The concept behind a “just transition,” enabling fossil-fuel workers and others to move from their current climate-damaging jobs to ones that pay as well and have equal benefits, is obviously rational. But implementing this concept isn’t easy, as the new book, Power Lines: Building a Labor-Climate Justice Movement, explores.
“Climate politics is a struggle over power,” writes author and professor Matthew T. Huber in the book’s preface. As Miya Yoshitani and Jeff Ordower state in the introduction, “… decades of relentless messaging and policy driven by corporate polluters have created the false paradigm of ‘jobs versus the environment.’”
In a phone interview, Power Lines co-editor Ordower, who is also the North American director of 350.org, said the labor-climate justice movement is clarifying the role of “global financial capital, that will do everything they can to divide us.” He called out the book’s first chapter, “The Dream and the Nightmare”—written by Norman Rogers, second vice president of United Steelworkers, Local 675—as elucidating the challenges and possibilities.
“Over the last year-and-a-half, labor and environmental groups in California have been meeting to better understand each other’s positions and to develop new platforms that take into account the needs of workers, communities, and the planet,” Rogers writes.
The East Bay has been, and still is, on the front lines of this power struggle. Power Lines’ introduction goes on to cite the Asian Pacific Environmental Network’s work in Richmond. Yoshitani is its former executive director, and APEN’s years-long fight for environmental justice in this “fenceline” community, dating back to 1996, is cited for efforts to bring together Chevron refinery workers with Richmond residents.
Yoshitani writes more extensively about APEN’s work in the chapter, “Resilient Communities Are Organized Communities.” In it, Amee Raval, APEN’s policy and research director, notes her organization’s Resilience Before Disaster Report was jointly developed with the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) California, along with the BlueGreen Alliance, which is dedicated to uniting labor and environmental organizations to fight climate change.
Another chapter, “Building a Worker-Led Movement for Climate Justice,” written by Brooke Anderson, tells the story of her journey with the East Bay Alliance for Sustainable Economy, the now-defunct Climate Workers and other organizations as they gained local victories, such as opposing the expansion of the Chevron Richmond refinery in 2014, as well as challenges from both inside and outside unions.
Anderson makes a vital point: “The realities of working poverty make it hard for workers to participate in their union on the most bread-and-butter issues, let alone those that feel one step removed.”
Keith Brower Brown is the labor/climate change organizer for Labor Notes, a media and education project for union activists. He has been active in East Bay local organizing during the last decade with “rank-and-file union members, doing bottom-up organizing,” he said, including the IBEW, Iron Workers and the UAW.
“Just transition has been ‘greenwashed’ by token programs that are empty rhetoric,” he said in a phone interview, also noting that although legislation is important, more important are issues such as union contracts in new, green industries, job-transfer guarantees and direct involvement from management, allowing workers to see “where is my place in this?”
What has worked locally, he said, are the teachers’ unions, including Oakland’s, focus on pushing for action on climate change as they negotiate contracts. He also cited the East Bay’s People’s Transit Alliance, helping to make the transition to electric buses, and SEIU’s work in Richmond on the “Make Polluters Pay” initiative.
Moving forward, Ordower named three questions to be addressed: What does labor do internally? How do climate activists organize with workers in mind? And, how are we organizing workers for the “new economy”?
Young workers will play a big role in this, argue Maria Brescia-Weiler and Liz Ratzloff in their chapter, “Young Workers Can Bridge the Labor and Climate Movements,” identifying in particular the Young Worker Listening Project, launched in 2019 by the Labor Network for Sustainability.
The Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act, Ordower said, has added not just more jobs, but more union and green-industry jobs. “But four years is not enough,” he said. “The more we continue to have administrations that understand workers’ rights and put money into the new economy, then we build from below.”
Ordower doesn’t expect everyone will read Power Lines cover-to-cover. “Look at something that interests you,” he said. “Understand the false narrative about ‘labor vs. climate.’ And be aware that all organizing efforts are challenging. These are historic fights.”
Jeff Ordower will speak about ‘Power Lines’ and the future of the labor-climate justice alliance on Sept. 17, from 6-7pm, at Manny’s, 3092 16th St., San Francisco. Tickets $18.
