Assure Green Jobs Are Good Jobs

The economic stimulus bill under consideration by Congress will include major investments in clean energy products and services, and will have the potential to create hundreds of thousands of green-collar jobs. But a comprehensive report, commissioned by three union groups and the Sierra Club and made public on Tuesday, asserts that the House and Senate versions of the bill do not do enough to ensure that green-collar jobs will provide wages and benefits sufficient to support a family.

The study, High Road or Low Road? Job Quality In The New Green Economy, is the first study to take a close look at how workers were being treated in the emerging clean energy sector. It found considerable evidence that although a number of clean energy sector companies offer good wages and benefits, in some cases in cooperation with labor unions, many more do not. That is happening, said the report, even though they receive public subsidies that in some cases require employers to pay the prevailing wages, and because in other regions prevailing wages are too low.

High Road or Low Road? Job Quality In The New Green Economy was prepared by Good Jobs First, a respected Washington-based labor advocacy and research organization. The Apollo Alliance made important contributions to the report. Co-Director Kate Gordon and Research Associate Elena Foshay are recognized as contributing authors.

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The report came a day before more than 2,000 clean energy advocates, business executives, union members, environmentalists, and social justice leaders convened in Washington for the second annual Good Jobs, Green Jobs conference, which has quickly become one of the clean energy sector’s most influential national gatherings. Among the conference’s featured speakers are businessman and Apollo Alliance Chairman Phil Angelides and Apollo board members Van Jones (Green For All), Leo Gerard (United Steelworkers of America), Terry O’Sullivan (Laborers International Union of North America), and Carl Pope (Sierra Club).

Timely and Significant
The new report and the Good Jobs, Green Jobs conference occur during a historic moment of decision in Washington about pursuing a new direction for the American economy. A national consensus, shaped in part by the Apollo Alliance and its New Apollo Program, has formed around the idea that major investments in the clean energy sector can simultaneously address the energy crisis, the climate crisis, and the jobs crisis. That consensus helped to elect President Barack Obama and influenced the $800 billion-plus American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, currently being debated in Congress, which at last read includes more than $100 billion over the next two years for clean energy development and green-collar jobs.

Yet despite all of the attention by voters and policy makers, said Philip Mattera, the director of research at Good Jobs First and the report’s principal author, the “public discussion of green jobs has focused almost entirely on the number or type of employment opportunities that could be created by a clean energy revolution. The question of whether these new jobs will offer wages, benefits, and working conditions needed to sustain families and communities has received much less attention.”

“Just because a company purports to be green doesn’t mean that it isn’t engaging in questionable practices as far as labor is concerned,” Mattera added in an interview. “Green companies are not necessarily enlightened when it comes to labor practices.”

The Apollo Alliance defines green-collar jobs as “well-paid, career track jobs that contribute directly to preserving or enhancing environmental quality.” In its 2008 report Green-Collar Jobs in America’s Cities, the Alliance wrote that the clean energy sector was capable of developing “the kind of family-supporting jobs that once anchored the American middle class, but in the industries of the future; industries like wind turbine manufacturing, solar panel installation, energy efficiency retrofits, and green building.”

Manufacturing, Construction, Recycling Studied
High Road or Low Road? looks closely at what the authors call green-collar “job quality” in three sectors: wind and solar component manufacturing, green building, and recycling. The report finds examples in each of employers that pay their workers well, but more often those that don’t.

For instance, the authors studied manufacturing wages in wind and solar component plants owned by 14 companies in nine states. The average manufacturing production wage in the United States, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, is $18.88 an hour. In just six of those plants did workers earn a wage at or near this average. Wind component plants owned by Gamesa in Pennsylvania paid up to $20.25 an hour, and a Sanyo solar manufacturing plant in Salem, Oregon paid $22 an hour. Manufacturing wages in the other plants dropped to as low as $11 an hour.

Plants that paid the best, the report found, were required to do so by job quality standards attached to the public subsidies received by the owners. For instance, said the report, Sanyo gained benefits through Oregon’s enterprise zone program, which directs companies to pay workers at least 150 percent of the county average annual wage of $45,000, or $22 an hour.

Enforce Wage Standards
Yet even in cases where wage requirements were part of a public subsidy, the report found that those requirements were not always enforced. United Solar Ovonic, for instance, received ample subsidies to build a plant in Battle Creek, Michigan. The city’s subsidy required the company, a major Midwest solar manufacturer, to pay workers the prevailing wage, in this case $16 an hour. The company refused and threatened to take their investment elsewhere, so city officials relented. Jobs at the plant pay $14 an hour.

Moreover, said the study, some U.S. wind and solar manufacturing firms are weakening the job security of their workers by opening plants in China, Mexico, and other low-wage nations.

The report described the importance of unions and union organizing to achieve high wage green collar jobs. In places where state and local governments attach strong labor standards to economic development subsidies and enforce the standards, the report said, also have some of the highest average wages in the clean energy, green-collar job sector. ,

Workers organized by the International Brotherhood of Teamsters at a modern recycling facility in San Francisco, for instance, start at $20 an hour.

There are benefits associated with organizing the green-collar workforce. The median union wage for construction workers is $20.50 an hour, said the report, compared to $12.30 an hour for non-union workers. Over the course of a year the union worker earns $17,000 more than the non-union worker.

Several companies, the report’s authors noted, have forged strong relationships with unions. Gamesa, the Spanish wind manufacturer, is collaborating with the United Steelworkers Union, which organized its plants in Pennsylvania. The report also notes how Gerding Edlen Development Co., a real estate development company based in Portland, recruited skilled union trade workers and invested union pension funds in innovative mixed-use developments in Oregon that are state of the art in energy efficiency and environmental sustainability. Union plumbers and pipefitters in the Portland region earn $35.69 an hour plus $17.19 in benefits. Sheet metal workers get the union package of $49.95 an hour, which includes health care, retirement benefits, and training.

Organize and Benefit
Unions also have begun to take the lead in encouraging clean energy development in cities. In Newark, where the Apollo Alliance recently helped produce a new economic development strategy based on making the city cleaner and greener, Mayor Cory A. Booker, the Garden State Alliance for a New Economy, and the Laborers’ Union Local 55 built a partnership this month to weatherize homes. That pilot project, profiled in High Road or Low Road?, could lead to improving thousands of homes and provide what the report said would be thousands of “high-quality job opportunities for Newark residents.”

High Road or Low Road? asserts that the potential of the new clean energy economy to raise wages and produce middle class prosperity is keen. But by no means is it assured.

Congress has an opportunity to take a crucial step this month. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, says the report, represents “a sterling opportunity” to establish employment standards and require companies that receive federal support to pay family supporting wages with health and other benefits - to create, in short, true green-collar jobs. Such standards should be included in the federal stimulus package and they should be enforced, said the report.

Without such standards, the clean energy revolution could stall because of political opposition from workers who aren’t being paid their fair share. “The very existence of economic development subsidies,” said the report, “is based on the principle that taxpayer funds can justifiably be used to benefit private parties only if the result is job creation and rising living standards.”

Keith Schneider, a writer on the environment and energy, is communications director of the Apollo Alliance. Reach him at keith@apolloalliance.org