Of all the campaign slogans that helped Democrats win formerly Republican-held offices in the 2018 midterm elections, the only memorable one—that of Gretchen Whitmer, who was elected governor of Michigan—was perhaps the bluntest: Fix the damn roads.
At first glance, that may seem an unlikely guide to how to persuade Americans to enact a Green New Deal. Roads, like cars and trucks (at least until they’re electrified), are so ancien régime. Then again, bikes, scooters, and pedestrians need smooth roads and sidewalks, too. And Americans at all points on the political spectrum agree that their nation’s sagging infrastructure needs shaping up. Our potholed roads, our crumbling bridges, our go-slow rails, our combustible grid; our drafty, energy-inefficient buildings; our lead-laden water systems, our porous flood controls—and beyond the merely infrastructural, our befouled air and our roasting planet—they all need fixing, do they not? And how about our economy, which even amid a decade of job creation isn’t creating the decent-paying blue-collar jobs it used to? It could use some fixing, too.
To all these ailments, a Green New Deal offers not just a plausible cure, but the only cure on offer. And yet, when pollsters run the phrase by Americans, respondents are remarkably cool to it, including many blue-collar workers whose lives and fortunes would improve if a Green New Deal came to pass.
That coolness is due in part to the demonization to which right-wing media and their ilk have subjected the Green New Deal. But it is also due to the strategic tone-deafness with which some climate activists have made their case—prescribing sacrifice to compatriots for whom the presumably fat years of American excess have largely been lean.
In fact, a Green New Deal would spark an era of clean growth. Here’s how:
Job Creation
In 2018, there were already approximately 2.1 million workers in the green-energy field: 1.3 million in such energy efficiency occupations as retrofitting, 800,000 in solar and wind energy. Any projections for the number of jobs that a Green New Deal would add to these totals depend, of course, on the level of carbon reduction the project seeks to reach, and by what year. University of Massachusetts economist Robert Pollin, who did work for the Department of Energy during the early years of the Obama presidency on the $90 billion share of the stimulus that went to green energy, has authored the most comprehensive reports on what a Green New Deal would look like in three states: New York, Washington, and Colorado. The reports outline what each state would need to do to reduce its carbon emissions by 90 percent by the year 2050, and how many jobs such a change would both create and eliminate. While he has only done preliminary work on a nationwide report, Pollin estimates that if the federal government set that 90 percent by 2050 target and allocated the funds required to reach it, it would create roughly five million new jobs in the first year of the project, rising to 7.5 million in later years.
The number of new jobs each state would create varies not just by population, of course, but also by how much of its energy is already produced by clean sources. In his studies of the three states, Pollin estimates that New York would see an increase of between 1.8 percent and 2.5 percent of total jobs from a Green New Deal program, and Washington an increase of between 1.2 percent and 1.7 percent. Colorado, by contrast, would see an increase of between 3 percent and 4 percent, because it lacks the existing hydropower generation of New York and Washington, where the hydropower stations abutting the Columbia and St. Lawrence Rivers, among others, generate a considerable share of those states’ electricity. Dry Colorado has no comparable waterways. (As Nelson Lichtenstein documents in his article in this issue, it was the original New Deal that built the dams and power stations along the Columbia River.)
Our potholed roads, our crumbling bridges, our go-slow rails, our combustible grid; our lead- laden water systems, our befouled air and roasting planet—they all need fixing, do they not?
Based on Pollin’s three state reports, it appears that a very rough one-third of the jobs the Green New Deal would generate would be blue-collar construction jobs, while the others would be jobs maintaining, running, and administering wind and solar power. The creation of construction jobs is important not just in itself, but also because construction workers and their unions have often been the most skeptical about the promise that a Green New Deal economy could enable them to maintain, much less improve, their living standards. Indeed, in some states, construction unions are allied with oil companies in opposing Green New Deal initiatives.
Absent Green New Deal plans that prioritize good jobs, their skepticism is understandable. The majority, and certainly the plurality, of construction jobs in any Green New Deal would be in retrofitting the tens of millions of buildings in the nation, and most of the retrofitting jobs created by the Obama stimulus had an hourly wage of no more than $15, which would be a step down for workers in the building trades. Under a Green New Deal, however, major retrofitting of office towers and apartment buildings would require serious construction work by serious construction workers, and could pay accordingly.
One way to ensure decent pay is to require that all such construction work be done under project labor agreements, which mandate bargaining between management and construction unions for the work to proceed. Another is that work be covered under prevailing-wage legislation (which currently exists in 28 states), which requires the payment of prevailing—customarily, union—wages on all public projects. A third requirement is that projects hire new workers from union or joint union-management apprenticeship programs.
Steve Gonzales/Houston Chronicle via AP Images
A wind power career training class at a private technical school in Houston, Texas
What are the prospects for such requirements? Some of them, particularly the hiring requirement from union apprenticeship programs, made it into a new law enacted in 2019 in Maine, where this Green New Deal statute was written with the state’s unions at the table, and where the state AFL-CIO officially endorsed it. Pollin’s plan for Colorado, commissioned by the state’s AFL-CIO and devised with continual input from that state’s building trades unions, has won the trades’ endorsement. Project labor agreements and union apprenticeships were also part of a Green New Deal ballot initiative put before Washington state voters in 2018, which a majority of that state’s unions supported, but which failed at the ballot box after fossil fuel companies spent more than $30 million on a campaign to defeat it. Hewing to their alliance with the oil industry, the state’s building trades unions opposed the measure, too.
In recent years, a substantial share of unionized construction work has been concentrated in the fossil fuel sector. The wave of anti-union legislation that swept the Midwest in the wake of the 2010 elections contained bills specifically targeting construction workers. Indiana, Kentucky, West Virginia, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Arkansas—all with newly elected Republican governors—enacted laws repealing their prevailing-wage statutes, which had the effect of substantially reducing the pay of workers on public projects. In those states and many others, the construction crews on public projects are invariably non-union. For many giant oil and pipeline companies with immense financial resources, however, maintaining union contracts on some of their projects has proved a smart political investment, winning them allies in their battles against decarbonizing the economy. (Much of the work for the oil industry involves building and maintaining pipelines, but a Green New Deal will require even more pipeline work, but of a climate-friendly nature. Due to the decay of aging water systems and to the advent of more extreme weather, says Joe Uehlein, who heads the Labor Network for Sustainability, “the entire system of storm management and delivery of fresh water needs to be rebuilt.”)
The Green New Deal plans put forth by such Democratic presidential candidates as Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Joe Biden—and former presidential candidate Jay Inslee, who was the first to put forth such a plan—could, if enacted, allay construction workers’ concerns. The plans set a high minimum wage for work on Green New Deal projects; most also call for both a prevailing-wage standard and project labor agreements, and specify ways that the work will be done by a unionized workforce. As well, the sheer size of those plans—ranging from $150 billion to $300 billion a year—signals a commitment not just to funding a new infrastructure and more energy-efficient buildings, but also to paying middle-class wages to those who build them.
The magnitude of the green-energy investments in all these plans also addresses another ailment from which the nation in general and construction workers in particular both suffer: the chronic underinvestment, both public and private, in America’s infrastructure and physical plant. In the private sector, according to one study from the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago, the share of corporate revenues going to investment since 1980 has declined by 7 percent (the share going to wages also declined by 7 percent), while the share going to shareholders through dividends and buybacks has risen by an offsetting 14 percent. In the public sector, the unwillingness of Republicans to spend public dollars on infrastructure—the Trump administration offered to cover just 10 percent of the costs of its proposed national infrastructure upgrading—has stymied efforts to build needed rail lines and a host of other long overdue projects.
What the Green New Deal offers construction workers, then, is the only plausible construction boom in the nation’s future, assuming the Democrats take the White House and Senate next year. If the project is undertaken along the lines of the plans laid out by Inslee and his fellow Democrats, it effectively guarantees union jobs at union pay with union benefits. “Addressing the climate crisis can be a full employment plan for the building trades far into the future,” says Uehlein. “We need to do a better job of making that case.”
Job Loss and Just Transitions
In 1977, the congressman to whom labor most looked to advance its interests—San Francisco Democrat Phil Burton—introduced legislation that would greatly expand the Redwood National Park in California’s north coastal region. The expansion, however, would have cost more than 2,000 loggers their jobs. Despite his indisputable bona fides as labor’s champion, Burton quickly became the target of the California union movement’s rage.
As I documented in the Prospect’s Summer 2019 issue, Burton came up with a plan to compensate the loggers until and unless they found comparable work. Under the plan, the loggers would receive full pay and benefits from a federal fund for up to six years—up to 11 years for older workers. Thus amended, Burton’s bill was endorsed not just by the Sierra Club but also by the loggers’ union (though the association of chain saw manufacturers remained opposed) and was enacted into law.
The Redwood Park Solution was largely forgotten, but the particulars of its arrangements for the workers who lost their careers now reappear in various Green New Deal proposals. In the 1970s, Tony Mazzocchi, an official of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers, advanced the idea that compensating workers in such situations had to become routine, and he gave that idea the name of “just transition.” Before that decade was out, with the crisis at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant and the discovery of toxic poisons in New York’s Love Canal, and with growing public awareness of other sites around the nation where toxic waste had been dumped, the government established a “Superfund” program to clean up such sites. “Our slogan at the time,” says Dave Campbell, who now heads a local of refinery workers in the Los Angeles area, “was, ‘We need a Superfund for workers’”—those who lost their jobs when their contaminated worksites were shut down.
Heather Rousseau/Roanoke Times via AP Images
Tunneling beneath a highway in Roanoke County, Virginia, to make way for the Mountain Valley Pipeline
In a 2016 Prospect article, Pollin and his co-author Brian Callaci tallied the number of workers in the nation’s fossil fuel industries. There were then 69,000 workers in the coal industry (a figure now reduced to roughly 50,000 as mines continue to close), with an additional 412,000 workers in supportive positions. The oil and gas industry employed 192,000 workers, with an additional 200,000 workers in support. The downsizing of those industries as part of a Green New Deal, Pollin and Callaci wrote, would take many years, so the number of displaced workers in any given year would be small relative to the total workforce. As well, a number of the workers in supportive roles would likely be able to find comparable jobs in the greener energy industries. Factoring in those considerations, Pollin and Callaci calculated that the annual costs of providing those workers with a just transition in wages and benefits over the next half-decade, as well as guaranteeing their pensions, would come to roughly $500 million per year.
Let’s say, however, that the 2016 Pollin-Callaci figure is an underestimate. Even if the figure is a billion dollars per year, that’s still considerably less than 1 percent of the yearly outlay in any of the plans put forth by the Democratic presidential candidates.
The Washington state 2018 ballot measure provided one version of that kind of just transition. It called for providing workers who’d lose their jobs with five years of full wages and benefits if they were within five years of retirement, and for other workers, comparable wages and benefits scaled to the number of years they’d been employed in the industry—until such time as they found comparable work. If the work they found offered lower wages and benefits, the workers would receive wage insurance payments scaling them up to their past levels of pay, along with payments scaling up their health insurance and pensions.
After a series of mergers, Mazzocchi’s union became part of the United Steelworkers in 2005. By then, the Steelworkers had already taken the lead in forming the BlueGreen Alliance with environmental organizations, to ensure that a transition to a green economy goes forward, but not at workers’ expense. Dave Campbell, who heads the Steelworkers local of Los Angeles–area refinery workers, notes that his members are among the most well-paid blue-collar workers in the land. For his members and other fossil fuel workers, he says, “just transition has to be very concrete—nothing merely general. People on the edge of losing their careers want to know what exactly will happen to them and their families.” Noting that members of his local make up to $125,000 a year and that comparable blue-collar jobs are very few in number, he asks, “Do we expect them to take jobs in movie theaters?”
“No family will sacrifice themselves for someone else’s family,” Campbell says. “But for the future of our children and their children, we are willing to make sacrifices together.”
Fixing Communities
When the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers first began looking for allies in their struggles to win just transitions for members losing their jobs, as plants were shuttered as toxic hazards, Campbell recalls, “we did a probe of the environmental organizations we could partner with. We basically decided that the environmental justice wing of the environmental movement was more promising. It was working class, it was in our communities, and it understood our need to put food on the table.” And, of course, those communities were often devastated by the closures, and also often bore the brunt of their proximity to the toxicity.
Historically, such communities have a disproportionate share of people of color. In Los Angeles, for instance, oil refineries are clustered in the heavily Latino community of Wilmington. In the 1960s and ’70s, the center of the city’s Latino population, East L.A., was divided and hemmed in by the greatest concentration of freeways in Southern California: The neighborhoods with the least political power got to breathe the city’s most polluted air. Throughout the nation, the residents of such neighborhoods are exposed to more illness-inducing substances—and have consistently shorter life spans—than other Americans.
Oil industry work involves building and maintaining pipelines, similar to work a Green New Deal will require: rebuilding systems of storm water management and delivery of fresh water.
So a Green New Deal needs to be not only a just transition for workers, mostly white men, who had well paying jobs in the carbon economy, but also a transition to economic opportunity and neighborhood remediation for the tens of millions of people who’ve lived on the front lines of environmental predation.
Accordingly, the Green New Deal plans put forth by the Democratic candidates and outlined in Pollin’s three state proposals include funding for those frontline communities that have suffered most from the fossil fuel economy. In the 2018 Washington ballot measure, fully one-third of the state’s Green New Deal outlays would have been spent in communities disproportionately impacted by carbon pollution. In formulating the measure, says Jeffrey Johnson, who then headed the state’s AFL-CIO, a chief concern of the drafters was “how do those disproportionately impacted by carbon pollution and climate disasters come out of this whole?”
The drafting process in Washington included representatives of those chiefly minority communities, as well as labor, business, and environmental activists. Had the measure passed, the disbursement of Green New Deal funds would have been controlled by a similarly diverse group. A governor-appointed commission with members from those communities would have been charged with directing $1.3 billion annually to various projects. Prospective grantees, says Johnson, “had to show that their projects would lower emissions, pay prevailing wages, employ community benefit agreements [which require hiring from poor and historically disadvantaged communities], use union apprenticeship programs, buy domestically produced products and materials, and respect tribal sovereignty. It would have put real people in charge of real money.”
In that sense, the Green New Deal should and can be both a top-down and bottom-up project—using government funds derived from taxing and bonding to meet urgently needed environmental standards arrived at democratically, and disbursing those funds through processes involving the impacted communities of workers and residents. Like the original New Deal, it affords America an opportunity to remake itself into a more egalitarian and prosperous nation. It is at one and the same time the way to fix the damn roads—and the only way to save the planet.
