Anthony Vazquez/Chicago Sun-Times via AP
Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker signs the state’s Climate and Equitable Jobs Act at Shedd Aquarium in Chicago, September 15, 2021.
Gina Raimondo will today release guidelines on how applications for manufacturing subsidies under the $53 billion CHIPS and Science Act will be evaluated. These could include whether applicants will get extra points for provisions long sought by the labor movement, such as project labor agreements and prevailing-wage commitments, which pave the way for union contracts.
For a model of what should be done, we can look at the most transformative agreement to date combining goals for decarbonization, well-paid union jobs, and climate justice at the state level. This is the Climate and Equitable Jobs Act (CEJA), enacted in Illinois in September 2021, before the major federal climate investments in the Inflation Reduction Act. In fact, it helped influence some details of President Biden’s program.
In the 2018 election, Democrat J.B. Pritzker won the governorship and Illinois became a trifecta state. Under the previous Republican governor, the state had enacted a law in 2016 with some decarbonization targets, but relying on low wages. Organized labor was not at the table, and Illinois began importing out-of-state non-union contractors who paid wages in the range of $15 an hour.
After 2018, the stars aligned, helped along by a new national labor-led group called Climate Jobs, which has state coalition affiliates in Illinois and five other states, including New York, Connecticut, and Maine. The entire state labor movement became a key part of the Climate Jobs Illinois coalition; not just the building trades, which stood to gain from construction, installation, and operating jobs, but both teachers unions and SEIU.
“When you talk about climate with organized labor,” says Pat Devaney, the Illinois state AFL-CIO secretary treasurer and labor’s lead negotiator on climate legislation, “that’s a really difficult conversation, because we have a lot of jobs in the fossil industry, and those are good union, paying jobs with great benefits.”
But the coalition held, and the result was a startling set of gains and a uniting of climate, labor, and racial justice activists and goals. The Illinois law coalition is now a model for other states.
Illinois joins 22 other states with explicit commitments to get to zero carbon by a date certain, but the Illinois plan is the most far-reaching and specific. It requires Illinois to be carbon-free by 2045. This is not just an aspirational goal. The law establishes specific interim targets along the way and carbon phaseouts. For instance, all coal and oil-fired plants, except for two municipally owned systems, must shut down by 2030.
That is a remarkably ambitious schedule, given that Illinois today gets about half of all its power from coal, oil, and gas, about 40 percent from nuclear, and only 10 percent from renewables such as solar and wind. The new generating capacity will be about 55 percent solar and 45 percent wind. The state’s new renewable portfolio standard (RPS) requires 50 percent renewables by 2035 and 100 percent by 2045.
The law also has the nation’s most stringent requirements to make sure that the new jobs are union. All utility-scale renewable-energy projects must have project labor agreements and pay prevailing wages. This effectively means that all of them will be union from the start. The prevailing-wage requirement extends to all clean-energy projects other than rooftop solar.
The Illinois success is latest success of an effort that dates back more than half a century to get organized labor and environmentalist movements on the same side.
The Illinois program provides a prodigious $580 million a year to subsidize renewable-energy projects. Costs are initially covered by relatively modest rate increases, but these will soon turn into net savings. One study by Mark Pruitt, former director of the Illinois Power Agency, projects that achieving 40 percent renewable energy by 2030 would yield over $1.2 billion in net lower electricity costs. As more federal funding becomes available, there can be even more progress under the Illinois framework at less cost to ratepayers.
Some random breaks also helped get the law enacted. ComEd, a leading utility, got caught in a bribery scandal that weakened its usual political influence. The scandal spilled over onto House Speaker Michael Madigan, a close ally of the utilities, who was ousted. A progressive, Chris Welsh, became Speaker in January 2021. Don Harmon, who became Senate president in 2018, was a longtime champion of renewable energy.
Until recently, environmental justice has meant mainly reversing historic harms done to communities of color, like from putting toxic facilities in their neighborhoods, as well as getting the lead out of water pipes and creating housing opportunities that are both affordable and green. The newer climate justice movement is broader. On that front, the Illinois law makes concrete commitments to get people of color into good union jobs in the green economy, through both pre-apprenticeship and apprenticeship programs, backed by $80 million in state spending. This includes a barrier reduction fund, which can be spent on transportation to get workers to the job site and child care assistance.
“Previously, there were aspirational goals,” says Devaney. “In CEJA they are hard requirements for contractors to receive the tax credits.”
Labor gets so much out of this deal that the trades can be more generous about broadening access to their ranks. According to Chynna Hampton, who leads the coalition’s efforts in pre-apprenticeship commitments for communities of color, “the unions are in lockstep with us. They are going to be the ones assisting with outreach, information sessions, and placements. They are going to be the ones coming out and talking to the contractors about actually hiring these folks.”
And thanks to the involvement and leadership of the Illinois affiliates of the NEA and the AFT, Illinois’s new law includes a funded carbon-free schools program. It requires utilities to assess needs and install solar energy infrastructure in public schools, which will also create more good union jobs. The program is state-funded, but thanks to a similar provision in Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, federal money will also flow.
The law even includes a displaced energy worker bill of rights, with $40 million to help those workers find other training and job opportunities. It is a baby step toward a long-sought goal of labor-climate alliances of a just transition for fossil fuel workers.
ENACTMENT OF THIS LANDMARK took extensive negotiation, collaboration, and trust between the state’s labor and environmental groups. There was no way to reach these goals without keeping Illinois’s 11 nuclear plants online for some years, even subsidizing them, since nuclear represents such a large proportion of the state’s non-carbon generating capacity. The state’s nuclear plants also provide hundreds of union jobs, many of them in parts of Illinois with few other sources of good blue-collar jobs. The law provides $700 million in subsidies for nuclear over five years, and then begins a gradual phaseout.
Nuclear is far from ideal, but as a nonpolluting fuel it is essential to the post-carbon transition. As serious legislative players, environmentalists have come a long way, since in the past they tended to be opposed to nuclear across the board.
Among the most contentious issues in finalizing the law was how to treat the state’s two large municipally owned power systems, which are heavily invested in coal-fired generators. An overly rapid shutdown could have bankrupted local governments, which sold bonds to finance these projects. The compromise allows a gradual decommissioning, concluding in 2045, with a 45 percent reduction by 2038.
The Illinois success is latest success of an effort that dates back more than half a century to get organized labor and environmentalist movements on the same side. This is no small achievement, since the dirty carbon economy has been substantially unionized, and the promises of green jobs that are also well-paid union jobs have been slow to materialize.
The founding father of this effort in the late 1960s was Tony Mazzocchi, a visionary leader of what was then the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers Union (OCAW), now part of the Steelworkers. Mazzocchi, who died in 2002, was also an early champion of worker health and safety efforts, understanding that so many of the workplace hazards that were sickening and killing his members were environmental. He was a major force behind enactment of the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970 that created OSHA.
And it was Mazzocchi who coined the concept of a just transition, meaning that workers who lose their jobs, as the dirty economy is replaced by a greener one, should not have to pay the price, but should get either generous pensions or other good job opportunities. So far, there are several ingenious and cost-effective blueprints, but nothing remotely adequate in actual policy.
Biden’s several laws combining environmental and jobs goals demonstrate what the federal government can do when it combines serious money with tough standards. But they are only as good as the details of their implementation. That, in turn, depends on whether progressive coalitions are fully mobilized to contest the immense residual corporate power.
The Illinois success shows what can be achieved when all the pieces come together. Let’s see which side Raimondo is on.
