We’re giving up Styrofoam cups here at our building in Washington, D.C. Also doing an energy audit and taking a few other steps as a start toward making our building a green one—just some of the actions the AFL-CIO announced this week, in time for Earth Day.
Back in 1999, there was surprise over the "Teamsters and Turtles" alliance during protests against the World Trade Organization meetings in Seattle. For many people, that was the first sign that we are not your father’s labor movement.
Since then, we’ve gone far further, allying with environmentalists not only against destructive trade agreements but joining forces over the need to ensure that newly created green jobs are not low-paying jobs but jobs that pay well and create and strengthen the U.S. middle class.
The Apollo Alliance was the first coalition to emerge from our early alliances with the environmental movement. The Apollo Alliance was created in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 tragedy to catalyze a clean energy revolution in America and it includes union, environmental, business and community groups focused on building a new energy economy. Apollo just released Make It In America: the Apollo Green Manufacturing Action Plan (GreenMAP), a series of policy recommendations aimed at revitalizing America’s manufacturing sector by investing significant federal funding in the domestic manufacture of clean energy components.
The Blue Green Alliance, a partnership of four unions and two environmental organizations, was formed in 2006, and in its most recent effort, published principles for comprehensive climate change legislation. You can read the policy statement here.
In February, our affiliated Working for America Institute (WAI) announced $1 million in funding for a new Center for Green Jobs to ensure the green jobs created under the Obama economic recovery bill are family-supporting jobs. The Center for Green Jobs has created standards to help community-level unionists assess the quality of jobs created under the recovery act. Click here for more about the standards.
Unions with members in a variety of industries are helping create a greener future (h/t to James Parks at the AFL-CIO Now blog for compiling this list):
- The Mine Workers (UMWA), Boilermakers (IBB), Electrical Workers (IBEW) and the AFL-CIO Industrial Union Council (IUC) are aggressively promoting the use of coal-generated electricity to provide jobs and help clean up the environment. Along with the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, the unions earlier this month released a study showing that using advanced clean coal technologies that capture and safely store carbon dioxide will create millions of high-skilled, high-wage jobs for U.S. workers. You can read the study here.
- UAW members last year produced environmentally friendly vehicles or components in plants in 30 cities in 14 states.
- Members of the United Steelworkers (USW) manufacture wind turbines at several plants in Pennsylvania. The proliferation of wind turbines is beginning to revive shuttered steel mills across the country. In Gary, Ind., two closed steel mills have been reopened to help meet the demand for steel plate to be used in wind turbines. The ore for these mills is mined by USW members and shipped on boats crewed by Steelworkers.
- The Machinists (IAM) work in numerous industries critical to reducing energy consumption and pollution, from energy-efficient heating and air conditioning systems and appliances to components for modernizing energy distribution systems in buildings.
- Members of the AFL-CIO Building and Construction Trades Department are building more green buildings that use renewable energy to run more efficiently. One example is the David Lawrence Convention Center in Pittsburgh, site of the AFL-CIO’s upcoming 2009 convention and the August Netroots Nation convention. Built with union labor, it is the only entirely green convention center in the country.
- Last year, the Plumbers and Pipe Fitters unveiled its Green Training Trailer that’s now touring the country to introduce UA apprentices, journeyman-level workers and green building expo participants to renewable energy technologies and sustainable building concepts. Take a virtual tour of the trailer at the UA website, www.ua.org, and click on “The UA has Gone Green” icon.
As Labor Secretary Hilda Solis told a Senate committee this week, “We don’t want [green] jobs that don’t go anywhere. We want jobs with a career path.”
These are jobs that will provide economic security for our middle-class families while reducing our nation’s dependence on imported energy. These are also jobs that traditionally cannot be outsourced.
Speaking of green. . . if you haven’t already, please take a minute to contribute to the Marcy Wheeler Investigative Blogging Fund. It’s all organic. And if we don’t keep investigative reporting alive, who will?
Related posts:
Spotlight
Support this site!
Subscribe to the newsletter
Advertise on Firedoglake
Send
us your tips
Make us your homepage
About Firedoglake
Advanced search
unions – looking out for the worker, the economy, and the environment.
thanks tula.
Who knew the Unions were full of DFHs?
Electric cars are the future!
GM should continue with plans to build the Volt, an earlier generation electric car GM produced called the EV 1 was a huge success.
Once people see the advantages to driving electric (no tune ups, oil changes, no belts, hoses or anti- freeze and best of all, no trips to the gas station )they will never go back to gas.
There could be no better investment in than to invest in becoming energy independent! We need to utilize everything in out power to reduce our dependence on foreign oil including using our own natural resources.Create cheap clean energy,new badly needed green jobs and reduce our dependence on foreign oil.The high cost of fuel this past year seriously damaged our economy and society.The cost of fuel effects every facet of consumer goods from production to shipping costs.It costs the equivalent of 60 cents per gallon to charge and drive an electric car.If all gasoline cars,trucks, and SUV’s instead had plug-in electric drive trains the amount of electricity needed to replace gasoline is about equal to the estimated wind energy potential of the state of N.D.We have so much available to us such as wind and solar.Let’s spend some of those bail out billions and get busy harnessing this energy. Create cheap clean energy, badly needed new jobs and reduce our dependence on foreign oil. What a win-win situation that would be for our nation at large! I just read a really good new book out by Jeff Wilson called The Manhattan Project of 2009 Energy Independence Now. http://www.themanhattanprojectof2009.com Investing in energy independence would positively impact our economy and futures.
unless all grants and laws and funding — and the stimulus — include mandated purchase of domestic equipment, most green jobs will simply be installing foreign-made products — as it is now.
Existing workers can do that and do do that now — and more jobs have not been created where utility companies have installed solar or wind equipment (as in Texas).
becoming energy independent does not in itself create green jobs — manufacturing and installing and maintaining and upgrading with only domestically-manufactured products can.
This is a little off the mark for this post, but I just had to comment. On my own blog I recently commented about the Republicans and their opposition to a cap and trade system. The reason given is that they feel it will cost too much, which simply isn’t true.
These same Republicans have also railed against Obama’s stimulus plan, saying that it burdens the next generation with too much debt.
Now at some point we are going to have to transition from fossil fuels to renewables, and that will cost money (preferably big business, and not the consumer). Since it is an inevitability that we are going to have to transition, shouldn’t these conservatives want to transition now, and prevent that cost from being passed on to the next generation?
Here is my post…Tell me what you think. Or if you are opposed to links, just comment here.
http://www.progessnotcongress.org
and promoting coal is not green in any way — there’s no such thing as clean coal.
Can’t ship out those Green jobs but they can bring in the H-1b visa’a for those jobs that Americans won’t do. They also have illegal immigration to abuse and force down living standards and wages.
Notice they didn’t pass that little piece called “buy American” in the Stimulus?
So, where do you think the “High Speed Rails” are coming from?
Aren’t they being made by foriegn companies and imported? Of course Americans are to stupid and lazy to manufacture and engineer these sort of items. Hey, Republicans say so it must be true.