climate change

By staff - California Labor for Climate Jobs, October 2023

Climate change is forcing a massive restructuring of our economy; a worker-led transition provides a once- in-a-lifetime opportunity to reshape our economy for working people and our communities while limiting climate dangers. Labor rights are a climate solution: we must increase workers’ voice on the job in all sectors through unionization, and invest in our public sector to build the democratic, clean, green economy we need. Massive investments in our infrastructure, agriculture and public sectors are moving us towards meeting California’s climate goals and can create a million new union jobs for pipefitters, carpenters, manufacturers, electricians, cable layers, public transit operators, agricultural workers and others. Expanding the public services our communities need to cope with extreme weather and climate disasters will create jobs for nurses, care workers, public sector workers and more, while providing new opportunities for workers who have been trapped in low-wage jobs.

A worker-led transition means fighting to support fossil-fuel dependent workers and communities, including wage and pension guarantees and retraining, rather than leaving it to the whims of the oil CEOs to dictate the terms of the transition. From West Virginia to Los Angeles, we have seen how unplanned closures and economic shifts have devastated workers and the communities where they live.

Transition is inevitable, but economic and racial justice are not. If labor takes the lead, we have a historic opportunity to grow the labor movement and create a cleaner, more equitable, and climate-safe economy that provides high-road, family-sustaining, union jobs.

Download a copy of this publication here (PDF).

By Jeremey Brecher - Labor Network for Sustainability, September 30, 2023

As Part 1 of “The Green New Deal in the Cities” demonstrated, cities have enormous opportunities to establish Green New Deal-type programs – and an enormous need to do so. Worldwide, cities produce more than 70% of carbon emissions. US cities are marked by extremes of climate change vulnerability and extremes of wealth and poverty. And as shown by this series’ accounts of the Green New Deals in Boston, Los Angeles, and Seattle, cities have the capacity to realize much of the Green New Deal program of creating jobs and justice by protecting the climate.

Unfortunately, in many cities that capacity is not being used. Each year the research organization the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy issues a “City Clean Energy Scorecard,” which has become a principal resource for tracking clean energy plans, policies, and progress in large US cities. Its 2021 report found that, of the 100 cities surveyed, 63 had adopted a community-wide greenhouse gas (GHG) goal; 38 had released enough data to assess progress toward their goals; and only 19 cities were on track to achieve their near-term GHS goals. Of the 177 new clean energy actions they reviewed, 38% related to adoption of a clean energy plan, partnership, goal, or governmental procedure. 34% were designed to improve energy efficiency of buildings. 28% promoted clean energy infrastructure. Less than 20% were equity-driven initiatives.

The Scorecard identified leading cities across five policy areas:

Community-wide initiatives: Seattle, San Jose, Denver, and Washington, D.C. have set GHG reduction goals; adopted strategies to mitigate the heat island effect; and pursued community engagement with historically marginalized groups.

Buildings: Denver, New York, and Seattle have established stringent building energy codes and requirements for energy performance in large existing buildings.

Transportation: San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and Boston have instituted location efficiency strategies, more efficient modes of transportation, transit and electric vehicle infrastructure investments, and have used transportation planning to reduce the isolation of historically marginalized communities.

Energy and water: Boston and San Jose have effective energy efficiency programs; programs to decarbonize the electric grid and reduce GHG emissions; and programs to simultaneously save water and energy.

By staff - Labor Network for Sustainability, September 30, 2023

On July 6, newly elected Mayor Brandon Johnson’s transition team provided the city plan for a “Chicago Green New Deal.” Mayor Johnson, a longtime Chicago teacher and union organizer, ran a social justice campaign stressing the disproportionate impacts polluting industry and changing climate have on communities of color and low-income neighborhoods. 

The environmental justice subcommittee of the mayor’s transition committee included 25 members from business, civic, social justice, and community-based organizations. Its recommendations focused on a Green New Deal for Chicago, a framework meant to serve “as guiding principles for our efforts to realize a cleaner, healthier, more just, and sustainable city.” Major goals include:

• Ensure effective environmental justice oversight and responsiveness
• Fully resource a new Department of Environment with a focus on environmental justice
• Achieve a Green New Deal for water
• Secure a just transition to an equitable, decarbonized Chicago
• Guarantee utilities are provided in a fair, equitable and affordable manner with an investment emphasis on communities facing the greatest utility burden
• Achieve a Green New Deal for schools 

The environmental justice recommendations also emphasized the need for job opportunities for communities in clean energy transition and other environmental efforts like accelerating lead service line replacement and electrification of buildings.

Jung Yoon, a co-chair of the environmental justice subcommittee and campaign director at Grassroots Collaborative, a coalition of community and labor organizations, said,

The framing is intentionally political and intentionally bold about using a frame of a Green New Deal to address environment and climate justice issues. I think there is a lot of excitement around how Chicago, as the third-largest city, can really pave the way to show what a Green New Deal in action can look like in our city so we can address current environmental and economic and racial disparities in a sustainable future.

By staff - Labor Network for Sustainability, September 30, 2023

On August 14 Montana district court Judge Kathy Seeley declared Montana’s fossil fuel-promoting laws unconstitutional and enjoined their implementation. In a 103-page order, Judge Seeley said that by prohibiting government agencies from considering climate impacts when deciding whether or not to permit energy projects, Montana is contributing to the climate crisis and stopping the state from addressing that crisis. She found that every additional ton of greenhouse gas pollution warms the planet, and that harms to the plaintiffs “will grow increasingly severe and irreversible without science-based actions to address climate change”.

The case was brought by 16 plaintiffs aged five to 22, who argued that the state’s pro-fossil fuel policies violated provisions in the state constitution that guarantee a “clean and healthful environment.” While young people have been suing for a decade in state and federal courts for recognition of a constitutional right to a stable climate, this case marks the first time in US history that a court has ruled on the merits of the case that a government violated young people’s constitutional rights by promoting fossil fuels. Michael Gerrard of the Columbia University Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, said, “I think this is the strongest decision on climate change ever issued by any court.”

By staff - Labor Network for Sustainability, September 30, 2023

The federal government is launching a series of Rapid Response Teams (RRT) to help communities impacted by recent or impending closing of fossil fuel facilities.

RRTs are intended to work with energy communities who have experienced a recent or approaching fossil fuel facility closure to address worker and community needs using existing federal resources. RRT members work with community members to identify economic transformation and revitalization goals, figure out ways to pursue those goals, and make the connections between programs across the federal family and up and down levels of government. RRTs aim to understand the needs of communities and work to make sure barriers to meeting those needs are smoothed over.

The RRT program was initiated by the Interagency Working Group on Coal and Power Plant Communities and Economic Revitalization. There are four existing RRTs in Wyoming, the Four Corners, the Illinois Basin and Eastern Kentucky. “Each region has a unique set of challenges the RRTs aim to address, including workforce training, economic diversification, reclamation of legacy energy assets, broadband access, infrastructure improvements and more.” So far RRT locations have been chosen by identifying the regions with the highest loss of coal assets and with inadequate financial and local community resources to address those losses. 

If your community or region is interested in being considered for an RRT, contact contact@energycommunities.gov.

For more: https://energycommunities.gov/technical-assistance/rapid-response-teams/

By Chris Townsend, Union Jake, and Adam Keller - Valley Labor Report, September 29, 2023

By Brian Wakamo - Inequality.Org, April 15, 2022

After nearly 30 years in the labor movement, Cindy Estrada is well familiar with the corporate playbook. “As soon as wages and benefits are decent, they want to move that work somewhere else.” That’s what happened, the United Autoworkers Vice President explained at a recent rally, after Oshkosh Defense secured a huge contract to build postal vehicles.

“The ink was still drying,” Estrada said, “when they announced they were moving the work to South Carolina.”

UAW members had fully expected to build the postal trucks in the existing Oshkosh Defense facility in Wisconsin. After all, the company had won the contract on the basis of their quality work. Instead, Oshkosh Defense plans to convert a vacant former Rite-Aid warehouse in notoriously anti-union South Carolina to fulfill the postal contract, circumventing the unionized workforce in Wisconsin.

Estrada and other UAW officials joined environmental groups and political leaders outside U.S. Postal Service headquarters in Washington, D.C. on April 6 to deliver 150,000 petitions demanding that the new postal vehicles be built with union labor.

“We have nothing against South Carolina workers,” Estrada said. “We believe every worker should have democracy in their workplace.”

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.

By Talia Baroncelli and Frank Hammer - The Analysis News, September 25, 2023

By Alex Han - In These Times, September 25, 2023

May 1886. As part of a national movement to win an eight-hour workday, workers at the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company in Chicago are on strike. Police attack, killing at least one person and injuring multiple others. The next day, labor leaders organize a peaceful mass rally at Haymarket Square. A bomb goes off and police indiscriminately shoot protesters.

The confrontation became an international rallying cry for labor advocates, but it would be 54 more years before the 40-hour workweek became enshrined by the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. A year later, the rapidly growing United Auto Workers brought to heel the Ford Motor Company— perhaps the most anti-union of the Big Three automakers at the time— by securing workers’ first collective bargaining agreement with the company. 

The growth of the industrial economy, along with a militant and newly organized working class, would force meaningful concessions from capital. But the eight-hour workday and 40-hour workweek would require a global crisis — in this case, capital’s need for labor peace during World War II — to become a reality. 

We now have the great opportunity of existing not in the midst of a single global crisis, but a ​“polycrisis.”