green unionism

By staff - International Trade Union Confederation, March 3, 2022

The ITUC has welcomed the latest step to agree a global treaty to tackle the crisis of plastic pollution, but has demanded immediate action to ensure a just transition for working people.

Nearly 200 countries agreed on a resolution that establishes an Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee (INC) with the ambition of completing a draft, global, legally-binding agreement by the end of 2024.

ITUC General Secretary Sharan Burrow said:

“It’s good that the final resolution acknowledges the key role of informal workers, and workers’ cooperatives, in collecting, sorting and recycling plastics in many places.

“But, the final treaty must recognise the importance of all workers in the life cycle of plastics, from fossil fuel fracking to production to waste.

“It must include comprehensive ’just transition’ plans to deal with the future impacts of the treaty on these workers in a fair way. But quite frankly, the world can’t wait. We need just transition plans now in every company and every country for every working person affected.

“We will engage fully with the INC to make sure all working people in the plastics supply chain are heard and their interests taken into account.”

It is expected that the INC will present a legally binding treaty that will address:

• the full lifecycle of plastics;
• the design of products and materials;
• the need for international collaboration to facilitate access to technology and scientific and technical cooperation.

The UN Environment Programme says that global plastic production has risen to around 400 million tonnes per year, with only an estimated 9% recycled.

The remainder is dumped in landfills or into the environment, including around 11 million metric tonnes put into the ocean each year. This figure is expected to double by 2030.

By Lauren Burke and Meredith Schafer - Labor Network for Sustainability, March 3, 2022

Santa Ana, Calif. — Forty-five (45) local and national groups organizing against climate change and for environmental justice have signed a statement calling on the green building community to reconsider partnerships with Kingspan Group, an Ireland-based global manufacturer of insulation and other building materials that markets its products as “green.” Led by the Labor Network for Sustainability, local groups including Orange County Environmental Justice, Madison Park Neighborhood Association, The River Project and others were joined by national groups including Greenpeace USA, Friends of the Earth, Climate Justice Alliance, Sunrise Movement, the Climate Advocacy Lab and 36 others. The green building community includes architects, specifiers, the US Green Building Council, and trade associations such as the American Institute of Architects.

“We call on those who deal with Kingspan to reconsider rewarding it for behavior that weakens the credibility of the green building community, and that goes against the values of safe and sustainable buildings and communities,” reads the statement co-signed by the 45 organizations.

Read the full statement and list of signatory organizations here

The groups are calling on the green building community to stop allowing Kingspan representatives to sponsor or speak at trade shows and conferences, and to discontinue offering continuing education courses taught by Kingspan until the Grenfell Inquiry is finished and changes are made to its Santa Ana factory. The statement points to whistleblower complaints by Kingspan workers on health, safety and stormwater pollution issues at its Santa Ana, CA factory filed in October 2021, as well as the revelations from the Grenfell Tower Fire Inquiry regarding its UK insulation business that came out in 2020-2021.

Read the CalEPA and CalOSHA complaints, and the Indoor Air Quality study

The 2020-21 testimony and evidence from the UK Government Inquiry into the 2017 Grenfell Tower fire revealed how Kingspan’s UK insulation division misrepresented and mis-marketed Kooltherm K15’s fire safety testing and certifications from 2006-2020. (Kooltherm K15 made up five percent of the insulation in the tower, which is why Kingspan is a core participant of the Inquiry.) The company began marketing K15 in the US in 2018, after the fire.

“Kingspan is not an appropriate source for continuing education courses or sponsorships of events for the green building community, including those that touch on fire safety.” Read about Kingspan and the Grenfell Inquiry here

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The Labor Network for Sustainability (LNS) engages workers and communities in building a transition to a society that is ecologically sustainable and economically just. We work to foster deep relationships that help the labor movement engage in the climate movement and the climate movement understand the economics of climate change and the importance of organized labor as a key partner in confronting the climate crisis.

The International Association of Sheet Metal, Air, Rail and Transportation Workers (SMART), AFL-CIO, is an international union whose affiliates represent sheet metal workers throughout the United States and Canada, as well as workers in transportation industries. Our members manufacture and install heating, ventilation, and air handling systems (HVAC), as well as architectural components such as metal roofing, facades, and other building envelope products.

By staff - International Trade Union Confederation, March 2, 2022

The report makes it clear that some thresholds to take action have been passed, leading to irreversible losses and damage, and that this decade is the only window of opportunity to act and that waiting for technological fixes to be invented to “catch up” is not a solution.

UN Secretary-General António Guterres described the report as an “atlas of human suffering”. He added: “The facts are undeniable. This abdication of leadership is criminal. The world’s biggest polluters are guilty of arson of our only home.”

Rapid and just transitions

ITUC General Secretary Sharan Burrow said: “We understand the urgency and support this report’s endorsement that governments must include justice and social protection as a part of their climate adaption measures.

“Climate-resilient development is enabled when governments, civil society and the private sector prioritise equity and justice. Working people must be central to the plans for rapid and just transitions. The ITUC’s global day of action to Climate- and Employment-Proof Our Work, #CEPOW, on 22 June, takes these demands to the workplace.

“We agree with the report’s recommendation that social protection programmes must include a climate adaption focus, and they must be supported by basic services and infrastructure.

“The report is clear that the worst impacts of climate change are already hitting some of the world’s poorest, most vulnerable communities. A just response is to provide social protection to these people, financed by a global social protection fund as part of a new social contract.

“Most importantly, this has to happen now with just transition plans in every country and every company. The impacts are already devastating for both people and the planet.

“Adaption and mitigation actions must also be implemented immediately. These are vital investments in resilience and the capacity to anticipate and respond to future shocks.”

By Priscilla Claeys, Jasber Singh, and Nettie Wiebe - Agroecology Now, March 1, 2022

Nettie Wiebe, you are one of the women leaders of La Via Campesina (LVC), a transnational peasant movement that defends food sovereignty and unites over 200 million small-scale farmers, agricultural workers and indigenous peoples working the land. Tell us a little bit about yourself, and how you got involved in LVC?

I have farmed all my life. I may have missed a few harvests when I was abroad studying, but otherwise I am committed to, and deeply rooted in, farming. That’s been my life along with academia. I have a PhD in philosophy and in ethics. I have always, in my mind, in my life, made the link between how we live, what we eat and how we think about ourselves. I see it as one package. My intellectual life is not separated from my lived, practical life. I’ve always integrated those two. People sometimes have asked me, what do you need a philosophy degree for? That seems so impractical. And I say no, it’s in fact very practical. I have lots of time to think when I’m driving around and around on fields, but more importantly, our ethical and our intellectual or academic lives need to be embedded in our practical lives. I don’t think we will make any progress on the serious climate and ecological issues unless we think collectively and individually about our positioning here. It’s not just an economic issue, it’s an ethical one.

I have been involved in La Via Campesina for many years. We are small scale farmers here in Saskatchewan (Canada) and when we started farming on our own, we immediately became members of the National Farmers’ Union (NFU, a LVC member organization). Because I am a woman and, because of how academia was then, and maybe still is, in terms of the role of women, I failed to get a permanent position teaching at the University of Saskatchewan. I then stepped away from the University and decided to use my qualifications in the movement, where my heart really was. I became active in the National Farmers’ Union and became the women’s president, for six years and then for the first time in the history of the NFU, actually in the history of any national farm organization in Canada, they elected a woman as their president. So I was the president of the NFU. This was the late 1980s, and the GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) negotiations were going on. At the NFU, we had already been resisting the US-Canada free trade agreements, which set the parameters for the neoliberal globalization of agriculture. So we had that experience here in Canada, and we knew this corporatization of agriculture was going to be devastating for small-scale farming. In 1993, we sent a delegate to Mons, Belgium where La Via Campesina was created, and we played a major role in organizing the second International Conference of La Via Campesina in Tlaxcala, Mexico in 1996. We already had good relations with peasant groups in the Central American region.

By J. Mijin Cha, Hunter Moskowitz, Matt Phillips, and Lara Skinner - Maine Labor Climate Council, March 2022

This report, written in consultation with researchers at Cornell University’s Worker Institute, examines the interrelated crises of climate breakdown and inequality, and lays out an ambitious roadmap for how Maine can build a renewable energy economy, create good union jobs, and tackle racial and economic inequality.

The report’s science-based recommendations will broadly help our state achieve four goals: quickly decarbonizing Maine’s economy; ensuring that the tens of thousands of new jobs that get created as part of Maine’s energy transition adhere to high labor standards in terms of pay, benefits, training, and job security; bringing underrepresented workers into the clean-energy workforce through well-run apprentice and pre-apprentice programs; and ensuring a just transition for workers and communities most affected by these changes. 

The report sets bold objectives for building out Maine’s renewable energy economy, including:

• Electrifying all state and local vehicles, including school and city buses, by 2040;

• Building a high speed rail corridor from Bangor to Boston while connecting to Lewiston/Auburn;

• Doing deep energy-efficiency retrofits and installing solar on all K-12 public schools and publicly owned buildings by 2035; and

• Installing 3GW of renewable energy by 2030 and upgrading Maine’s energy transmission and storage capacity

Read the report (PDF).

By Paul Prescod - Jacobin, March 1, 2022

Labor leader Tony Mazzocchi believed unions could inspire their members to engage in a broader political movement of working people. His Local 149 did just that in the 1950s — and in a suburban environment where no one thought it possible.

There’s no denying that strong labor movements often thrive in urban centers. The organization of capitalist production in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, while heavily exploitative of workers, also created the conditions for robust forms of worker organization. Being densely packed in cities that were relatively close to their workplaces allowed industrial workers to form deep bonds of solidarity with each other. Apart from the shop floor, these workers were likely to also interact with each other in other social spaces common to cities.

But how does the labor movement fare in the suburbs? Traditionally, the suburbs are thought of as bastions of conservatism, where workers go to become atomized consumers free from the common public spaces that feed solidaristic action.

Indeed, the business class has long believed this. While commentators often examine the offshoring of manufacturing jobs, not nearly as many focus on the relocation of urban jobs to the suburbs. This process was already well underway in the 1950s and ’60s.

Despite the very real challenges that suburbanization present, the labor movement cannot resign itself to the impossibility of maintaining strong unionism in the suburbs. History can serve as inspiration here.

In the early 1950s, the Helena Rubinstein women’s cosmetics plant was moved from Queens to the leafy suburbs of Long Island. Tony Mazzocchi was president of the union representing its workers: Local 149 of United Gas, Coke, and Chemical Workers’ Union (Gas-Coke). While today Mazzocchi — whose life is chronicled in Les Leopold’s excellent book The Man Who Hated Work and Loved Labor: The Life and Times of Tony Mazzocchi — is known in labor circles for his pioneering work in the realm of workplace health and safety, he cut his teeth building in the heart of the suburbs one of the most well-organized, militant, and effective union locals in the country — “a vibrant ‘city-style’ union smack in the middle of all those boxy little houses,” Leopold writes.

In the fifth chapter of his book, Leopold tells the story of the new Rubinstein plant, located in Long Island’s North Shore, a beautiful setting that seemed to make worker discontent impossible — not just because of its geographic setting, which seemed to discourage aggressive trade unionism, but also the times. Red-baiting within the labor movement was at its peak in the early 1950s, and Gas-Coke had experienced purges of leftists already in the late 1940s. But the overwhelming anti-communism still could not eliminate all residues of good trade union culture.

By Jeremy Brecher - Labor Network for Sustainability, March 2022

Protecting the climate requires rapidly reducing the extraction of fossil fuels. That’s a crucial part of the Green New Deal. While the federal government has done little so far to reduce fossil fuel production, people and governments all over the country are taking steps on their own to cut down the extraction of coal, oil, and gas.

Introduction

The U.S. needs to cut around 60% of its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 2030 to reach zero net emissions by 2050.[1] The world will need to decrease fossil fuel production by roughly 6% per year between 2022 and 2030 to reach the Paris goal of 1.5°C. Countries are instead planning and projecting an average annual increase of 2%, which by 2030 will result in more than double the production consistent with the 1.5°C limit.[2]

In the previous two commentaries in this series we have shown how initiatives from cities, states, and civil society organizations are expanding climate-safe energy production and reducing energy use through energy efficiency and conservation. These are essential aspects of reducing climate-destroying greenhouse gas emissions, but in themselves they will not halt the burning of fossil fuels. That requires action on the “supply side” – freezing new fossil fuel infrastructure and accelerating the closing of existing production facilities. That is often referred to as a “phaseout” or “managed decline” of fossil fuels.

Such a phaseout of fossil fuel production is necessary to meet the goals of the Green New Deal and President Joe Biden’s climate proposals. The original 2018 Green New Deal resolution submitted by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called for a national 10-year mobilization to achieve 100% of national power generation from renewable sources. Biden’s Build Back Better plan sought 100% carbon-free electricity by 2035 and net zero GHG emissions by 2050. These goals cannot be met without reducing the amount of fossil fuel that is actually extracted from the earth.[3]

While the US government and corporations are failing to effectively reduce the mining and drilling of fossil fuels, hundreds of efforts at a sub-national level are already cutting their extraction. 50 US cities are already powered entirely by clean and renewable sources of energy. 180 US cities are committed to 100% clean energy.[4] According to a report by the Indigenous Environmental Network and Oil Change International, Indigenous resistance has stopped or delayed greenhouse gas pollution equivalent to at least one-quarter of annual U.S. and Canadian emissions.[5] Such reductions are an essential part of a widespread but little-recognized movement we have dubbed the “Green New Deal from Below.”[6]

By staff - Labor Network for Sustainability, March 2022

A dozen Maine unions launched a new coalition this March to push for pro-labor environmental initiatives. The coalition, called the Maine Labor Climate Council, includes:

• Amalgamated Transit Union Local 714
• International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 490, 567, 1253, 2327 and 104
• International Association of Bridge, Structural, Ornament & Reinforcing Iron Workers Local 7
• International Union of Operating Engineers Local 4
• International Union of Painters and Allied Trades, District Council 35
• North Atlantic States Regional Council of Carpenters, Locals 349 and 352
• Laborers’ International Union Local 327
• Maine AFL-CIO
• Maine Education Association
• Maine State Building and Construction Trades Council
• Maine Service Employees Association SEIU 1989
• Southern Maine Labor Council

According to Maine AFL-CIO President Cynthia Phinney, “The twin crises of climate change and inequality demand bold and urgent action.”

By staff - Labor Network for Sustainability, March 2022

The United Mine Workers just announced that it will partner with energy startup SPARKZ to build an electric battery factory in West Virginia in 2022 that will employ 350 workers. The UMWA will recruit and train dislocated miners to be the factory’s first production workers.

“We need good, union jobs in the coalfields no matter what industry they are in,” said UMWA International Secretary-Treasurer Brian Sanson. “This is a start toward putting the tens of thousands of already-dislocated coal miners to work in decent jobs in the communities where they live.”

The first markets for the company’s batteries are expected to be for material handling vehicles like forklifts, agricultural equipment, and energy storage.

Source: bit.ly/UMWAEnergyJobs

By Jeremy Brecher - Labor Network for Sustainability, March 2022

Tired of waiting for the Green New Deal? Thousands of individuals and communities, cities, and states are taking climate protection into their own hands by creating their own “Green New Deal from Below.” This commentary portrays how people are using energy efficiency and conservation locally to realize the climate, jobs, and justice goals of the Green New Deal.

Every time you replace an incandescent light bulb with a florescent or LED one, every time you caulk a window to stop heat from escaping, you save energy. Every time a skyscraper installs new heating and cooling equipment, it saves a significant and measurable number of watts. Indeed, the energy that is saved by these and other energy efficiency and energy conservation measures has come to be known as “negawatts.”

Energy efficiency and conservation are essential elements of the Green New Deal. It includes “upgrading every residential and industrial building for state-of-the-art energy efficiency, comfort and safety” and “decarbonizing” manufacturing, agriculture, transportation, and other infrastructure.[1] Spelling out the role of energy efficiency, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) in April, 2021, introduced the Green New Deal for Public Housing Act which aims to strengthen public housing communities, improve living conditions for residents, and create jobs by addressing the housing and climate crises through the retrofitting, rehabilitating, and decarbonizing of the nation’s entire public housing stock.[2]

Meanwhile, at community, local, and state levels people are already producing “negawatts” through the “Green New Deal from Below.” Using more efficient home appliances, building houses and workplaces close to public transportation, and insulating buildings are a few examples. Homes, workplaces, stores, and other buildings are among the highest producers of greenhouse gases, and in this commentary we will focus on examples of energy efficiency and conservation that reduce the use of energy in buildings.