green unionism

By various - Platform London, May 18, 2023

By Dan DiMaggio - Labor Notes, May 18, 2023

Contracts covering 150,000 auto workers at the Big 3 will expire on September 14, and the new leadership of the United Auto Workers is taking a more aggressive stance than in years past.

“We’re going to launch our biggest contract campaign ever in our history,” UAW President Shawn Fain told members in a Facebook live video.

Fain took office in March after winning the union’s first one member, one vote election. Running on the slogan, “No Corruption, No Concessions, No Tiers,” he and the Members United slate swept all the positions they ran for, giving reformers a majority on the international executive board.

While the union has vowed to take on tiered wages and benefits, job security, and plant closures, the transition to electric vehicles (EV) looms especially large.

Since President Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act last August, companies have announced $120 billion in investments in domestic EV and battery manufacturing. The Act includes big tax credits and incentives for clean energy and EVs.

Ford alone is investing $11 billion in a new EV assembly plant and battery factories in Tennessee and Kentucky. The Biden administration wants EVs to make up half of all new vehicles sold by 2030.

By Finlay Asher - Safe Landing, May 4, 2023

Finlay Asher of Safe Landing gave this talk on 4th May 2023 as part of the "Aero Lectures" series organised by the HAW University in Hamburg in cooperation with DGLR, Royal Aeronautical Society (RAeS), ZAL and VDI. He covered the need for aviation decarbonisation, the issues with various technological and policy options, what Safe Landing's positive view of the future for air travel is, and how we think we can achieve it (worker-led movements and Aviation Workers' Assemblies.)

By Jeremy Brecher - Labor Network for Sustainability, May 16, 2023

While the Green New Deal started as a proposed national program, some of the most impressive implementations of its principles and policies are occurring at a municipal level. Part 1 of “The Green New Deal in the Cities” provides an extended account of the Boston Green New Deal, perhaps the most comprehensive effort so far to apply Green New Deal principles in a major city. Part 2 presents Green New Deal-style programs developing in Los Angeles and Seattle, and reviews the programs and policies being adapted in cities around the country to use climate protection as a vehicle for creating jobs and challenging injustice.

Urban politics often seem to produce not so much benefit for the people as inequality, exclusion, and private gain for the wealthiest. Does it have to be that way? In cities throughout the US, new political formations, often under the banner of the Green New Deal, are creating a new form of urban politics. They pursue the Green New Deal’s core objectives of fighting climate change in ways that produce good jobs and increase equality. They are based on coalitions of impoverished urban neighborhoods, disempowered racial and ethnic groups, organized labor, and advocates for climate and the environment. They involved widespread democratic mobilization. A case in point is the Boston Green New Deal.

By Luis Feliz Leon - Labor Notes, May 16, 2023

After a bruising three-year fight, workers at school bus manufacturer Blue Bird in Fort Valley, Georgia, voted May 12 to join United Steelworkers (USW) Local 697.

“It’s been a long time since a manufacturing site with 1,400 people has been organized, let alone organized in the South, let alone organized with predominantly African American workers, and let alone in the auto industry,” said Maria Somma, organizing director with the USW.

“It’s not a single important win. It’s an example of what’s possible—workers wanting to organize and us being able to take advantage of a time and a policy that allowed them to clear a path to do so.”

The vote was 697 to 435 with 80 percent turnout. At two factories and a warehouse near Macon, the workers build school buses and an array of specialty buses.

Blue Bird is the second-largest bus manufacturer in the country, after Daimler Truck’s Thomas Built Buses. The Auto Workers represent workers at a Thomas Built facility in North Carolina.

The main issues in Georgia were pay and safety. Workers began organizing in earnest at the height of the pandemic in 2020 after Blue Bird workers reached out to a Steelworker organizer following a union win at a tire factory in nearby Macon. They overcame a fierce anti-union campaign in a right-to-work state where only 4.4 percent of workers are union members.

But Somma adds that workers tapped into local union networks. “People think the South is non-union, but we have a lot of members in middle Georgia,” she said.

The Steelworkers represent thousands of members in the state—at BASF, which makes chemicals used in plastics, detergent, and paper manufacturing, Anchor Glass, and the paper giant Graphic Packaging International.

By James Tapper - The Guardian, May 14, 2023

People investing their pensions in funds that claim green credentials are being warned they may actually be backing the world’s largest oil and gas companies.

Carbon Tracker Initiative said that asset managers have invested $376bn (£295bn) in oil and gas companies, despite publicly pledging to back efforts to limit global temperature rises to 1.5C. The environmental thinktank based in London and New York found that more than 160 funds with a green label held $4.6bn in 15 companies including ExxonMobil, Chevron and TotalEnergies.

It also found that 25 members of the Net Zero Asset Managers initiative had invested in those companies and some had increased their holdings in 2022. NZAM said its international initiative started two years ago and investors needed time to change their strategies.

The warning comes as the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority prepares to publish anti-greenwashing rules that are intended to clean up how investment funds are labelled.

By staff - International Labour Organization, July 13, 2023

Since the General Conference of the International Labour Organization (ILO) in 1919 adopted the Anthrax prevention recommendation- R003 calling upon Member States to make arrangements for the disinfection of wool infected with anthrax spores there have been significant advances in the knowledge about biological hazards, their prevention, and the treatment of diseases they cause. However, despite many improvements including the eradication of smallpox and the regional elimination or control of other infectious diseases, the threat from biological hazards continues to be a global challenge. The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated that the world of work needs to anticipate and be prepared for known and emerging biological threats. SARS-Cov-2 has also highlighted the importance of the community-workplace interface and the need of strengthened collaboration between occupational health services and public health institutions.

The objective of the Technical Guidelines on Biological Hazards adopted by the 346th Session of ILO’s Governing Body in November 2022 (GB.346/INS/17/3) is to provide governments, employers, workers, and their organizations with key principles for the effective management of biological hazards in the working environment, in line with ILO standards and principles. The guidelines were drafted by a group of international specialists and were adopted by a tripartite meeting of experts from different countries that met in Geneva from 20 to 24 June 2022.

Through the dissemination and promotion of these guidelines, the ILO is committed to continuing to
respond to its constitutional objective of supporting its constituents in managing current, emerging, and re-emerging biological hazards in the working environment to ensure the protection of health and life of all workers.

Download a copy of this publication here (PDF).

By Chris Dite and Arthur Rorris - Jacobin, May 11, 2023

Workers in an industrial trading port in Australia are now at the forefront of the fight against war with China*, demanding that jobs and environmental protections take precedence over militarism.

On May Day, thousands of workers from in and around the industrial trading city of Port Kembla in New South Wales (NSW) rallied against the AUKUS deal. AUKUS will see Australia procure nuclear-powered submarines from the United States, and is designed to counter the rise of China as a global power. To date, this was the biggest demonstration against the pact held anywhere in the world.

AUKUS potentially involves Port Kembla hosting a US nuclear submarine base. This would come at the expense of the region’s developing green energy infrastructure. The protesting workers argued that the current drive to war will endanger the city and imperil the many thousands of union jobs that would be guaranteed by a green transformation.

International media outlets in AUKUS partner countries and China have begun to take notice. The workers of Port Kembla will now prove decisive in shaping not only their own futures, but Australia’s role in the biggest conflict of the era.

Jacobin spoke with Arthur Rorris, secretary of the South Coast Labour Council, to find out how this small city came to take the lead in the fight for jobs and peace.