green unionism

By staff - Labor Network for Sustainability, January 2023

In Jackson, Mississippi, our on-the ground organizer Joshua Dedmond is actively working on emergency response for water distribution and recovery from the extreme flooding that overwhelmed the city’s antiquated water filtration system. Our goal is to fortify the Justice for Jackson coalition in opposing the Governor’s push to privatize management of Jackson’s municipal water supply. Success for Jackson will mean strong democratic engagement and public accountability in overhauling the city’s utility infrastructure to ensure equitable access, distribution, and pricing of safe drinking water for all residents, as well as fair labor practices, wages, and good jobs for the community in rebuilding its water system for a sustainable future.

These climate change challenges are not unique to Jackson, Mississippi. Chronic underinvestment and systemic racism, and the compounding threats of sea level rise and flooding are endemic throughout the Gulf States, especially in BIPOC communities. For the coming year, LNS is planning a southern strategy to build more power and political leverage for frontline environmental justice organizing by engaging and enlisting impacted workers and their unions in demands for building climate resilient infrastructure and communities.

By staff - Labor Network for Sustainability, January 2023

In 2022, the Labor Network for Sustainability helped build solidarity between environmentalists and Santa Ana, CA factory workers who stood up to their employer, Kingspan’s, so-called ‘green’ manufacturing processes that pollute indoor air and the local watershed. Kingspan factory workers are organizing to demand safe working conditions, including addressing unhealthy levels of PM2.5 pollution inside the workplace that they measured in collaboration with UC Irvine pollution scientist Dr. Shahir Masri. The workers also blew the whistle on Kingspan for misrepresenting its daily operations and water pollution clean-up efforts to the CalEPA. Also, in October 2021, a majority of Kingspan’s Santa Ana workers delivered a petition to managers demanding a fair process to decide whether to form a union.

The Labor Network for Sustainability hosted a Zoom teach-in with these workers, Dr. Shahir Masri, and environmental, community, and Labor allies to build solidarity and momentum for this campaign. Following the teach-in, 45 local and national environmental groups signed onto a letter demanding that the Green Building Community stop partnering with Kingspan until the international building materials company cleans up its act. This action was part of a larger campaign mounting pressure on Kingspan in what is truly a modern day David and Goliath story– one with true economic, environmental, and worker justice at its core.

For updates on this campaign, follow @CleanUpKingspan on Twitter.

By Larry Kleinman and Kim Fellner - Convergence Magazine, January 2023

Progressives believe in the labor movement. We support unions and believe that workers are entitled to a collective say in the terms and conditions of their employment, free from the arbitrary dictates of management.

But what if the management is you? When it comes to nonprofit (or “NGO”) social justice organizations—and the funders who help sustain the work—the response is often, “Yes, but…”

And what if you’re the union? When workers organize in a progressive nonprofit—even one that accepts unionizationthe approach is sometimes no different than it might be with a hostile or profit-making employer.

We, your authors, decided to undertake this guide because we were fielding a growing number of calls about organizations in crisis. Too often, groups we value were struggling to fulfill their important movement missions, while being shredded from within, often about issues of unionization. While we both have decades of experience in labor and NGOs--spanning a wide range of roles--we no longer serve as paid staff or leaders of any organization. Being without official portfolio, we thought we might be able to offer a resource to help move those conversations to a better place.

This guide is not meant as the final word on anything. Rather, consider it a rough, hand- drawn map to navigate some poorly-charted terrain. The perspectives and suggestions are offered in the spirit of strengthening the resilience and alliances of progressive forces-- and to get to a more definitive and satisfying “yes” on the issue of unionization.

Download a copy of this publication here (PDF).

By Chaumtoli Huq - Pace Environmental Law Review, January 2023

Web Editor's Note: This publication contains an error, identifying the International Woodworkers of America (IWA), a CIO union, as an IWW affiliate. This is inaccurate. The IWA was cofounded by many radical workers, including (but not limited to) members of the IWW, but it was never an IWW union itself.

The Green New Deal harkens us back to the nostalgia of the New Deal era when a diverse and comprehensive set of federal legislation, agencies, programs, public work projects and financial reforms were implemented between 1933 and 1939 by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to promote economic recovery. Among them, relevant to this essay’s focus on labor, was the passage of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) which provided legal protection to organizing, and supporting unionization and collective bargaining. However, due to political compromises, categories of workers including domestic workers and agricultural workers, who were mostly Black and immigrants were excluded from the NLRA’s coverage. Despite these exclusions, it was a time when the New Deal state seemed to be a strong ally of workers and the labor movement. Industrial peace and security were dominant narratives fueling much of the New Deal legislation. This industrial peace and security rhetoric suppressed the radicalization and rising militancy of the labor movement of the time such as the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Moreover, the law was actively used to prosecute criminally radical unionists and through other extra-judicial means.

New Deal policies solidified one form of unionism, referred to as business or contract unionism which is based on the idea that the union or labor movement brokers wages, benefits from its members, through collective bargaining agreements, and unions become servicers or administrators of those benefits. Such an approach heavily defers to law, state and legislative spaces as the protector of labor rights; thereby, ceding power away from worker or community control. In contrast, social unionism espoused the view that the role of the labor movement was to build worker power which gives them greater control over their livelihood, workplaces and environment. This view encompassed a wide spectrum of political ideologies and strategies. Social unionism broadly advanced that unions should address the economic interests of its members, encourage them to be active on broader issues of social justice and engage with the state to pass protective worker legislation.18 Under the social unionism view, syndicalists like IWW were skeptical or at most contemptuous of the legal system and emphasized the direct role of the union as agents of social change and governance.

Read the report (PDF).

By staff - Labor Network for Sustainability, January 2023

LNS is empowering a rising generation of young workers to lead the labor-climate movement into the future. This fall, LNS convened an inaugural Young Workers Convergence that brought together nearly 100 young workers from 23 states (as well as DC and Canada) and more than 50 different worker and environmental organizations to participate in workshops, hear from our union comrades who have successfully built labor power in service of climate justice, share strategies across states and sectors, and build a collective vision for a climate justice movement led by and for workers. This event ignited an emergent network of young union, climate, and community organizers who are bringing new energy and focus to the climate justice movement. In the coming year, we will grow and support this critical cohort with training, strategy support, and regional convenings across the country.

Check out this Teen Vogue article Teen Vogue article to learn more about the Young Worker Organizing Project.

By Celina Barron, IBEW Local 11; Barbara James, Carpenters Local 1907; Emmett Doyle, Carpenters Local 68; and Amy Calandrella, IUOE Local 98 - Young Worker Convergence on Climate; Labor Network for Sustainability, December 23, 2022

By Workers' and Peasants' Platform for Water and Energy - Workers' and Peasants' Platform for Water and Energy, December 16, 2022

We highlight that the energy area in Brazil was historically built to be a sector of excellence, even though it has countless contradictions. We have natural bases (water, rivers, oil, sun, wind, among others) that through the work of the workers provide comparative advantages at world level. We have an oil and electricity industry with the potential to become one of the largest sovereign industries in the world and in conditions to meet the priority needs of the Brazilian people. We have a goods and services industry capable of meeting the national content of the energy production chains. We have highly capable workers who produce and supply electricity, water, cooking gas, gasoline, diesel oil, agricultural fertilizers and other derivatives of this immense country. We have production and mastery of built and known technologies, and we have experience in how to treat with dignity those affected by the works and workers in the sector.

However, the evidence on the energy issue reveals a dramatic situation left to the country by the Temer and Bolsonaro governments. The savagery of the prices of cooking gas, fuel and electricity have been transformed into an instrument of rapine on the Brazilian people. Strategic companies have been sliced up, strangled and privatised. The main State structures have been destroyed or are being captured by speculators and rent-seekers.

It is a situation of destruction of energy sovereignty, science and technology and all initiatives for the industrialisation of energy. Even the country's independence and energy security are not guaranteed.

Read the entire statement (PDF).

By Maximillian Alvarez, Megan Milliken Biven, James Hiatt, and Clarke - The Real News Network, December 14, 2022

By various - Chief Sustainability Office, Los Angeles, December 10, 2022