Making green jobs good jobs

Right on time for the 2009 Green Jobs Conference, this week Change to Win released a report titled High Road or Low Road?  Job Quality in the New Green Economy.  The report looks at wages and conditions for jobs in a variety of green workplaces, and finds that not all is well in the green collar economy.

The bad news is that some green jobs are low-paying and subject to union-busting and off-shoring, just like jobs anywhere else.  The report cites wages as low as $8.25 / hour in a recycling plant and $11 / hour in renewable energy manufacturing.  Like other manufacturing jobs, green manufacturing for products like windmills can be offshored, and that is already happening.  And jobs everywhere are subject to aggressive anti-union activities - in fact, the head of the National Green Building Committee (an initiative of Associated Builders and Contractors) is W. Brewster Earle, president of Comfort Systems USA Energy Services, a large heating, ventilation, and cooling systems company which has sought to undermine union activity in its workforce for years.

There is, on the hand, plenty of good news to go around too.  That includes reports of stellar green employers, like wind energy manufacturerGamesa, and examples of good municipal initiatives to give workers good, green jobs, like the LA Clean Trucks program and the Newark weatherization training program.

As Tod wrote yesterday, it now appears that the stimulus package will be passed by the Senate within a few days.  Despite the out-of-whack priority given to tax cuts over spending, the stimulus should still include a good chunk of change for green spending.  The question now is, how much of that spending will support good jobs?  There is some language in the bill for enforcing wage protection laws, but that's about it in terms of worker protection.

While I'd ideally like to see stronger worker protection languge in the bill - for example, language which allows workers at any company which receives stimulus spending money to organize by card-check - it looks like that is unlikely to happen.  I think it will be incumbent on the Obama administration, as well as any local and state agencies to which the funds are distributed, to attach reasonable regulations to this money.  At a bare minimum, companies which receive stimulus spending should be paying a living wage.  More than that, they should not be allowed to engage in union-busting, and should be compelled to remain neutral in the face of union organizing drives (it also follows that they should also contract in good faith with their workers, although I'm not sure how easily good-faith bargaining requirements could be written into regulation.)  Such requirements will not water-down the green nature of the stimulus; on the contrary, they will make the green collar economy more attractive to workers, and will incentivize more and more people to enter this workforce and become available for the massive task of greening the economy.