[Relying on the private sector to decarbonize is a recipe for
abandoning workers.]
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THE FUTURE OF THE LABOR-CLIMATE ALLIANCE  
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J. Mijin Cha
June 15, 2023
Dissent
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_ Relying on the private sector to decarbonize is a recipe for
abandoning workers. _

, John Englart

 

President Joe Biden has emphasized the need for climate action since
he was on the campaign trail. His platform included policies inspired
by the Green New Deal, and one of his first acts in office was to
issue an omnibus executive order calling for a “Whole of
Government” approach to tackling the climate crisis. Then, in August
2022, he signed the Inflation Reduction Act. Heralded as the most
significant piece of U.S. climate legislation to date, the IRA
allocates $369 billion to incentivize clean energy, energy efficiency,
electric vehicle purchases, and other supply-side measures to build
demand for low-carbon technologies and products. Its underlying
philosophy is that if renewable energy and low-carbon technology is
cheap and plentiful, market dynamics will make fossil fuel production
and use prohibitively expensive.

The IRA has also been promoted as a climate jobs bill; one estimate
projects that the law will create roughly 900,000 jobs per year over
the next decade. The Biden administration’s focus
on _good_ climate jobs is the result of the hard work of climate and
labor activists alike. For decades, any attempt to expand
environmental regulations was met with industry threats of job losses
due to increased compliance and operation costs. Industries were able
to successfully pit workers against environmentalists, who were
perceived, at times with good reason, as elitists who cared more about
animals than people. Now, after decades of organizing, unions have
become more engaged in pushing for climate action, while climate
advocates have recognized that workers are integral to winning
ambitious climate policy. The job-creating power of decarbonization is
an important draw for those who may not have been otherwise engaged in
climate politics.

Equally important is the recognition that workers and the environment
both face harm from companies. Capitalist principles reduce
environmental protections to costs that cut into profits. The same
goes for worker protections and wages. The IRA was an opportunity to
provide an alternative model: investment in public projects and moving
away from privatizing the clean energy economy. Instead, the law
continues to place faith in the private sector to do right by workers
and the climate. The underlying belief is that if enough incentives
are provided, businesses will act in ways that are socially
beneficial. An analysis by McKinsey found that the majority of energy
and climate funding in the IRA comes in the form of tax credits for
corporations. They will receive them regardless of what they pay in
taxes; if the credit is more than the tax bill, they pocket the
difference.

Furthermore, while the IRA is likely to spur private-sector renewable
energy development and uptake of low-carbon technology, it does not
fundamentally disrupt fossil fuel systems. There is no target for the
reduction of fossil fuel use over time, no effort to force fossil fuel
companies to diversify their energy portfolios, and no requirement
that oil, gas, and coal stay in the ground. Money directed at negative
emissions technology—carbon capture and storage (CCS) and carbon
dioxide removal—translates to continued fossil fuel use if not
coupled with a mandate to eventually end fossil fuel use. Despite
billions spent, there has yet to be a successful CCS project that
meaningfully captured emissions. And there is overwhelming empirical
evidence that regardless of renewable energy production, fossil fuel
production and use is not only continuing, but growing. In the United
States, it is expected to reach a new record level this year, beating
the previous one set in 2019.

The truth is that as long as fossil fuel production is profitable,
companies will continue to extract and burn coal, oil, and gas.
Meaningful climate action requires regulations and restrictions that
will draw down the fossil fuel industry. A planned drawdown can also
provide the time and resources necessary to support displaced workers
and communities, which in turn can ease tensions that arise when
climate policy more accurately reflects the economic impact of
decarbonization. Relying on the private sector to decarbonize, by
contrast, is a recipe for failing to support workers.

While progress has been made in bringing unions and climate activists
together around the promise of green jobs, there is no way to address
the climate crisis without ending the use of fossil fuels—which will
result in job losses. This fact has led to continued tension between
climate movements and labor movements, particularly at the national
level. In big oil and gas pipeline fights, such as Keystone XL or
Dakota Access, some unions, especially in the building trades, have
come down in support of the developers because of the work pipeline
construction generates for their members. On the other hand, many
climate proposals continue to focus on emissions reductions, touting
the creation of millions of jobs without discussion of their quality.
Mainstream climate advocates are relatively quiet on the proliferation
of low-wage, exploitative work in areas like in solar energy
build-out.

There is an expectation, whether implicit or explicit, that fossil
fuel workers should support decarbonization for the greater good,
regardless of the economic uncertainty that it will bring. They may be
able to find work in other industries, but there is a misguided
expectation that they should support being displaced from their
current jobs despite the uncertainties about future employment and the
threat of economic insecurity.

The term “just transition” has become the go-to phrase for dealing
with these conflicting concerns. The idea originated with labor and
environmental justice advocates who believed workers and communities
should be supported as the industries they relied upon financially
were phased out. Applied to the energy transition, just transition
argues for policies that support workers and communities as economies
move away from fossil fuels. And research has shown that attitudes
about an energy transition, even in fossil fuel regions, become more
positive if there are social supports in place. But as just transition
has become a more popular framework, it has been co-opted by entities
with little concern for either workers or the environment. Shell has
issued a “just and fair transition” declaration that provides no
specifics and is undermined by its legal disclaimer that the
company’s operating and planning budgets do not reflect any net-zero
target. Many climate advocates, for their part, have claimed that any
increase in renewable energy will produce a just transition with no
discussion of the quality of the new jobs or who has access to them.

Corporate greenwashing and a lack of attention from climate groups
increases distrust among fossil fuel workers and communities about the
very idea of a just transition. An initiative as well-financed as the
IRA could have shaped the meaning of the phrase, but here the IRA
comes up short. A just transition requires the redevelopment of
regions affected by job loss; the IRA could have directly allocated
funding for these places via publicly built and owned renewable energy
projects that would keep more revenue in communities. Instead, the IRA
provides tax credit bonuses for clean energy projects in fossil fuel
regions, with far fewer attendant social benefits.

The IRA’s approach to labor protections is the same as its approach
to emissions reductions. Rather than mandating a prevailing wage or
other labor provisions, there are bonuses for companies that provide
them. The incentives certainly make creating good jobs more
attractive, but they don’t change how difficult it is to unionize
workplaces. States like Illinois and New York, by contrast, have
passed climate policies that integrate labor standards into renewable
energy projects over a certain size. The Illinois law also includes
dedicated just transition funding. These efforts move past
incentivizing good jobs to mandating them.

There have been some recent successes in other states. Last December,
workers in Warren, Ohio, voted overwhelmingly to unionize Ultium
Cells, an electric vehicle (EV) and components factory. Any vote to
unionize is significant given how U.S. labor law is stacked against
workers, but this victory was particularly noteworthy because of the
dearth of unionized EV plants. Today, much of the auto industry is
moving to the South, where right-to-work laws dominate. According to
one analysis in 2021, electric vehicle and battery manufacturers had
made plans to invest nearly $24 billion in factories across the
region.

U.S. union density reached a record low in 2022. The private-sector
unionization rate is just 6 percent; in auto manufacturing, the trend
is not toward unionization but toward relocating plants in
jurisdictions with weaker labor protections. Proterra, an electric bus
manufacturing company long heralded as an example of a good union
employer in a low-carbon sector, just announced that it was
concentrating production in South Carolina, a right-to-work state, and
closing its plant in California. Stellantis, the company that makes
Jeep Cherokees, announced it was closing an Illinois plant that
produced vehicles with internal combustion engines and moving those
operations to Mexico, claiming the increased cost of manufacturing EVs
meant it had to cut costs elsewhere. These examples show that despite
the financial incentives in the IRA, companies are still relocating to
places where labor costs are cheaper and labor protections are weaker.
Moreover, EV production is less labor intensive than internal
combustion engine production; a transition to EVs, even holding the
number of cars manufactured even, means there will be fewer jobs
available. Autoworkers are already being laid off in the transition to
EV production—some estimates put the number as high as 80,000 lost
jobs globally—and it is unclear what provisions are in place to
support those workers.

The shaky foundations of the IRA make it all the more important that
labor and climate organizers remain engaged with the process of
implementation. Though it is federal legislation, much of the IRA’s
success will depend on what happens at the state level, where rebates
for energy-efficient appliances will be distributed, programs that
receive federal funding will be administered, and much more. Moreover,
while hiring union labor is encouraged and rewarded in the IRA, it is
not guaranteed. Implementation will dictate how much of the work is
union. The importance of implementation is why Ryan Pollock, lead
organizer at IBEW Local 520 in Austin, Texas, believes that state
governments should be organizing targets. (Pollock and his union were
part of the coalition of unions that advised the creation of the Texas
Climate Jobs Project to advocate for climate policy at the state
level.) A hostile governor like Texas’s Greg Abbott can refuse to
accept federal dollars that come from the IRA rather than fund state
climate resilience efforts, or reject federal funds and projects that
would require labor standards or other equity measures they oppose.
Local organizing is necessary to push back against these hostile
forces.

State and local organizing can also be more effective in bridging the
tension between fossil fuel workers and climate policies. In
Pollock’s experience, state-level organizing is also where you can
build the support of fossil fuel workers and unions for climate
policies: if you understand regional economic conditions, it’s
easier to build relationships where you can have difficult
conversations. As Pollock told me:

Using the organized building trades as an example, when I would
explicitly use the words GND, I could practically see my brothers and
sisters raise their hackles. However, when I would have conversations
about the very ideas raised by the GND, without naming it, such as how
we need to start planning for how our industries might be changing in
the future and how that might affect both our careers and our union,
then those very same people wouldn’t hesitate to listen and agree.

In addition to state and local organizing, another logical step to
strengthen labor-climate advocacy is for more environmental and
climate organizations to support legislative reforms to make
organizing easier. Renamed in honor of the late leader of the AFL-CIO,
the Richard L. Trumka Protecting the Right to Organize Act (PRO Act)
was reintroduced with bipartisan support in February 2023. The PRO Act
would override right-to-work laws and enact reforms to hold employers
responsible for violating workers’ rights. Rather than fight plant
by plant or warehouse by warehouse, the PRO Act would facilitate
organizing everywhere, and therefore serve as a big step toward
building a unionized clean energy economy. Several environmental
organizations have already declared their support for the PRO Act,
including the Sierra Club, whose own workers are unionized.
Environmental organizations should go beyond communicating support for
the bill and expend actual political capital to pressure elected
officials on the issue. An easy step would be to include support for
the PRO Act on legislator environmental scorecards to signal that
labor organizing is considered a climate issue, and making
endorsements contingent on support for the bill.

There is no prescriptive, one-size-fits-all path forward to building a
labor-climate alliance. What cannot happen is a return to pushing for
emissions reductions while leaving economic and social concerns aside,
because of a mistaken belief in the tradeoff between expediency and
efficacy. Ending fossil fuel use will require building power through
multi-issue, broad-based coalitions. We are stronger together.

_J. MIJIN CHA is an assistant professor of environmental studies at
the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is also a fellow at
Cornell University’s Climate Jobs Institute and a member of the
Climate and Community Project._

_DISSENT is a magazine of politics and ideas published in print three
times a year. Founded by Irving Howe and Lewis Coser in 1954, it
quickly established itself as one of America’s leading intellectual
journals and a mainstay of the democratic left. SUBSCRIBE TO DISSENT
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* Labor
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* Climate Change
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* organizing
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* PRO Act
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* unions
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* greenwashing
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* Inflation Reducation Act
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