This Is How to Create a Green Economy That Works for All

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While Washington dithers, a few enterprising towns and cities have been figuring out locally based strategies to decarbonize, and revealing valuable global lessons about reorganizing their economies. In Massachusetts, the Green Justice Campaign, an offshoot of Community LaborUnited, an alliance of unions and advocacy groups, started with a simple plan: weatherize local homes and leverage public funds to curb carbon consumption and cut energy bills.

The organizers put grassroots muscle behind Washington’s feel-good rhetoric on the green economy and went to people’s doorsteps to recruit households and local workers, negotiated with vendors and pressed state officials to enact broad emissions-reduction standards and support for renewable energy transition. Though it operated on a small scale, the green agenda was ambitious in treating the community like an ecosystem—a collaborative climate adaptation fueled by their own labor and serving families’ material needs.

The coalition’s principles of “green justice” foregrounds economic equity for immigrants and people of color. Working-class communities of color do, after all, have a special stake in theclimate change battle, since they are disproportionately burdened by the social and health problems posed by carbon-driven industries.

Under a set of new state policies aimed at promoting energy efficiency and green-technology development, the coalition crafted a weatherization project around a grassroots workforce program to give local workers a deep investment in the energy transition. Advocates worked with communities to push for structural changes in the home renovation sector, which was largely non-unionized and minimally regulated, and rife with abuses such as unsafe working conditions and wage theft.

To ensure decent working conditions, the coalition built solid labor standards into the contracting process, including protections for occupational safety and regulatory oversight of workplace conditions. The coalition also helped broaden access to jobs for poor and disadvantaged workers by pushing strong protections against employment discrimination and the misclassification of workers as independent contractors. The program also included commitments by the firms to subcontract with union workers to help raise wages and job security.

In their evaluation report, the coalition concluded, “the gains we have made will ensure an estimated $14.3 million in collective wage gains for weatherization workers each year.” As more homes get fixed up, they yielded savings on residential energy bills, income gains for workers, and on the environmental side, a cleaner, less carbon-heavy environment for local communities. All that in turn saved the state tens of millions of dollars, the group says, which would otherwise supported benefits like food stamps, Medicaid and, yes, home-energy subsidies.

The big data might not mean much to local families who are more worried about making rent than preserving glaciers, but Green Justice offered them a clear “value proposition:” on top of engaging officials and mainstream environmental groups, the group observed, “We also won credibility by bringing a new dimension to the discussion—equity.”

The project is modest in scale, but stands as a model of a collective social contract that connects the dignity of work and the integrity of the environment. Rational climate policy doesn’t have to be complicated, it just has to work within the complexity of human ecology, turning social tension between communities and natural resources into momentum for social change.

Labor is at the center of that equity concept. Environmental-labor coalitions advocate for high-caliber clean energy jobs programs, based on comprehensive training and apprenticeships, which track people into living wage jobs with health and retirement benefits, backed by union representation.

http://www.thenation.com/blog/179505/how-create-green-economy-works-all#

Edited April 25, 2014 by Porterhouse

[Mr. Big Dog 10,747]

This kind of pinko commie ####### doesn't do jack to solidify the Banana Republic Status of this nation! How does the oligarchy benefit from this nonsense? That's right, they don't. So take it and shove it where the sun don't shine.

[Danno 1,228]

Ever since Glen Beck outed Van Jones and he got run out of the White House...... the Green revolution just kinda wilted with Obama..... I suspect his heart was never in it (never mind his wild claims).