Labor and Green Jobs
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I was very happy to be interviewed and quoted for this excellent Ella Nilsen piece at Vox on the labor movement’s reticent on green jobs. To me, this statement, which I’ve used before, is the fundamental issue with green jobs:
“The fossil fuel industries were unionized in long struggles that were classic labor stories,” said University of Rhode Island labor historian Erik Loomis. “Now, they’re in decline and you have these new industries. But a green capitalist is still a capitalist, and they don’t want a union.”
About 4 percent of solar industry workers and 6 percent of wind workers are unionized, according to the2020 US Energy and Employment Report.The percentage of unionized workers in natural gas, nuclear, and coal power plants is about double that, around 10 to 12 percent unionized (although still not a huge amount). In addition, transportation, distribution, and storage jobs — which exist largely in the fossil fuel sector — about 17 percent of the jobs are unionized. Still, the solar and wind unionization rates are in line with the albeit very low national rate of unionized workers in the private sector, which is about 6.3 percent.
If green capitalists actually care about saving the planet, they need to welcome or at least accept unions into the workplace. If they don’t, then a sustainable planet simply isn’t that important to them.
I also gave a bit of historical context:
The process of organizing mineworkers started in the late 1800s and continued for decades. It was a grueling struggle —union-busting tactics of coal and oil barons weren’t just dragging their feet on better pay, they were literally willing to fight to keep wages low.
“Not only is the work horrible and you have mass death, but these coal companies were literally killing workers; they were murdering organizers,” Loomis, the labor historian, told Vox. In the early 1920s, a yearslong struggle between West Virginia coal workers and their companies turned into a violent battle between an “army of miners 10,000 strong” and private planes organized by coal companies bombarding miners with “bleach and shrapnel bombs,” according to the Smithsonian Magazine.
The result of these hard-fought victories was the height of labor power in the US, ushered in by the New Deal policies of Franklin Delano Roosevelt as well as the massive economic mobilization of WWII. By 1953, 35.7 percent of private-sector workers belonged to unions, according to a 2016 American Journal of Public Health article. Due to years of anti-labor policies, that number dropped to just 6.3 percent by 2020, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Public-sector workers in unions, including teachers, police, and firefighters, are over five times that number — around 34.8 percent.
The struggle to unionize workers in the new energy sources of the future hasn’t met opposition as violent as those mineworkers did, but it’s still opposition from the new barons of the 21st century. For instance, Tesla CEO Elon Musk — who is frequently contending with Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos for the title of richest man on the planet — has taken to Twitter to question why his employees would want a union (in addition to manufacturing electric cars, Tesla is also a leading solar panel manufacturer).