes, and wildfires are already causing suffering for hundreds of millions of people worldwide. Climate-driven impacts on the economy are already significant: according to one recent peer-reviewed study, the climate crisis inflicted a global economic toll of $16 million an hour in extreme weather damages between 2000 and 2019. Given that these impacts are occurring at only 1.2°C of warming, it’s no wonder that economists, financial institutions, and financial regulators are increasingly worried about the risk that the climate crisis poses to our shared economic prosperity.

“The financial impacts that result from the economic effects of climate change and the transition to a lower carbon economy pose an emerging risk to the safety and soundness of financial institutions and the financial stability of the United States,” concluded the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency in a recent report, making it clear that climate-related financial risks are faced by all financial institutions and the broader economy. As long-term fiduciaries, pension funds should be among the investors most alarmed about the economic risk associated with the climate crisis. Some have taken public strides forward, such as announcing net-zero pledges, investing in climate solutions, or defending the right to invest responsibly. These are critical steps forward. However, as this report shows, the institutions responsible for stewarding trillions of dollars on behalf of the American people are failing to address climate-related financial risk in their proxy voting strategies, a key tool investors have to encourage responsible corporate governance and corporate behavior.

This report analyzes the nineteen state pensions in states where a state financial officer — such as the state treasurer, comptroller, or auditor — has indicated it is a priority issue to advocate for more sustainable, just, and inclusive firms and markets, and protect against climate risk. In addition to the nineteen state pensions, the report includes the five systems managed by the New York City Comptroller, who has also indicated these issues are priorities. These funds included collectively represent over $2 trillion in assets under management (AUM).

Download a copy of this publication here (PDF).

By Liza Gross and Peter Aldhous - Inside Climate News, December 31, 2023

Scores of California farmworkers are dying in the heat in regions with chronically bad air, even in a state with one of the toughest heat standards in the nation.

For most of July 2019, stifling heat hung over the agricultural fields of California’s Central Valley, as farmworkers like William Salas Jiminez labored under the sun’s searing rays. Temperatures had dipped from 99 to 95 degrees Fahrenheit the last day of the month, when the 56-year-old Puerto Rico native was installing irrigation tubing in an almond orchard near Arvin, at the valley’s southern edge. 

Around 1:30 that afternoon Salas sat down to rest. When he stood up to go back to work, he suddenly collapsed. An hour and a half later, he was dead. Reports filed with the U.S. Department of Occupational Health and Safety, or OSHA, say Salas died of a heart attack.

Salas’ death certificate lists atherosclerotic heart disease as the immediate cause of death. But it also lists “extreme heat exposure” and obesity as significant contributors. Both heart disease and obesity increase the risk of fatal heatstroke.

By Finlay Asher, Kieran, and Marius - Aerospace Ambition, December 22, 2023

By Katie Myers - Grist, December 20, 2023

2023 was marked by symbiosis between the labor and climate movements. Workers across industries and geographies loudly declared that a world in which their safety and well-being are disregarded is even more dangerous to them and to others in a time of energy transition and climate crisis. After decades of hesitancy, several major unions recognized an urgent need to organize those who will do the hard work of decarbonizing the nation’s economy. It doesn’t hurt that public sympathy, and policy, has grown friendlier toward them. As a result, calls for a just transition rattled union halls and corporate offices as organized labor enjoyed one of its most active years in recent memory and environmental organizations, long uncertain about where unions stood, found new allies.

“The choices and solutions are not really gonna work unless labor is involved with them,” said Dana Kuhnline, director of Reimagine Appalachia. It works with union leaders and environmental grassroots groups to bring good jobs to coalfield communities that need them. “I think that’s a lesson climate activists really have to take to heart.”

The reality of a warming world was a central concern for UPS, Amazon, and airport workers who demanded, and in many cases won, concessions protecting them from extreme heat. But the biggest gains were made by the 150,000 members of the reinvigorated United Auto Workers, or UAW, who made a just transition a key demand in one of the most high-profile strikes of the year. Though the union’s primary demands concerned wages and sick days, no small amount of negotiating focused on the looming transition to electric vehicles. Workers wanted to ensure the factories that will make that happen for Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis will be union shops, with wages and benefits equal to those provided at traditional auto factories. Forty years of internal organizing brought UAW to a place where it was willing and able to address energy transition, whereas in previous years, its leaders had gotten fidgety at the idea. 

By staff - Reel News Network, December 19, 2023

By Max Ajl and Clara Paillard - Green New Deal Media, December 19, 2023

By staff - La Via Campesina, December 18, 2023

From the 1st Meeting of Diversities in the 8th Conference of La Via Campesina, we, LVC peasants who identify ourselves as sexually and gender diverse, and our allies, want to celebrate the creation of this space. Here, we meet to exchange ideas, debate and reflect on a reality that drives us, as an international organization, to continue transforming the ways we relate to one another in order to end all the discrimination, prejudice and all forms of violence that gender non-conforming people experience.

We are certain that a new society free of all oppression on the basis of gender, race, ethnicity, diverse abilities and class will only be possible when all the people who make up La Via Campesina can treat each other with respect, guaranteeing basic human rights, peasant rights, as well as the rights that have been historically denied to sexually and gender diverse persons and that aim at creating emancipated human relations.

We celebrate the diversity in our soil, waters, forests, farms, and territories. We celebrate our communities’ social and cultural diversity because it builds strength and resilience. As people who embody these diversities, we do not ask to be tolerated; this is not about pity or charity. This is about knowing that a socially diverse movement for agroecology and food sovereignty is a stronger movement and that the liberation of everyone is intertwined with the liberation of our societies.

By staff - La Via Campesina, December 18, 2023

#18D23 On the International Day of Migrants and Refugees, La Via Campesina calls on states to ratify and implement the UN Convention on the Rights of Migrants and their Families. LVC rejects the proposed EU agreement on migration and proposes a Global Solidarity Pact for the rights of migrants and refugees.

The situation of millions of migrant people and families around the world continues to worsen. Every day, the grabbing and plundering of resources and the destruction of local economies, mainly by transnational economic powers, in addition to wars, terrorism, and environmental and climate disasters, are increasing. All of this is made worse by global capitalism and colonialism, forcing people from their territories. Authoritarian governments and international institutions are complicit, putting in place a regulatory and military structure that stigmatizes, represses, and murders those who decide to migrate at the borders. Once they reach their destination, these people (many of whom are in the agricultural sector) suffer exploitation, discrimination, and racism. In economies that take advantage of migrant labor, such as Europe or the United States, and in countries through which migration passes, the segregation and oppression these people face are made worse by policies of hate and violence against the most vulnerable. This is promoted by the extreme right and fascism, playing into the political and economic power of those who already own our planet.

La Via Campesina includes many organizations of migrants and rural waged workers. The movement continues to demand the recognition and support of both the peasants who remain and fight in their territories and those who decide to migrate to improve their lives and their communities.