Here’s a rare spot of good news. A Bloomington, Indiana GE plant once slated for closure will now be the site of investment in energy-efficient refrigerators:
The factory, which employs 585 members of Local 2249, will hire 200 more workers, part of a $93 million facility upgrade to add a new line of side-by-side refrigerators that will incorporate “green” insulation and other components.
Bloomington Local 2249 Business Manager Carven Thomas said the news elated members:
In 2008, we were on that obituary list. It was us. I hope this example will become a blueprint for company-labor relations and help reinvent manufacturing in the United States.
On Monday, GE shut down the plant temporarily to gather workers as well as local and state officials to share the news that instead of closing, selling, or spinning off the plant, the company was in fact making a major investment in the facility, adding the new line in Bloomington and bringing some jobs back to the United States from Mexico. IBEW International President Edwin D. Hill and Sixth District Vice President Lonnie Stephenson were in Bloomington for the announcement.
The Bloomington plant is among four that will benefit from the $432 million investment in “cool refrigeration” technology. The move will create 500 new green jobs by 2014 and brings GE’s total U.S. investment in appliance manufacturing announced since 2009 to more than $1 billion and jobs created to 1,300.
A company release says the factories will use a top-to-bottom redesign process that maximizes efficiency known as “lean” manufacturing. Most of the new units will be smart grid-enabled to save energy and cut costs. They’ll use refrigeration insulation that dramatically cuts greenhouse gas emissions. And the plants themselves will reduce carbon emissions 90 percent, GE says.
Of course this is just one of many, many similar steps GE and other corporations need to make, but it’s heartening nonetheless.
Meanwhile, the AFL-CIO blog covers a call for more investment in American jobs:
By rebuilding our nation’s transportation infrastructure, we could create 3.7 million jobs, 600,000 alone in manufacturing, according to a new action plan released today by the Apollo Alliance.
The Clean Transportation Manufacturing Action Plan (TMAP) calls for an investment of $40 billion a year over the next six years to modernize and shore up our nation’s roads, bridges, mass transportation and advanced vehicles. The plan was developed by a bipartisan group of union members, business owners, environmental and community activists and political leaders.
For decades, the United States has all but ignored mass transit. In fact, since 2005, U.S. companies and governments have spent more than $10 billion to purchase rail cars, tracks and other mass transit equipment overseas, United Steelworkers (USW) President Leo Gerard said during a telephone press conference today. That $10 billion is money that should have been spent here.
Today, existing U.S. public transit bus, rail vehicle and clean truck supply chains support some 40,000 U.S. manufacturing jobs. There are more than 375 existing companies that could scale up to meet expanded demand if Congress is willing to put TMAP into action, Gerard says.
The potential is there. Now we need a government that will follow through with funding and incentives.
Tags: green jobs, Jobs, outsourcing
The current oil spill on the Gulf of Mexico will kill birds and fish and animals, possibly entire populations of them. It will pollute the waters in which people swim and fish and possibly the water they drink. It will devastate the economies of the states it hits—good-bye to commercial fishing, tourism, and who knows what else.
Add those to the arguments for clean energy and green jobs. The choice is so clear—oil flooding the ocean and devastating the economy, or building a new, clean energy economy that employs millions, moves us away from dependence on foreign oil, and leaves the world a better place for future generations.
Tags: clean energy, green jobs
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.
Tags: green jobs, Jobs
Mike Elk at Campaign for America’s Future draws attention to something really important when we talk about green jobs: Making sure that those jobs stay in the U.S. Specifically, GE is sending all of their manufacturing of compact fluorescent lightbulbs to China.
Why would they do that?
Ohio could indeed be a hub of new light bulb production. Recently, a Chinese-owned manufacturer of high-efficiency light bulbs has opened a factory, citing Ohio as having some of the world’s most highly skilled light-bulb workers.
Ohio’s legacy of bulb production, and its factories that could easily be converted from incandescent production to CFL production, presents a grand opportunity to employ workers in building a green energy economy in Ohio.
The IMPACT Act introduced by Brown in the Senate would help small and medium-sized manufacturers transition to the clean energy economy. Brown’s bill creates a $30 billion Manufacturing Revolving Loan Fund to provide these manufacturers with much-needed access to credit to improve energy efficiency and retool for the clean energy industry.
The Apollo Alliance—a coalition of business, labor, and environmental groups—estimates that the IMPACT Act could create 680,000 direct manufacturing jobs nationally and 1,972,000 related jobs over the next five years.
So far, GE has shown every intention to take the American tax dollars being used to subsidize the green-energy economy and use them to build Chinese factories and pay Chinese workers.
So Ohio has the skilled workers and the factory facilities, and needs the jobs. But GE is going to China, with our tax dollars. Remember this whenever anyone gets started with rhetoric about how workers need to be retrained, learn new skills if they don’t want their jobs shipped overseas. Nope. Companies are pretty much going to ship jobs overseas even when their workers are already skilled. Bills like the IMPACT Act will help create incentives for some companies to stay. But we also need stronger regulations and trade policies, and we need to shine a light on companies like GE that talk big about the importance of manufacturing in the U.S. while moving their own production to China.
Read Mike’s whole piece for more.
Tags: green jobs, Ohio
In December 2008, the New York Times ran an opinion piece by Linda Hirshman questioning how economic stimulus would benefit women, given their low concentrations in the construction industries where significant amounts of the stimulus would be spent.
Back before the feminist revolution brought women into the workplace in unprecedented numbers, this would have been more understandable. But today, women constitute about 46 percent of the labor force. And as the current downturn has worsened, their traditionally lower unemployment rate has actually risen just as fast as men’s. A just economic stimulus plan must include jobs in fields like social work and teaching, where large numbers of women work.
The bulk of the stimulus program will provide jobs for men, because building projects generate jobs in construction, where women make up only 9 percent of the work force.
She pointed specifically to green jobs, as well, as predominantly male, and argued that “jobs for women can be created by concentrating on professions that build the most important infrastructure — human capital,” and funding should be allocated there, to teachers and social workers and librarians.
Teachers and social workers and librarians are incredibly important, of course, and should be funded. But writing off construction jobs and green jobs as automatically male is not the way to make that argument.
Jeannette Wicks-Lim of the Political Economy Research Institute demonstrates some of the flaws in Hirshman’s case. Rather than saying “these are men’s jobs and these are women’s jobs and that’s that,” Wicks-Lim begins by asking “How do we get women into these new jobs?” She also points out the benefits to women of moving into traditionally male-dominated fields, which often pay better than traditionally female-dominated fields—in her example, carpenters make an average wage of $18.72 while preschool teachers make an average wage of $11.42. One of these jobs is 99% male, the other is 98% female. Guess which is which.
We can’t just take it as a given that men are going to get the better-paying jobs. And government money going to green jobs can bring about real change:
Tags: green jobs
Sandra Brown McAuliffe and Britt Woods were recently in Washington, D.C. to attend the Good Jobs, Green Jobs National Conference. Their entries were unanimously chosen by our judges, AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Richard Trumka, United Steelworkers Vice President Fred Redmond, and Sierra Club political director Cathy Duvall.
Tags: green jobs
