green unionism

By Renfrey Clarke - Green Left Weekly, October 7, 2016

Efforts to halt plans for nuclear waste dumping in South Australia have made important advances in recent weeks, with environmental, trade union, indigenous and other bodies pushing for a joint opposition campaign.

At a September 16 meeting called by the peak labour movement body, SA Unions, and the Maritime Union of Australia, members of at least 14 organisations resolved to work toward forming a coordinating committee “around the common objective of preventing nuclear waste dumps being established in South Australia”.

The meeting endorsed preparations by activists for a major anti-dumps rally to be held on October 15 — the anniversary of the first British nuclear bomb test on the Australian mainland, was conducted at Emu Field in South Australia’s north-west in 1953.

SA is being targeted as the site of three large-scale repositories for radioactive materials. The federal government wants a dump for Australian-sourced low and intermediate-level waste at Barndioota, near the Flinders Ranges town of Hawker. The site is culturally important to local Aboriginal people, and the project has been met with bitter opposition from Traditional Owners.

Meanwhile, the Labor state government of Premier Jay Weatherill plans a complex of dumps and re-encapsulating facilities, as part of a massive scheme that will involve importing and storing, for payment, as much as a third of the world’s current stock of high-level spent reactor fuel. A related part of the project will be the world’s largest dump for imported intermediate-level radioactive waste.

Before heading off on September 13 to inspect nuclear waste storage facilities under construction in Finland, Weatherill gave his strongest hint yet that after a period of “consultation”, the state government by year’s end will shift its dumps scheme into a phase of active preparation.

Abandoning the project, Weatherall told the Adelaide Advertiser, looked unlikely. “There’s a red light, there’s a green light and there’s a sort of amber light of ‘proceed with caution’.”

By staff - Inequality.Org, September 28, 2016

At the center of the Dakota Access pipeline fight are some of the country’s most impoverished and most economically powerful people.

One section of the four-state pipeline would run through North Dakota’s Standing Rock Sioux reservation, where 41 percent of 8,200 residents live below the poverty level and nearly a quarter are unemployed. Thousands of people have joined the Standing Rock tribe in opposing the pipeline over concerns it will contaminate their water supply and damage sacred sites and cultural artifacts.

On the opposite side is Energy Transfer Partners (ETP), whose CEO, Kelcy Warren, has a net worth of more than $4 billion. While ETP is the majority investor, a number of Wall Street banks have lined up to finance the project.

In an example of the power of people prevailing over the power of money, the Obama administration has ordered ETP to halt construction to allow for further consultation with the Standing Rock Sioux. But the fight is not over. The corporation has vowed to press ahead and President Obama has not yet issued a definitive statement against Dakota Access.

Judith Le Blanc, director of the Native Organizers Alliance, has been working to support native leaders as they develop strategies to continue to challenge these powerful forces. In mid-September she helped lead a four-day training at Standing Rock with tribal officials, native-led non-profits, and local community and political leaders on power mapping, strategic campaign planning, and direct action.

Inequality.org co-editor Sarah Anderson interviewed LeBlanc on her views about this ongoing battle.

By x344543 - IWW Environmental Unionism Caucus, October 5, 2016

Whither EcoUnionist News and all of its supplements? - You may have noticed that there has not been a new installment of this feature since issue #122. That is because our web admin, who has diligently compiled and published this feature, without interruption, on a weekly basis, for almost two years, has determined that the sheer workload has overwhelmed his ability to consistently produce a quality product. He writes:

After some hard soul searching, much reflection, and no shortage of handwringing that I have decided to terminate the (mostly) weekly "EcoUnionist News" Feature and all of its subsets (Capital Blight News and Carbon Bubble News) as well as the very voluminous special supplements, such as #NoDAPL News on ecology.iww.org.

This is a very hard decision for me to make, because I strongly believe that the feature potentially serves a useful purpose, namely providing a "link dump" of news that is relevant to our organizing, or hoped-for-organizing that is simply not available anywhere else.

However, the feature has become simply too large for me to handle, often taking up two or even three days of my time to produce, which I do on top of maintaining ecology.iww.org (which involves posting other relevant, full-length articles), doing IWW EUC work, having a full-time job, participating in several other related green-unionisty type political activity, and having something of a life, little though my spare time has been outside of all of that. In fact, it's getting to the point that EcoUnionist News is too much of a task for me to handle, even if I were to drop all other activities. As you may have noticed, the feature often includes upwards of 100-plus articles each week. Until recently, I had been reading every single one of them. I had managed to do this even during the busiest days of the No Coal in Oakland campaign, which has been victorious (so far) and been an inspiring example of green-union organizing of the type that the three of us who founded the IWW Environmental Unionism Caucus had only dreamed about just three years ago.

However, in recent weeks, especially with the IWW Convention and the #NoDAPL campaign exploding on the scene, I have been including articles that I have not read carefully or even at all, and though I am pretty sure all of them have been meritous, the potential for growing sloppiness increases, and frankly, it's an indicator that the idea is a case of my having bit off more than I can chew. 

The items I have included in EcoUnionist News are (in my opinion) almost always either items that, while of some use to Green Unionists, do not make the cut as suitable full-length articles for ecology.iww.org or they're from sources where obtaining permission (such as mainstream capitalist periodicals) would be time consuming and challenging. Reading all of them has been extremely time consuming (though I have been able to take advantage of downtime where I work, such as breaks, to cover some of that). Still, I have been setting aside longer, likely much more relevant documents that deal directly with green unionism, just transition, and the like, because of the time I have instead focused on EcoUnionist News, and my "GRIL" pile is only getting bigger.

I have been weighing the options for a while now, and I have concluded that the best use of my time is to end the EcoUnionist News effort for now and focus more closely on posting the full length articles and reading the longer, more in depth items in my GRIL pile that deal with green unionism and just transition which would be a benefit to ecology.iww.org.

As for the items that will not be posted, most of these are still available, syndicated through the RSS feeds we feature on ecology.iww.org, here.   

I still will focus primarily on information and news myself (or whatever local campaign comes my way that helps us build the ideas of green unionism and where my help is requested), but for now the weekly EcoUnionist News feature has been put on ice. 

That said, our web admin has agreed to publish a much shorter list of "EcoWobbles", news items that are not quite suitable as full articles, but are of (in his opinion) of compelling interest to green unionists. So with that in mind, here are the first five such items:

An Alternative to Trident: Peace ships from Barrow - By Peter Doyle, Facts For Working People, September 26, 2016 -  This article is a contribution to the debate in the Labour Party about whether or not a Labour government should spend money to renew British nuclear submarines, now reaching the end of their useful life. The author suggests an intriguing idea for a just transition.

European trade unions' experts evaluate and plan the next steps on health and safety at work - By staff, European Trade Union Institute, September 29, 2016 - European trade unions' experts evaluate and plan the next steps on health and safety at work.

Honoring a dirty job and a beautiful one, too - By Amy Muldoon, Socialist Worker, October 5, 2016 - The author recommends an exhibition in New York City that will make you think twice about the actual pillars that a modern city rests on.

Kiteline Radio: Dear Marius episode - By Cindy A Crabb, Kiteline Radio, September 28, 2016 …We begin our show with updates on the National Prison Strike, and then devote the entire episode to Marius Mason, a friend and former Bloomington resident currently serving a 22 year sentence for acts of ecological defense. We hear messages from people to and about Marius, listen to some of Marius’s music and poetry, and learn about his case.

Strike continues at Anglo American’s Australian coal mine - By staff, Mining.Com, October 3, 2016 - 140 workers at Anglo American’s German Creek coal mine in Australia remain on strike over their trade union enterprise agreement (EBA), which expired in April 2014 and is being negotiated ever since.

By Brad Hornick - System Change not Climate Change, October 4, 2016

The fresh new face Canada showed the world at the Paris COP21 climate meetings held out hope for many Canadian climate activists that a national course change was in the works.

By Jim Silver - Rabble.Ca, October 5, 2016

Although Carlo Fanelli's book Megacity Malaise: Neoliberalism, Public Services and Labour in Toronto is not about Winnipeg, it offers many insights applicable to Winnipeg and to other Canadian cities. Fanelli is a former Toronto civic employee who looks at civic issues from the point of view of city employees and their unions. His central argument is that the fiscal problems confronting Toronto and all major Canadian cities are not caused by over-spending on civic services nor by excessive union wage demands, although this is what is typically claimed.

The basis of Canadian cities' fiscal problems is in Canada's Constitution, which does not give cities the taxing powers to generate sufficient revenue to do all of the things for which they have responsibility. Cities are forced to over-rely on property taxes, which "is unsustainable in the long run." Property taxes are regressive, and don't grow with the economy, leaving cities in a constant state of fiscal crisis. This is made worse by the fact that federal commitments to civic issues have been sporadic and insufficient to meet cities' needs.

This has been worsened further by the ideological dominance in Canada of neoliberalism. This ideology has driven massive cuts in taxation and in public spending -- by 1999 Ontario's Mike Harris government, for example, had made 99 different tax cuts; by 2013 Stephen Harper's government had cut federal taxes to the lowest rate in 70 years -- followed by the downloading of responsibilities from senior to lower level governments. Cities have borne the brunt of this offloading, and have not had the capacity to generate the revenues needed to deal with it.

Toronto and Winnipeg have responded with a host of policy measures that do not get at the real root of the problem. Like Winnipeg, Toronto has allowed suburban sprawl to grow, on the grounds that more suburban housing will mean more property tax revenue. But this doesn't get at the underlying structural problems, and in fact generates more costs in the longer run. Selling off valuable public assets to the private sector creates profits for private interests, but produces a one-time only injection of cash that is no solution to the underlying problem and that diminishes future revenue flows. The same is the case with privatization and contracting out and the use of public-private partnerships (PPPs).

There is a great deal of evidence that PPPs, to take that example, do not generate the savings that cities claim. Ontario's auditor-general produced a major report on 74 PPPs completed between 2003 and 2014 and found that these cost Ontario some $8 billion more than traditional public financing. Contractors benefit, cities' budgets do not, yet Toronto and Winnipeg continue to make use of PPPs on the largely false grounds that they save public money. The contracting out of city work continues unabated, and any "savings" it produces are typically the result of non-union contractors exploiting vulnerable workers. This is the case with the privatization of Winnipeg's garbage collection service in 2012. The hard work of lifting garbage cans and dumping them into trucks is done by temporary day labourers -- many of them young Aboriginal men -- hired on a day-by-day basis at minimum wage with no benefits. Described in an expose by Aboriginal Peoples Television Network as "Winnipeg's dirty little garbage secret," this exploitative process is how Winnipeg "saves" money via privatization and contracting out

Spending on valuable public services continues to be cut on the largely false grounds that cities have a "spending problem," while the already massive infrastructure deficit balloons ever further. Roads, bridges, underground pipelines and transit services continue to deteriorate, while parks and recreation facilities, libraries and other essential civic services remain underfunded. The urban fiscal crisis grows unabated.

City governments, desperate for solutions and driven by their ideological orientation, point the finger at out-of-control spending and excessive wage demands by civic unions. Many in the right-wing media promote this simplistic and largely false explanation.

Fanelli points to data showing that incomes have stagnated over the past three decades of neoliberal governance. "In Canada's three largest cities the bottom 90 per cent of income-earners made less in 2013 than they did in 1983." Toronto's 2007 Independent Fiscal Review Panel found that the average wage of City of Toronto workers, including overtime, was "less than $40,000 in 2007." Toronto's unionized workers and their unions are not the cause of the city's fiscal problems.

Yet one of the great "successes" of neoliberalism and its adherents has been to redirect the anger of many modest-income earners at civic employees and their unions. Civic employees are seen as being paid too generously, despite their relatively modest earnings. As Fanelli points out, "the vitriol directed at them is intense, often as if they live lavish lives at the expense of non-unionized workers."