just transition

By Union Jake, Adam Keller, et. al. - Valley Labor Report, May 3, 2024

By Union Jake and Adam Keller - Valley Labor Report, May 1, 2024

By Veronica Wilson - Labor Network for Sustainability, April 30, 2024

On May 8, 2024, California Labor for Climate Jobs (CLCJ) will rally for a Day of Action at the California state capitol. As legislators head into final days of committee hearings and Governor Gavin Newsom prepares to announce his 2024-2025 State Budget revisions, CLCJ will turn up the volume to voice their pro-worker and pro-climate demands. Now with 15 unions on board, the coalition already has some wins like EV manufacturing block grant programs in the state to prioritize high road employers to enhance labor standards, community benefits and labor peace agreements.

Adding to that momentum, the coalition’s manufacturing, home care, service, education, food and commercial, and public employees unions will link arms to call for climate resilient schools, Cal OSHA staffing, indoor and outdoor heat protections for workers, and more. Track #workerledtransition and #labormustleadonclimate and please help amplify the worker-led transition to a climate-safe economy. You can follow these and more on CLCJ social media, including CLCJ Instagram, CLCJ Facebook, and CLCJ Twitter/X.

By Chris Litchfield - Labor Network for Sustainability, April 30, 2024

In conjunction with the US Climate Action Network and RE-AMP Network, LNS convened thirty community leaders and union activists in Chicago, April 11th and 12th, to discuss regional solidarity in the fight for just transition. Grounded by RE-AMP’s technical analysis on current state of emissions in the Midwest and updates from USCAN’s international and regional campaigns (both the Fast, Full, Fair Fossil Fuel Phase-Out and the Power 4 Southern People, NOT Southern Company campaigns, respectively), just economic and social transition, and the importance of labor’s engagement in that transition, took center stage.

What really came through was the necessity to embrace a broader framework for just transition, rooting our understanding in the history of the United States. As there has yet to be a truly just transition from the underpinnings of the US economic system, namely slavery and settler colonialism, it was agreed upon that same system cannot be expected to equitably transition from fossil fuels, and any struggle for a sustainable future has to proactively address those previous unjust transitions. A visit to the site of the Haymarket Square Rally and the resting place of the Haymarket martyrs was a further reminder of the long struggle for an equitable, sustainable future we carry forward despite violence from the right wing and the state.

By Chris Litchfield - Labor Network for Sustainability, April 30, 2024

By staff - Labor Network for Sustainability, April 30, 2024

For two years, the GKN auto parts plant in Florence, Italy, has been occupied by laid-off workers. In late March, thousands of people from all over Italy marched in solidarity with workers from the plant. The call for the March 25 demonstration was signed by hundreds of organizations.

The workers issued a plan for “reindustrialization from below” with reconversion toward sustainable mobility and renewable energy. A Reindustrialization Group has identified the skills of the workers, mapped the factory’s layout, and inventoried its machinery and infrastructure. It is now seeking projects to make use of their machinery and skills. The workers are negotiating with a company that specializes in clean energy production to explore the possibility of producing cutting-edge photovoltaic panels and batteries at the plant. Meanwhile, an “Ex GKN for Future” crowdfunding campaign is laying the groundwork for a future based on “popular shareholding.” It raised nearly 60,000 Euros in the first two weeks – anyone can invest.

To learn more: https://jacobin.com/2023/04/italy-gkn-factory-occupation-transform-production-workers-jobs-climate-change

For the crowdfunding campaign portal (in English, French, German, and Spanish, and Italian): https://www.produzionidalbasso.com/project/gkn-for-future/

By Union Jake and Adam Keller - Valley Labor Report, April 29, 2024

By Union Jake and Adam Keller - Valley Labor Report, April 30, 2024

By Luis Feliz Leon - Labor Notes, April 30, 2024

Michael Göbel, president and CEO of Mercedes-Benz U.S. International, stepped down from his post yesterday, according to a video message that workers were shown.

Göbel had groused in an April captive-audience meeting about a worker’s claim that Mercedes had come for the “Alabama discount”: low wages. His departure is another win for Mercedes-Benz workers, who already scored pay bumps and an end to wage tiers—and they haven’t even voted on the union yet.

The company and Alabama politicians are ramping up their anti-union campaign as an election draws near. The 5,200 Mercedes workers at a factory complex and electric battery plant outside Tuscaloosa will vote May 13-16 on whether to join the United Auto Workers, with a vote count May 17.

They’re following close on the heels of Volkswagen workers in Chattanooga, Tennessee, who notched a historic victory April 19—the first auto plant election win for the UAW in the South since the 1940s.

The VW vote was a blowout: 2,628 yes to 985 no, with 84 percent turnout. The National Labor Relations Board certified the results April 30, meaning VW is legally required to begin bargaining with the union.

By Katie Myers - The New Republic, April 28, 2024

(excerpt...)

Climate regulations and the Inflation Reduction Act’s generous incentives are now stimulating electric vehicle manufacturing. Despite the Biden administration’s pro-labor economic agenda, IRA funding—and thus billions of dollars in public and private investment—has largely gone to areas with low union density, spurring worries among autoworkers that the E.V. shift could create a second tier of lower-paid, nonunion workers spearheading the transition to electric vehicles, working in dangerous conditions with flammable elements like lithium.

In 2022, Volkswagen broke ground on E.V. production and assembly; the same year, the Mercedes plant in Tuscaloosa, Alabama—UAW’s next battle, organizers tell me—began manufacturing an electric SUV. In the most recent union contract between UAW and the Big Three automakers, General Motors and Stellantis agreed to allow joint-venture E.V. manufacturing plants under the union umbrella, and now, Tennessee may be the next step.

Since the beginning conversations about reducing dependence on fossil fuels—a necessary transition that nonetheless could have deleterious impacts on workers across steel, coal, oil, auto, and building trades industries—workers have demanded a “just transition”: an energy transition that prevents as much of the workforce as possible from being dislocated, allows for training and opportunity, and provides jobs equal to or better than the ones that came before. Environmental organizations have taken up the demand, too, seeing that a united front for labor rights and environmental justice is more powerful than keeping the two at loggerheads, as right-wing politicians might prefer. A just transition is what workers in the South are demanding as the IRA funds flood in.

“We’re seeing a bunch of E.V. manufacturers come here,” said Michael Adriaanse, “and they should be union.” Adriaanse organizes with the Blue Oval Good Neighbors Committee. In rural, working-class Black communities in west Tennessee, this labor and community coalition is mobilizing to bargain with Blue Oval City, a Ford joint-venture electric vehicle plant that’s the recipient of the largest public investment the state of Tennessee has ever made, with an added $9.2 billion in funding from the Department of Energy. The VW victory has given workers hope for their efforts to negotiate good jobs and community benefits with the E.V. industry, he added. But it’s going to be hard-won.