As the federal government prepares to spend billions of dollars promoting the creation of green jobs as part of the huge economy recovery bill, a new report warns that the jobs already being created in climate-friendly sectors of the economy do not always measure up in terms of wages and other terms of employment. The report, entitled High Road or Low Road: Job Quality in the New Green Economy, was produced by Good Jobs First (yours truly was the principal author). It was commissioned by the Change to Win labor federation, the Sierra Club, and the Teamsters and Laborers unions.
Many proponents of green development assume that the result will be good jobs. The report tested that assumption and found that it is not always valid. This is based on an examination of three sectors: manufacturing of components for wind and solar energy generation; green building; and recycling. In each sector, we found examples of employers that compensate their workers decently and treat them with respect. These include the Gamesa wind equipment manufacturing operations in Pennsylvania; developer Gerding Edlen’s commercial and residential construction projects centered in Portland, Oregon; and Norcal Waste Systems’ Recycle Central operation in San Francisco.
Yet we also found examples of purportedly green employers paying substandard wages and not treating their workers well. These include at least two wind energy manufacturing plants—one run by Clipper Windpower in Iowa and another run by DMI Industries in North Dakota—where workers initiated union organizing drives in response to issues such as poor safety conditions and then faced strong union-busting campaigns by management. Some U.S. wind and solar manufacturing firms are weakening the job security of their workers by opening parallel plants in foreign low-wage havens such as China, Mexico and Malaysia.
The report finds that many wind and solar manufacturing plants are receiving sizeable economic development subsidies from state and local governments. This use of taxpayer money provides an opportunity to raise wages and other working conditions. Many states and localities already apply job quality standards to companies receiving job subsidies or public contracts. In the report we urge wider and more aggressive use of such standards by federal as well as state and local agencies. The report offers other public policy options and urges the private U.S. Green Building Council to consider adding labor criteria to its widely used LEED standards for green construction.
The overall message is: green jobs are not automatically good jobs. We have to make them so.
Note: This item is crossposted on the Good Jobs First Clawback blog.