green unionism

By Tahir Latif Secretary, Greener Jobs Alliance - Greener Jobs Alliance, June 23, 2022

The industrial action currently being taken by the RMT is a source of hope and inspiration for workers across the country. But it is also action aimed at a more sustainable transport system that works for people and planet. The Greener Jobs Alliance fully endorses the statement set out here, produced by the Climate Justice Coalition.

“The Climate Justice Coalition stands in solidarity with RMT members taking industrial action to protect their pay, jobs and working conditions, and the wider fight to protect a public transport system for people – social need – not private greed. Billions are being cut from our transport system at a time when we should be increasing investment to ensure a fully public, affordable, and integrated transport system. Rail is critical to decarbonising the transport sector; £27 billion for more new roads and cutting duty on domestic aviation is the wrong way round.

Our railways are already being impacted by the effects of climate change, putting additional demands on a stretched workforce providing an essential public service. This action by the Government is symptomatic of their disregard for the concerns of climate, environment and workers.

As a coalition representing groups within climate and environmental campaigns, faith, race and social justice groups, and trade unions, we call on you all to support this struggle. This includes adding our voices to resist the anti-trade union and worker narrative being driven by the Government in the mainstream media and publicise that it is their inaction and behaviour that is detrimental to people, not workers seeking justice.

Inaction on climate change is harming innocent people across the globe. Protecting the rights of workers and living standards must be a priority for the climate justice movement in fighting for a Just Transition to a zero-carbon economy.

We stand with the RMT to fight for their aims, and to campaign for a better deal for workers and a fairer, climate just, society.”

By Crystal McCoy - Earth Island Institute, Summer 2022

Very often, the fossil fuel industry and its allies try to divide climate activists from blue-collar workers, as if our interest in a habitable planet where we can earn enough money to feed our families is not somehow shared. But from my own history, I know this is not the case.

I was born in Gillette, Wyoming, in one of the biggest coal mining regions in the world. I have spent my entire adult life working “out in the field,” so to speak. My very first industrial job was working for a company called Cotter in my hometown of Canon City, Colorado. During its heyday between 1958 until 1979, and intermittently since then, including when I worked there, it was a yellow cake uranium processing facility. It is now a Superfund site.

After that I moved to the scrap recycling industry, where I stayed for the majority of my adult life. There I worked on everything from decommissioned coal cars to your average everyday refrigerators. Over the years, I had to clean up many vehicles that came in to be shredded for scrap, which still had many contaminants inside. Working conditions were never favorable. My wages were always lower than those of most of my male counterparts. Sometimes I was not treated as an equal, despite being skilled in my field. And as a woman I also faced countless sexist remarks and gender discrimination on the job.

By staff - Nuclear Information and Resource Service, June 21, 2022

Over 170 organizations, including Beyond Nuclear, North American Water Office, Food & Water Watch, Institute for Policy Studies Climate Policy Program, Nuclear Energy Information Service (NEIS), Center for Biological Diversity, International Marine Mammal Project of Earth Island Institute, Nuclear Information and Resource Service (NIRS) and more sent a letter to Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm opposing the misuse of the Department of Energy’s Civil Nuclear Credit program (CNC) to dismantle the fossil-free phaseout and just transition plan for the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant. 

The CNC was created by the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) to mitigate potential greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) increases due to the closure of unprofitable nuclear reactors that operate in competitive electricity markets. The letter explains how applying the CNC program to Diablo Canyon would violate the letter and intent of the law. The nuclear power plant is not eligible for funds under the CNC program because it does not meet the basic requirements of the IIJA, nor those of the CNC program guidance DOE published to implement the program. 

The letter highlights climate, economic, environmental justice, and power supply concerns with abandonment of the just transition agreement dictating the planned closure of Diablo Canyon’s nuclear reactors in 2024 and 2025. 

Over 50 organizations from the State of California signed onto the letter, including San Luis Obispo Mothers for Peace, Physicians for Social Responsibility-Los Angeles, SoCal 350 Climate Action, Tri-Valley CAREs, Physicians for Social Responsibility/Sacramento, San Francisco Bay Physicians for Social Responsibility, Oceanic Preservation Society, Electric Vehicle Association of CA Central Coast, Californians for Energy Choice, Parents Against Santa Susana Field Lab and more. 

Tim Judson, NIRS executive director said, “Diablo Canyon’s planned phaseout and just transition accelerates California’s climate and renewable energy goals, supports Diablo workers and local communities, and promotes economic and environmental justice. Misusing the CNC program to unravel that progress would betray President Biden’s commitments to climate and environmental justice.” He added, “The Diablo Canyon phaseout plan which California is implementing is a just transition model DOE should promote instead of seeking to preempt it. The basis for the plan shows how phasing out nuclear power plants along with fossil fuel generation can help accelerate emissions reductions, the growth of the renewable energy economy, and a just and equitable transition for workers and communities. Is DOE afraid to let that happen while it is spending billions of dollars to promote the idea that we need to invest in overly expensive, failure-prone nuclear power plants?”

By staff - IndustriALL, June 21, 2022

The transition to a more sustainable aviation sector will impact workers and trade unions are demanding concrete measures to ensure a Just Transition and a fair transformation of the sector, which is inclusive and maintains and creates decent jobs.

This week, international and European trade unions representing workers in the aerospace and aviation sectors met to discuss a united position ahead of the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) Assembly in September, at which it is hoped that the future pathway towards sustainable aviation will be agreed by international governments and key industry stakeholders.

At such a critical time, where the aviation industry faces the urgent challenge of responding the continued fallout from the Covid crisis, unions have identified the need for a coordinated industry-wide response from airlines, airports, governments, and unions to rectify capacity shortages, flight delays and beleaguered service levels that have plagued the industry for months.

Workers’ participation is critical, not just in fixing the underlying issues that are currently crippling the industry, but crucially in the addressing the long-term sustainability and decarbonisation of the industry. Workers’ participation will be essential in the social management of such a major industrial change. Climate justice cannot exist without labor justice with decent work being created through freedom of association and collective bargaining.

The meeting organized by IndustriALL Global Trade Union, International Transport Workers’ Federation, and their European counterparts industriAll European Trade Union and the European Transport Workers’ Federation follow successful collaboration on the Toulouse Declaration on the future sustainability and decarbonisation of aviation.

The aerospace and aviation sectors are intrinsically linked. Global trade union federations are particularly important in these processes playing a key role linking common needs and are essential in turning them into an international vision and strategy. Trade unions from both sectors see significant opportunities offered by a combined and cross-sectoral approach, based on a supply chain-wide vision and an international industrial strategy that is built on foundations of sustainability and decent work.

By Brett Wilkins - Common Dreams, June 21, 2022

"This defeat is just a temporary setback," said one campaigner. "We will organize to come back stronger to make our demand for fossil fuel divestment heard because fossil fuel companies are driving us toward unimaginable disaster."

Climate, environmental, and social justice advocates on Tuesday condemned the decision by a Democratic California lawmaker to kill proposed legislation that would require two of the state's leading pension funds to divest from the fossil fuel industry. 

"Today amidst a historic mega-drought, wildfires, and fossil-fueled public health crises, Assemblymember Jim Cooper, Chair of the Assembly Committee on Public Employment and Retirement, refused to allow Senate Bill 1173, California's Fossil Fuel Divestment Act, to be heard in his committee," Fossil Free California said in a statement. "This one-man veto allows the state's pensions to continue to invest billions from public funds into the fossil fuel industry, for now."

S.B. 1173 would have prohibited the California Public Employees' Retirement System (CalPERS) and the California State Teachers' Retirement System (CalSTRS)—the two largest public pension funds in the United States—from making or renewing investments in fossil fuel companies. The measure would also have required the pensions to liquidate their fossil fuel holdings by 2030. The two funds currently hold an estimated $9 billion in fossil fuel investments.

"This decision is a moral failure that disproportionately impacts young people, Indigenous communities, communities of color, and low-income communities," the coalition asserted. "Climate chaos has already cost California billions in damages and health costs from fossil fuel pollution and climate disasters. Jim Cooper, who has just been elected Sacramento County Sheriff, has reported $36,350 in Big Oil campaign contributions from this election season alone."

State Sen. Lena Gonzalez (D-33) said in a statement that "while I am deeply disappointed that my Senate Bill 1173 was not set for a hearing in the Assembly Committee on Public Employment and Retirement this week, I remain committed to the necessary and ongoing fight against the impacts of climate change on our state, and especially those communities in my district that are disproportionately impacted by the negative effects of the climate crisis."

"Teachers and state employees whose retirement futures are invested by our state's pension funds have long demanded that CalPERS and CalSTRS cease investing their money in fossil fuel companies, and this demand will only grow stronger and louder," she continued.

By Zoë Garbett - Bright Green, June 17, 2022

I was recently elected as a Green Party Councillor for Dalston. One of the first things I did in this new role, just over a week after the election (14 May), was respond to a call to help couriers in my ward in response to police presence. That evening, the police attended Ashwin Street to conduct “Operation Vespa” using vehicle checks to conduct immigration raids, which led to a clash between the police and the community – a community which responded to a call to protect delivery riders. You can read more about the events of that evening in this article and in a statement I made the next day.

This act of solidarity didn’t come from nowhere. There has been a strengthening of community response around the delivery drivers in Hackney over the years which the Hackney Green Party has played an active role in.

The Hackney Green Party has been supporting the local riders and working with their union (Independent Workers of Great Britain, IWGB) for years. The heart of Dalston, in and around Kingsland High Street, is packed with restaurants and, with the rise of home delivery apps, riders park in Ashwin Street to pick up food or to have a break.

IWGB have been holding stalls in Ashwin Street to chat to riders about what they need and encourage people to join the union since around 2017. Green Party members in Dalston have got to know riders from regularly walking through Ashwin Street and by speaking to the Union about how the Party could help. In 2019, the Dalston Green Party Newsletter, going to around 4000 homes, included four tear-off slips for residents to give to couriers when they came to their door with a delivery. The slips, two in English and two in Portuguese (the most commonly spoken language of the Ashwin Street couriers), promoted the union and had a QR code to take them to a page about joining the union. This received a great response from couriers. Local Green Party members also handed out the slips in Ashwin Street, the couriers were cautious at first – as they experience a high level of abuse and people trying to order from them on the street, but regularly attending and identifying couriers in the union to translate and promote was really successful.