TO STOP THE CLIMATE CRISIS, WE MUST DO A LOT OF WORK
By Jilly Edgar
The Civilian Climate Corps is up for debate in Congress and these are the terms: in the Senate, Chuck Schumer and progressives have settled on a $30 billion initiative that will be funded through the existing AmeriCorps program. In the House, Democrat leaders are unwilling to spend more than $10 billion and prefer to use the money for expanding job training and apprentice programs that already exist in such places as the Department of Labor. The latter more closely matches the original plan Biden put out in March.
Key to the $30 billion proposal are workers’ benefits, such as guaranteed $15 an hour minimum pay and health care. It is these kinds of rights and protections that necessitate a higher price tag and also bridge the gap between the House and Senate divergence over agency structure. Organizing the CCC through AmeriCorps does not mean that it has to look exactly like AmeriCorps; rather, long-term training, career development, and union protections are inextricable from any successful vision of the CCC, no matter where it is housed.
A CCC ensures two crucial aspects of climate mitigation occur. One is that the necessary work to combat climate change which is unprofitable gets done, such as the restoration of natural ecosystems. The other is that people are not only protected, but actually benefit from the inevitable disruption that will take place as the fossil fuel industry declines.
Employment in the coal industry has already been declining since Reagan’s presidency, not thanks to environmental policy, but instead as a result of automation. In West Virginia between 1980 and 1989, the number of coal jobs dropped from 60,000 to 30,000. In oil and gas, 107,000 jobs were eliminated between March and August of 2020 alone. These cuts happened while the companies simultaneously received generous gifts from the federal government when oil prices tanked and through the Paycheck Protection Program. Not only are workers shorted by the shrinking industry, but so are entire communities that depend on it for tax revenues.
Merely opening the floodgates for private investments in renewable energy will not help. The majority of such investments already come from private capital and have only 4 and 6% union density in solar PVs and wind energy, respectively. Contracts, including protections and pay, in renewable energy are comparatively worse than in fossil fuels projects, like pipeline construction, despite requiring similar skills.
Rather, new investments must be made by the federal government to make up for the weakness of these opportunities, and a jobs guarantee carries historical popularity and political gumption. It is both unreasonable and politically misguided to push people towards worse jobs, and it is foolish to assume that renewable energy companies on their own are carrying out saint’s work — as Kate Aronoff has pointed out, they are still regular companies motivated by profit above all. Acting on such logic will further disconnect climate policy from improvements in people’s lives.
A robust CCC will do the opposite. It has been argued that the key to successful and sustainable climate policy is to deliver tangible improvements to people’s everyday lives by means of implementing it. Bringing meaningful opportunities for work to people and places that need it, want it, and don’t have it is already proven to be popular because the people themselves have asked for it. In Somerset County, Maine, for example, workers who previously found opportunities in the local economy based on forestry and paper production, but have been witnessing their decline for years, are looking to cultivate the solar industry. And in tenant-led visions of the future of public housing, tenants themselves are the ones to be hired to do the work of retrofitting and making their homes resilient.
With negotiations as they currently stand, the CCC is not anywhere close to the extent of labor organizing necessary to move away from fossil fuels and stop the climate crisis. It is still the largest concession to begin the process of a “just transition,” but it does little to account for workers in the majority of economic sectors.
As Matt Huber points out, a major fallacy of present-day just transition politics, despite its importance and original roots in the labor movement, is the framing of “workers as victims.” Doing so disregards the linchpin of working class organizing: workers’ power derives from their strategic position in the economy to strike, stop workflow, and cause political-economic disruption, which warrants them genuine leverage to win demands. Unless that inherent power is exercised, we will likely only see a fraction of the climate action we need.
One of the greatest mistakes of the climate movement so far has been the lack of inclusion of labor in strategic organizing. Relationships between labor and other radical branches of the Left, such as the Occupy movement, have long been rocky. This misalignment is not something the world can afford any longer. Rhetoric around crucial strategies to address the climate crisis, such as “electrifying everything,” is hollow unless substantial relationships are built with workers in the electricity industry, who are already “one of the most unionized in the entire economy — the electric power generation, transmission, and distribution industry had a 24.5 percent union membership rate in 2020.”
Most people have a lot to gain from a Green New Deal and most people are workers. A fully-funded CCC is just one part of its vision. Clean, cheap electricity, educational opportunities, and a living wage-these are demands that working class movements have been organizing to attain for decades. The Green New Deal will deliver them, but only if we leverage the full potential of a worker’s climate movement.
