Cash for Caulkers? « Main Street

Cash for Caulkers?

The premise: Cash for clunkers was popular and effective. Could “cash for caulkers”—government funding of home weatherization projects—be equally so?

If the answer is yes, it’s great news for all of us, since weatherization projects reduce energy use, save money over the long term, and create work now. But, as David Leonhardt writes in the New York Times, it’s more complicated than cash for clunkers.

Remember: Many homeowners could already save money by weatherizing their homes. And they are not doing so.

That’s in large part because the projects can seem so daunting. To date, energy experts, in the government and the private sector, have not done a good job of distributing useful information. What does exist tends to be either too complicated or too general. I recently asked various experts what percentage of homes should get new insulation, for example, and several replied that it varied by region — which is both true and unhelpful.

That’s one issue. Choosing what to do to your house is tough—you’re balancing the inconvenience of having to move furniture and people pounding on your walls and the question of how much it will cost and how it will save.

There’s another thing we have to think about with weatherization, though, and Leonhardt doesn’t address it. What are the labor standards going to be for the workers weatherizing houses? Will it pay a decent wage?

Construction jobs often pay pretty well, at least if they’re union. But construction workers don’t typically make nearly as much as you’d think if you heard their hourly wage, because there are seasons when there’s not much work, and jobs don’t always line up so that you go from finishing up Building A on Wednesday to starting on Building B on Thursday. Weatherization work could be even more like that—many full-scale house weatherizations would cost in the neighborhood of $4,000, which might be spread between several different contractors since it can involve electrical work, roof work, carpentry… And that’s not even getting into materials costs.

Not only that, some of the weatherizations Leonhardt talks about might be limited to much, much less than $4,000: sealing some holes in air ducts, installing a new thermostat, little stuff that—don’t get me wrong—makes a big difference in energy use and is absolutely worth doing, but that isn’t likely to produce steady full-time work and would require a really good hourly wage to be a decent job to have.

When we talk about green jobs, this is something important to remember: they have to be good jobs, too. We can’t make someone spend their life stringing together couple-hour caulking jobs at $14 per hour with big gaps in the hours they’re paid for as they drive from house to house or wait for good weather or wait for another house to need caulking and call it a good thing for the economy.