THE LAST FEW DECADES have not been kind to the folks who brought
you the weekend. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there
are around 16 million Americans on union rolls today. That
figure is fully two million fewer folks than were members of labor
unions in 1983, an astounding stat considering there has been an
increase of more than 40 million in the number of waged and
salaried workers in the United States over that period. Today just
12 percent of the workforce carries a union card, down from 20
percent at the kickoff of the Reagan economic boom.
Over the last quarter century the unions lost serious ground.
The loss of labor’s influence in the econ-omy is even more
pronounced when breaking down the numbers between public and
private sector unions. The private sector union rate is less than
10 percent today. Labor’s numbers overall have been inflated by the
proliferation of public sector employment at all levels during the
steroid era of big government.
Simply, private sector unions don’t matter much to Americans
anymore. To the extent Americans think of them, they are reminded
of entities whose intransigence has helped draw Detroit and the
airlines to the brink of fiscal disaster. A recent Pew Research
Center survey on Americans’ political values and core attitudes
found that respondents’ views on labor were dimming, with only 53
percent of independents saying they consider labor unions necessary
to protect working people. In 2003, 76 percent agreed with that
view.
Looking for help as they drown in a sea of political
irrelevance, labor heavyweights like the Teamsters, the AFL-CIO,
and the Service Employees International Union have reason to
believe the Obama administration will throw them a green lifeline.
President Barack Obama has promised to use his office to
fundamentally transform America’s energy economy, transitioning
Americans away from fossil fuels and creating millions of so-called
green jobs in the process.
The new green economy Obama routinely invokes holds some hope
for private sector unions to slow, if not even halt and reverse,
their stunning declines. Obama pledged during the campaign to spend
$150 billion to create green jobs, and his administration promises
to spend billions more on a host of infrastructure upgrades and
other energy-related stimulus projects.
Attempting to capitalize on that environmental commitment,
organized labor is latching on to the green jobs movement with
gusto. In August, a coalition of labor unions joined with
environmental organizations to launch a 50-stop tour visiting 22
states to pressure Congress to pass cap-and-trade legislation. “If
you make real things that will reduce our carbon footprint, and
create good family-supporting jobs in America, that ought to be the
direction this country is going in,” said Leo Gerard, the
international president of the United Steelworkers, announcing the
Made in America Jobs Tour. “I’ve had enough of Wall Street throwing
up on my shoes because they pigged out at the candy store.”
THE MADE IN AMERICA jobs tour is just the latest push by labor
to advance Obama’s energy and environmental proposals. The new
labor secretary, Hilda Solis, not only is a darling of the unions,
she also sponsored green jobs legislation while a member of
Congress. The shock troops at the various green jobs summits and
rallies held around the country in support of the Obama energy
agenda are, ironically, often the same union activists who (at the
direction of union officials) performed a lot of the volunteer
campaign work for Hillary Clinton in her presidential run against
Obama.
What is organized labor’s incentive for going green? For unions,
it seems a lot less about saving the planet than about saving (or
at least enriching) themselves. With the federal government
pledging to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on energy related
projects, labor sees a chance to grab a significant portion of that
money as well as to ensure that future green energy manufacturing
and other green collar employment are union jobs.
“Global warming is a working families issue,” said AFL-CIO
President John Sweeney at the Good Jobs, Green Jobs national
conference in February just a few short weeks after Obama took
office. That event—co-sponsored by a number of prominent labor
unions along with the Natural Resources Defense Council and the
Sierra Club in a partnership called the Blue-Green Alliance—brought
more than 2,000 labor and environmental activists to Washington to
set parameters for a massive government employment program under
the banner of saving the planet. Gerard called the event “the
working-class and progressive movement’s Davos.” The fledgling
Obama administration sent Environmental Protection Administration
chief Lisa Jackson to pump up the troops, while United Nations
Undersecretary General Achim Steiner and others talked up the
notion of an emerging “Global Green New Deal.”
On the first day of the Good Jobs, Green Jobs conference,
organizers cut off the program at noon so that attendees could
flood Capitol Hill just as Congress was fleshing out the stimulus
bill. President Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment
Act into law two weeks later, and it contained a treasure trove of
items from Big Labor’s wish list. One was a provision that applies
Davis-Bacon wage mandates to all construction projects funded by
the law, including the $25 billion appropriated to green the
nation’s schools and federal office buildings. It also applied
Davis-Bacon to the Department of Energy’s weatherization efforts,
for which ARRA coughs up $5 billion. On top of that, Congress
required that iron and steel used in ARRA-funded projects be
purchased in the United States, providing lots of work for American
steel and ironworkers who have been watching orders go overseas to
lower-cost producers.
But that’s not all labor wants in the new green economy. The
federal government will spend billions of dollars to subsidize
alternative energy production from wind, solar, biomass, and other
industries. Those industries are already ramping up to hire new
employees. Labor bosses want to ensure that these jobs pay union
scale. Too often, they claim, green jobs pay too little. “We did a
survey of every job currently being called ‘green’ by employers,
and found the majority of them didn’t pay enough to support a
family of two,” said Terence O’Sullivan, president of the Laborers’
International Union of North America. “Every worker building a
green product should be able to afford a plug-in hybrid car.” If
the government is footing the bill for renewable energy, labor
leaders figure, then it can demand that workers be paid what unions
for years have called “a living wage.”
The brass ring on labor’s green carousel would be to push the
federal government in the direction of green protectionism, levying
carbon tariffs against products from low-cost, no-carbon-curbing
countries. Energy Secretary Steven Chu naively mused during a
hearing about “level[ing] the playing field.” Those comments set
off fears of green trade wars. Yet with the strong backing of the
Blue-Green Alliance, congressional sponsors of cap-and-trade
legislation were considering such a provision as they tried to pass
a global warming bill this summer.
THE GOOD JOBS, GREEN JOBS CONFERENCE reinforced the old adage
about politics making strange bedfellows. Washington’s Omni
Shoreham Hotel was packed with the odd mixture of hardened
steelworkers and other union toughs rubbing elbows with the effete
eco-cadres from the professional environmental movement. The
grizzled shot-and-a-beer types filling the hotel’s lobby and
meeting rooms might have a slight degree of common cause with the
Birkenstocks-and-granola crowd when it comes to the federal
government redirecting billions in taxpayer cash to green programs.
But that’s about all they have in common. On Walden Pond is very
far from On the Waterfront.
It’s anybody’s guess how long this curious partnership will
last. While there are some overlapping interests among the unions
and environmentalists, at least on the surface, those interests
quickly diverge. The tensions at play soon become apparent.
The Greens want to use the power of Big Government to support
and prop up industries and technologies that have a tough time on
their own. The clean energy sources loved by environmentalists have
significant cost disadvantages compared to fossil fuels and nuclear
power. The great Green challenge is to figure ways to narrow that
spread, and anything adding to the cost of renewables makes it that
much harder to curb greenhouse gas emissions.
The unions’ interest lies in guiding the national enthusiasm for
government-sponsored environmentalism in a direction that pays
their members high wages and adds numbers to their rolls. That
means gaming the rules so that the unions take a cut from the
bundles of cash Washington plans to spend. And that means even
higher costs than those that would arise from moving toward
expensive renewable energy without union add-ons.
While Greens and Big Labor might huddle together in an odd
alliance of fellowship and comity in Washington, relations are not
as smooth outside the Beltway. Workers at a Clipper Windpower
production facility turbine plant in Iowa, for instance, rejected
efforts last year by the International Brotherhood of Electrical
Workers to organize. Labor leaders grumble about similar rejections
at green manufacturing facilities elsewhere.
Still, the national environmental groups appreciate the help
from labor in pushing Washington to spend more and more taxpayer
money on green energy projects, and are happy to return the favor.
That’s why the Sierra Club proudly hung an enormous banner on the
front of its headquarters announcing its support for the
Orwellian-sounding Employee Free Choice Act (a.k.a. Card Check),
another union priority.
What does eliminating the secret ballot in union organizing
elections have to do with the environment? Not a damn thing.
Welcome to the new green economy.
