[State lawmakers worked hard to convince utilities and
construction union members that they would not end up on the chopping
block.]
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HOW NEW YORK’S DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISTS BROUGHT UNIONS AROUND TO
PUBLIC RENEWABLES  
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Luca GoldMansour
June 19, 2023
The American Prospect
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_ State lawmakers worked hard to convince utilities and construction
union members that they would not end up on the chopping block. _

NYC Democratic Socialists and climate activists, including city
councilmember Tiffany Cabán (middle), march to Gov. Kathy Hochul’s
office in New York City, January 13, 2022., Gabriele Holtermann/Sipa
USA via AP Images

 

Last month, at the end of a torturous budget season, New York
lawmakers secured the passage of the Build Public Renewables Act
(BPRA), a landmark win for state-level decarbonization efforts. The
law requires the New York Power Authority (NYPA), the state-owned
power supplier, to move toward providing electricity to its state,
municipal, and residential customers exclusively from wind, solar, and
other renewable power sources. This mandate also directs the authority
to build, operate, and own renewable-energy projects to meet the
state’s goal of 70 percent renewable electricity generation by 2030.

The BPRA also includes historic ironclad worker protections that
environmental and labor advocates hope will set the standard for what
public investment in a just energy transition backed by good-paying,
clean-energy union jobs looks like.

One might think that it would be easy to gain labor unions’ support
for public-works legislation explicitly designed with Franklin
Roosevelt’s New Deal in mind—the NYPA was the brainchild of FDR,
who signed the authority into law in 1931. But getting strong labor
provisions in the final version of the bill and, consequently, getting
labor on board, proved to be no small feat. The BPRA is a product of
years of advocacy by the New York chapter of the Democratic Socialists
of America and Public Power New York, a coalition the DSA formed with
other environmental groups.

When the campaign for the BPRA began in 2019, New York City’s DSA
chapter was not yet a serious player in Albany. But they also
understood that these unions, especially those that represent the
relevant labor forces like the Utility Workers Union of America, are
critical to winning major climate reforms. “We knew that we were not
going to be successful with BPRA and its implementation unless labor
was a full willing partner,” Stylianos Karolidis, an NYC-DSA
organizer, told the _Prospect_.

Since they did not initially have access to state-level union leaders,
the DSA organizers started by building relationships with local
utilities unions across the state. Public Power New York recruited
hundreds of volunteers to help steer the victories of numerous
DSA-endorsed state legislators in 2020 and 2022. One successful
candidate was climate organizer Sarahana Shrestha, now a state
assemblymember from the Hudson Valley. She unseated her long-tenured
Democratic primary opponent, in part, by highlighting his opposition
to the BPRA.

The bill
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began to move in Albany in a real way when unions outside of the
utilities sector, like the New York State United Teachers, the New
York State Nurses Association, and the Service Employees International
Union, endorsed the bill. Once the bill passed the state Senate in the
summer of 2022, the utilities unions took a more serious interest in
the plan.

The BPRA’s labor provisions include prevailing-wage assurances and
require that all the NYPA’s renewable projects include
collective-bargaining agreements for every employee, including
contractors and subcontractors. These agreements must be in place
before work can start on a project. The law creates a $25 million
just-transition fund to retrain fossil fuel–sector workers who could
lose their jobs, and specifies that union leaders must be consulted in
this process. It also prioritizes hiring these retrained workers for
the NYPA’s renewable projects.

New York can now help to build planet-saving technologies instead of
waiting for the private sector.

At first, the utilities unions opposed the plan. They were skeptical
(and some privately still are) that the public-sector jobs created by
the BPRA would match the ones gained in hard-won private-sector
contracts. Their trepidation stems, in part, from what it means to be
a public employee in New York. The utilities unions say that the NYPA
has not typically been a good-faith negotiator, often stalling talks
while employees worked under expired contracts for up to five years.
Since the state’s Taylor Law prohibits public-sector employees from
striking, labor doesn’t have many tools to counter these tactics.
But the provision in the BRPA that requires a collective-bargaining
agreement to be in place before work can begin on a project site
allayed some of their concerns.

To overcome the broader union opposition, Michael Gianaris, the state
Senate deputy majority leader, twisted some arms. Gianaris held
numerous meetings with Mario Cilento, the New York State AFL-CIO
president, and Gary LaBarbera, the Building and Construction Trades
Council of New York president. They finally agreed to take a publicly
neutral stance on the bill. Another watershed moment came during last
July’s marathon legislative session. It included testimony from
Patrick Guidice, the International Brotherhood of Electrical
Workers’ business manager, who praised the bill’s labor
provisions, calling them the best labor provisions he’d ever seen.
So good, he said, that he doubted it could pass.

Guidice’s doubts were seemingly vindicated in January when New
York’s Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul introduced her own version of
the bill, later dubbed “BPRA lite.” It gutted the original
version’s labor language and weakened the NYPA’s mandate to
generate electricity from renewable sources. Guidice “was right to
be skeptical because Democrats have been treating labor like this
useful tool for years,” Karolidis, of the NYC-DSA, says. “We all
knew labor was something we couldn’t afford to compromise on.” The
version of BPRA in the final budget, which retained the labor language
Guidice had praised, was a massive win for progressives and for
public-sector ownership and control of clean-energy infrastructure.

As the elation over New York’s first significant climate legislation
in four years subsides, new concerns about implementation have crept
into the picture. Statewide labor leaders have little faith
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in the current NYPA CEO, Justin Driscoll, who has contributed to
Republican campaigns. Public Power New York has called for his ouster,
and the Senate seems to be making good
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on that request.

The law mandates that every two years the NYPA must assess how well
the private sector is keeping up with the state’s renewable-energy
goals. If they are slacking, the authority is mandated to build new
renewable projects to fill that gap. A plan scrapped from BPRA’s
final version would have given the legislature, labor, and
environmental justice groups control of this assessment process.
Instead of these “democratization” reforms, the NYPA’s planning
process includes several channels for public comment.

Karolidis says that if the NYPA’s leaders try to thwart the BPRA’s
labor and environmental objectives, advocates will use these channels
to turn up the heat on the agency. Much of this activism would likely
occur in rural upstate New York, where project-siting controversies
are more likely to erupt. NIMBY pressures, combined with concerns
about how these new renewable power sources will connect with the
electric grid, will pose ongoing challenges for the NYPA.

Fred Stafford of Public Power Review points out
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another concern about one of the consumer benefits in BPRA, a discount
for residential consumers in “disadvantaged communities
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(households in certain ZIP codes that are earning 60 percent or less
of the state’s household median income). Leaving moderate- and
upper-income earners out of this framework could pose challenges to
building a political constituency for publicly owned and operated
power generation.

Creating good-paying, clean-energy union jobs can provide important
political benefits. New York can now help to build planet-saving
technologies instead of waiting for the private sector to see
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an upside in saving the planet. Plus, interest in public power is
increasing. “A lot of people were nervous last year that the
Inflation Reduction Act represented the horizon for environmental
politics right now,” says Karolidis. “I can’t tell you how many
people have reached out to us from across the United States who want
to do something like the Build Public Renewables Act.”

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Luca GoldMansour is an editorial intern at the Prospect.

* Build Public Renewables Act; New York Renewable Energy; Democratic
Socialists of America; New York Labor Unions;
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