green unionism

By Niall Christie - Morning Star, August 6, 2021

UNIONS and politicians have said that the support for North Sea oil and gas workers must be greater from the Scottish government if targets for a just transition and net-zero emissions are to be met.

Scotland’s transport and net zero secretary Michael Matheson announced multimillion-pound funding yesterday for projects to reduce emissions in the North Sea oil sector, with money being matched by the oil and gas industries.

Mr Matheson confirmed £16.5 million for seven energy schemes being led by the Net Zero Technology Centre.

The SNP MSP, unveiling the funding alongside business leaders, said that the government is wholly committed to a just transition to net zero, which ensures no-one is left behind.

Energy workers’ representatives have said that any move away from oil and gas cannot put existing staff out of pocket, pointing to suggestions of a training passport, adding that unions must be a part of this planning.

RMT general secretary Mick Lynch said: “This is a key part of the just transition mechanism for offshore oil and gas workers which is in danger of being neglected and we cannot allow that to happen.

By Beth Allen, Communications Workers of America, Ross Middlemiss, Workers for Biological Diversity, and Jean Su, Center for Biological Diversity - Center for Biological Diversity, August 6, 2021

The Center for Biological Diversity recognized its new employee union today following a union card count showing that 68% of the eligible workers support joining the union.

Workers at the national conservation organization announced the formation of Workers for Biological Diversity/CWA in mid-June, in partnership with Communications Workers of America Local 9415. Center leadership pledged to voluntarily recognize the union if a majority of workers signed cards supporting union membership.

The new union includes paralegals and lawyers, organizers, media specialists, scientists, membership, development and IT staff. Today’s count was verified by Elizabeth Bunn, national policy director at the Labor Network for Sustainability.

“Joining the labor movement makes the Center for Biological Diversity an even stronger advocate for threatened communities, wildlife and wild places. At this pivotal moment for our planet, we’re standing with workers against big polluters and other powerful interests,” the Workers for Biological Diversity Organizing Committee said. “We’re stronger when we band together. And we want to thank our partners at the Communications Workers of America for helping us elevate and amplify our work.”

“Since the Center’s beginning, we’ve stood alongside the labor movement to fight pollution, dangerous working conditions and corporate attacks on the environment, human health and the climate,” said Jean Su, a member of the Center’s Executive Conservation Team. “Such collaboration is more important than ever as we face a climate emergency and the need to shift from a dirty economy to one with good-paying, unionized renewable energy jobs. We support and empower every person who works at the Center, and we look forward to partnering with Workers for Biological Diversity as we continue this vital work for all people and the planet.”

The Center’s new union is part of a growing unionization trend among workers at environmental and other nonprofit organizations, including the Sunrise Movement, Sierra Club, 350.org, Defenders of Wildlife, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and the American Civil Liberties Union.

“We are very pleased to welcome these new members to CWA Local 9415,” said Decovan “Coby” Rhem, president of CWA Local 9415. “As a local union that has long worked to join our movement with those working in progressive nonprofits to create systemic changes, we see the Workers for Biological Diversity/CWA as an important addition to our CWA family, in particularly strengthening our commitment to supporting the work of environmental justice and to oppose climate change.”

The Center for Biological Diversity is based in Tucson, Ariz. and has offices throughout the country and in Mexico. Its conservation programs include Endangered Species, Environmental Health, Oceans, Public Lands, Carnivore Conservation, Urban Wildlands, Population and Sustainability, International, Energy Justice, Environmental Equity and Justice, Government Affairs and the Climate Law Institute.

By Staff - La Via Campesina, August 5, 2021

UN Food Systems Pre-Summit falls short on climate, hunger crisis, COVID-19, and food systems transformation, say counter-mobilization participants, totalling almost 9,000 people.

3 August 2021. Rome, Italy. Between 25-28 July 2021, some 9,000 people gathered for a mostly virtual counter-mobilization to oppose the United Nations Food Systems (UNFSS) Pre-Summit. The alternative forum was hailed a huge success, as it drew together a wide variety of attendees and was able to catalyze and amplify a counter-narrative to the official proceedings. With critical articles and pieces published in major media outlets such as the BBC, Al Jazeera and Italian state TV Rai, and several thousands of #FoodSystems4People posts on social media seen by potentially 10 million users, the counter-mobilization succeeded in reaching a broad public with its vision for genuine transformation of unsustainable food systems.

The “People’s counter-mobilization to transform corporate food systems” kicked off with an 8-hour long global virtual rally. This massively-attended event featured messages from offline communities, declarations, artistic performances and live mobilizations by hundreds of individuals and organizations from all continents, representing smallholder farmers, pastoralists, fisherfolks, indigenous peoples, agricultural and food workers, landless peoples, women, youth, consumers, the urban food insecure, NGOs and academics.

The counter-mobilization provided a space for dialogue about the threats posed by increasingly corporate-controlled and globalized food systems, and the already existing viable solutions to overcome them. An opening declaration summarizing the demands of the People’s Autonomous Response to the UNFSS – a platform of 330 organizations who took part in the counter-mobilization – was officially released. This civil society group are urging that policy discussions and decisions be made in the UN Committee on World Food Security, the only multilateral space with established inclusivity and accountability.

By Yelter Bollen, Tycho Van Hauwaert, and Olivier Beys - European Trade Union Institute, August 2021

Europe’s industrial base needs to undergo a swift and persistent transformation towards carbon neutrality and circularity, but this transition must happen in a fair and socially just manner. In this working paper, we evaluate the support mechanisms for heavy industry which have been put in place over the past 20 years, comparing the state of play in the Netherlands, Germany and Belgium.

We also compare recent developments in the industrial policy frameworks of these countries, considering European as well as domestic policy levers. We conclude that policy frameworks have largely been ‘defensive’, have lacked foresight, and have had negative distributional effects. Recent shifts in policy have opened up avenues for progress, but the level of ambition remains insufficient and uneven. Major economic incentives and support measures should cohere with a just transition, at the (sub-)national as well as the EU level.

Read the text (Link).

By Staff - Earth Strike UK, July 30, 2021

Earth Strike is a grassroots movement for workers, youth, and community organisers to challenge the root causes of the climate crisis. Our mission is to disrupt the capitalist system that is causing the climate crisis and to fight for a better future for the global working class.

We extend our solidarity to, and practical support in, your struggle for pay rises of at least 15%. We will support you on any potential picket lines. Workers fighting for decent pay and to protect the standards of our healthcare system should be able to take direct action in pursuit of these demands at a time and in a manner of their own choosing. We therefore oppose all legal restrictions on the right to strike.

We are environmentalists supporting and seeking to mobilise for your struggle, and we want to see other environmentalists do the same. Our struggles are much closer than many might imagine. Healthcare jobs are climate jobs, and the refusal to fund and support healthcare properly is a damning indictment of this system’s response to climate breakdown. As air pollution chokes children in the streets of London, disproportionately in working-class and black and brown communities, the hospitals which should mitigate the damage are underfunded, with workers in them underpaid and overworked. As the effects of climate breakdown worsen, it will be healthcare systems having to deal with the impact. Meanwhile, we do not forget the vast wealth inequalities that exist between this country and others, particularly where climate destruction is already felt hardest.

As climate activists, we particularly oppose the ban on strikes over so-called “political” issues, and the ban on strikes in solidarity with other workers. Those laws prevent workers from striking directly to demand radical action on climate change, to oppose NHS privatisation and cuts, and to directly support your demands – as miners, postal workers, dockers, print workers, and others did in the 1980s. Our new “Empower the Unions” initiative aims to highlight the injustice of these restrictive laws, and mobilise both climate and trade union activists against them.

So we say: all power to the NHS workers! Your fight for 15% is a key part of the wider struggle for a genuinely socialised healthcare system, free at the point of use and run by workers and service users, which in turn is part of the struggle for a different kind of society – one in which human and environmental need, rather than the needs of profit, comes first.

An injury to one is an injury to all – solidarity!

By Alameda and Contra Costa AFL-CIO Central Labor Councils - Labor Network for Sustainability, July 30, 2021

By Luis Feliz Leon - American Prospect, July 28, 2021

Miners at Warrior Met Coal in Alabama have been on strike for almost five months, struggling to reverse concessions in pay, health care, and safety. Strikers brought their picket lines from the piney woods of the South to the tony Manhattan offices of three hedge fund shareholders on June 22, and more than 1,000 mine workers and union allies return today to demonstrate outside the offices of the company’s largest shareholder, asset manager BlackRock.

Miners have chanted, “No Contract, No Coal!” and “Warrior Met Has No Soul” on picket lines from the worksite in Brookwood, Alabama, to New York City. “We’re here to let the whole world know that we will take it from the bottom of the United States to the top. Where we have to take this fight, we’re going to take it,” Dedrick Gardner, a first-generation miner from a union household of teachers and postmasters, said on the New York picket line in June.

It’s a well-trodden path for United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) members. In 1974, coal miners from southeastern Kentucky’s Harlan County journeyed to Wall Street during the ninth month of their strike, leafleting outside a shareholder meeting of the company Duke Power.

Filmmaker Barbara Kopple’s Harlan County USA documented miners and their families as they rose up against gun-toting goons and the bosses who plundered their lungs and their labor to extract coal and soul. Kopple joined them on Wall Street too, capturing conversations between strikers and local cops discussing wages and benefits, a microcosm of shared class struggle from opposite sides of the fence. “They make some profit, but they keep it all to themselves, right?” the police officer asks the miner at one point. “Yeah, they don’t spread the wealth.”

That solidarity has been present at Warrior Met since miners walked off the job on April 1. When management put a contract offer on the table several days later, workers roundly rejected it by a vote of 1,006 to 45.

“The industry standard is 30 bucks an hour,” said Johnny Murphy, vice president of UMWA Local 2397. “We’re at $23. Corporate greed has taken over America.”

By Jaime Amorim - La Via Campesina, July 28, 2021

Food sovereignty is intrinsically linked to the debate over what we envision for rural areas and what type of development should be applied, as well as what type of food to produce. And why do we want to produce?”

In the same year that La Via Campesina celebrates 25 years of defining, building, and fighting for “food sovereignty,” the United Nations (UN) will convene a summit for heads of state, members of large businesses and private corporations, multinationals and agribusiness representatives to discuss food systems processes.

The UN Food Systems Summit, or FFS, will take place in September of 2021 during the week of the High-Level panel of the United Nations’ General Assembly. Before the Summit, a pre-Summit will take place in Rome at the end of June.

I will take advantage of this space to debate(discuss?) the two subjects which complement each other in two separate articles. In this first one, I will discuss the 25^th anniversary of the debate for food sovereignty. In the second will concern the contradictions surrounding the realization of the Summit on food systems, which will be convened by the Secretary General of the United Nations. This is the decade in which the UN and its member states must accomplish the activities and actions to which they committed by 2030, the objectives defined in order to reach their goals for building Sustainable Development.

The Summit on Food Systems will be held just as the world is experiencing a pandemic that has taken the lives of more than four million people worldwide, victims of COVID-19. At the same time, we see, as a consequence of the crises, the rise in the number of people who suffer hunger worldwide, as well as an increase in unemployment, poverty and violence.

By C.M. Lewis - The Strike Wave, July 28, 2021

Maine Governor Janet Mills’ labor-backed veto of LD 1708—which would have consolidated two private utility corporations into a statewide consumer cooperative, Pine Tree Power—is a sober warning to those fighting for public utilities: neglect unions at your peril.

Mills is no friend to labor. She previously vetoed pro-worker labor reforms and pledged to veto the right to strike for public workers. But her veto, sustained by the legislature, still accomplished the goal of concerned unions like the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, Local 567, who were alarmed at a potential change in legal jurisdiction.

Union resistance to progressive proposals can often cause consternation. Culinary 226’s opposition to Medicare for All notably caused a stir during the Nevada caucuses, raising the ire of many progressives. However, an immediate assumption that IBEW was wrong to oppose the bill buries the complicated reality: the bill would’ve tangibly harmed union workers. 

IBEW’s opposition was driven by concern that the bill would move workers from jurisdiction under the National Labor Relations Board to the Maine Labor Relations Board, bringing them into the public sector. Although that superficially sounds like a minor administrative change, and no reason for opposition, it would’ve had severe consequences for their workers—notably losing the statutory right to strike, and the imposition of the open shop through the Janus vs. AFSCME ruling

Viewed through that lens, IBEW’s opposition—while frustrating—is not unreasonable, and it speaks to a difficult problem faced by advocates for public utilities: that under present law, there is little to no way to bring private utilities under public control without stripping union rights from workers.

By Bo Delp - Texas AFL-CIO, July 27, 2021

A new and growing coalition of Texas labor unions Monday launched the Texas Climate Jobs Project (TCJP), a major joint effort to fight climate change and reverse income inequality in the energy capital of the country.

A new report by climate and labor experts at Cornell University, Northeastern University, and Occidental College, in consultation with 27 Texas labor unions, accompanied the launch and outlays out a comprehensive climate jobs action plan to put Texas on the path to building an equitable clean-energy economy. A provision of the plan includes the installation of 40 GW of solar energy and 100 GW of wind energy and the electrification of school bus and public vehicle fleets by 2040.

The launch of the Texas Climate Jobs Project comes a day before the Texas AFL-CIO convention, at which the state’s labor leaders are expected to pass a resolution backing the coalition’s mission and its foundational report.

“Texans are facing several converging crises: a changing climate that is hurting working people first and worst, skyrocketing income inequality, and deep racial injustice,” said Rick Levy, President of the Texas AFL-CIO. “Today, the Texas labor movement is coming together to endorse a historic proposal that would tackle these crises by creating good union jobs across our state and combating climate breakdown. As the unions that power the energy capital of America, we believe the Texas Climate Jobs Project can lead the way in transforming our economy in ways that lift up working families and communities while protecting the air we breathe and the water we drink. We must make sure that the workers who have powered this state for generations are not left behind.”

The Texas Climate Jobs Project will advocate for long-term solutions to these intertwined crises by pushing state and local lawmakers to tap the state’s massive renewable energy potential and create millions of new family-sustaining union jobs, as outlined in the report’s recommendations.

In addition to outlining targets for renewable energy development and vehicle electrification, the report calls for the retrofitting and installation of solar panels systems on all Texas public K-12 schools by 2035, the creation of a Just Transition Commission, and the construction of a high-speed rail network.

“Climate change is hurting every working person in Texas,” said Bo Delp, Executive Director of Texas Climate Jobs Project. “Today, unions from across our state are advancing their vision of a pro-worker, pro-climate agenda that gives everyone a fair shot to succeed in our clean energy transition.”