[ Unity between labor and environmentalists are forged by fighting
for local projects, as well as broader initiatives. Many environmental
justice groups believe working-class communities shouldnt have to
shoulder costs of a crisis they didnt create.]
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WHAT IT WILL TAKE TO BUILD A BROAD-BASED MOVEMENT FOR A JUST
TRANSITION  
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David Bacon
August 31, 2022
Sierra
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_ Unity between labor and environmentalists are forged by fighting
for local projects, as well as broader initiatives. Many environmental
justice groups believe working-class communities shouldn't have to
shoulder costs of a crisis they didn't create. _

Photo by David Bacon,
[link removed]


 

In 2020, Washington State passed the Climate Commitment Act
[[link removed]],
and when it went into effect on January 1, 2022, Rosalinda Guillen was
appointed to its Environmental Justice Council. The appointment
recognized her role as one of Washington's leading advocates for
farmworkers and rural communities.

Guillen directs Community2Community Development
[[link removed]], a women-led group encouraging
farmworker cooperatives and defending labor rights. She has a long
history as a farm labor organizer and in 2013 helped form a new
independent union for farmworkers, Familias Unidas por la Justicia
[[link removed]].
Guillen agreed to serve on the council but with reservations. She
feared that the law's implementation would be dominated by some of the
state's most powerful industries: fossil fuels and agriculture. 

"Its market-based approach focuses too much on offsets,” she says.
“Allowing polluting corporations to pay to continue to pollute is a
backward step in achieving equity for rural people living in poverty
for generations." Just as important to her, however, is that while the
law provides funding for projects in pollution-impacted communities,
it doesn't look at the needs of workers displaced by the changes that
will occur as the production and use of fossil fuels is reduced.

The impact of that reduction won't affect just workers in oil
refineries but farmworkers as well. "The ag industry is part of the
problem, not just the fossil fuel industry," Guillen says. "They're
tied together. Ag's monocrop system impacts the ecological balance
through the use of pesticides, the pollution of rivers and clearing
forests. As farmworkers, this law has everything to do with our
miserable wages, our insecure jobs, and even how long we'll live. The
average farmworker only lives to 49 years old, and displacement will
make peoples' lives even shorter." 

The key to building working-class support for reducing carbon
emissions, she believes, is a commitment from political leaders and
the environmental and labor movements that working-class communities
will not be made to pay for the transition to a carbon-free economy
with job losses and increased poverty. But the difficulties in
building that alliance and gaining such a commitment were evident in
the defeat of an earlier Washington State initiative, and the fact
that the Climate Commitment Act lacked the protections that initiative
sought to put in place. 

In Washington State fields, at California oil refineries, and amid
local campaigns around the country, this is the big strategic question
in coalition building between the labor and environmental movements:
Who will pay the cost of transitioning to a green economy? 

Some workers and unions see the danger of climate change as a remote
problem, compared with the immediate loss of jobs and wages. Others
believe that climate change is an urgent crisis and that government
policy should protect jobs and wages as a transition to a
fossil-fuel-free economy takes place. Many environmental justice
groups also believe that working-class communities, especially
communities of color, should not have to shoulder the cost of a crisis
they did not create. And in the background, always, are efforts by
industry to minimize the danger of climate change and avoid paying the
cost of stopping it. 

 

Photo by David Bacon
“This is the big strategic question in coalition building between
the labor and environmental movements: Who will pay the cost of
transitioning to a green economy?”

IN WASHINGTON STATE, A MISSED OPPORTUNITY  

Washington has been a battleground over these ideas, a bellwether in
the national debate over how to make a truly just transition. Guillen
is part of a statewide coalition among workers, unions, communities of
color, and environmental justice organizations that was formed to
campaign for an initiative that sought to establish the ground rules
for such a just transition. Similar coalitions are growing in other
states as well. 

According to Jeff Johnson, former president of the Washington State
Labor Council and Guillen's longtime political ally, "We have an
existential crisis that is social, political, and racial, in addition
to climate. And we know that the impact of climate change will hit
those communities who had the least to do with causing it." 

That understanding led Johnson, Guillen, and their allies to put
the Carbon Emissions Fee Initiative
[[link removed](2018)] on
the Washington ballot in 2018. It would have charged polluters $15 per
metric ton on the carbon content of fossil fuels sold or used,
including in the production of electricity generated or imported in
the state. While carbon tax bills have been introduced in other
states, the initiative was unique because it would also have set up a
fund guaranteeing workers income and benefits if they lost jobs in the
transition.

The group that drafted and then campaigned for the measure included
environmental justice organizations that did health mapping to show
its benefits. Other environmental advocates documented its impact on
clean air, water, and forests. Initiative backers brought in Native
American nations, guaranteeing that they would have free, prior, and
informed consent over the use of their land in any carbon reduction
project.

As labor council president, Johnson sought to build support from
unions by emphasizing the needs of workers. "A just transition is not
just a retrofit," he says. "We have to build in labor standards for
public expenditures, with apprenticeship and local hiring agreements
to give access to people who've been locked out. It has to include
project labor agreements, buying from vendors with clean standards in
terms of both carbon content and labor."

The initiative was vastly outspent by industry, however. Fossil fuel
corporations bankrolled an opposition budget of $31.5 million, while
supporters raised $8 million. Johnson's council gave $150,000. His
request for official endorsement of the initiative got support from 62
percent of the delegates to the state labor convention, but it needed
two-thirds, and so the state labor council didn’t endorse the
measure. The failure reflected the fact that the state's building
trades unions were firmly opposed, alleging that the initiative would
cost jobs. In the general election, the alliance between industry with
its huge expenditures and the building trades was enough to defeat the
initiative, 56 to 44 percent.

The loss dramatizes a basic strategic problem confronting the
developing labor-environmental alliance. Sections of the building
trades have close relationships with industry, as do some
environmental organizations. Those relationships make unity difficult
around big steps to address climate change, and industry can deploy
huge financial resources to defeat those steps, as it did with the
initiative. Johnson cautions that within labor's ranks, the just
transition approach was supported by almost two-thirds of Washington
unions. "The initiative got 1.3 million votes, and at least 250,000
came directly from union members, and over 500,000 if we count their
families."

Johnson's own political perspective challenged the ideas of union
members from the beginning. He brought speakers to labor gatherings to
talk about racism and immigration, in addition to climate change. "We
have to reach our members and not fear talking with them honestly," he
urges. "We have to break the historic weapon that's been used to
divide us." 

Coalitions between labor and environmental groups, Figures believes,
are forged through fighting for local projects as well as broader
initiatives.

BUILDING UNITY

Derrick Figures, the Sierra Club's labor and economic justice
director, has a similar perspective. "We work with activists,
especially in largely brown and Black communities, who aren't included
unless we struggle for it," he says. His office assists and
coordinates the activity of over 100 organizers that the Sierra Club
has assigned to climate justice work. "They are often people who come
from affected communities," he notes, "and they spend a lot of time
building relationships on the ground. We need to build an army of
organizers, working on both labor and climate change."

Coalitions between labor and environmental groups, Figures believes,
are forged through fighting for local projects, as well as broader
initiatives. He points to several agreements in which those organizers
have provided research, resources, and organizational support for
concrete gains. "We have a community benefit agreement, for instance,
in Alabama and California for the manufacture of electric school
buses," he notes. “Our Clean Transportation for All team, alongside
Jobs to Move America, helped provide training to activists and joined
unions in pushing for this."

These are not small goals. According to one report,
[[link removed]] replacing
every gasoline or diesel school bus with a vehicle-to-grid electric
one "would create a total of 61.5 GWh of extra stored energy
capacity—enough to power more than 200,000 average American homes
for a week ... power output equivalent to over 1.2 million typical
residential solar roof installations or 16 average coal power
generators." 

The Sierra Club, along with Earthjustice, the Center for Biological
Diversity, and CleanAirNow KC also sued Postmaster General Louis
DeJoy
[[link removed]] over
contracts to purchase gasoline-powered instead of electric trucks for
the US Postal Service’s 190,000-vehicle fleet. That lawsuit
partnered with others that included the United Auto Workers. It put
the environmental movement in alliance with unions in the plants that
build the vehicles as well as unions representing the postal workers
who drive them, who've fought DeJoy since Donald Trump appointed him.

Figures himself was formerly on the staff of the American Federation
of Teachers. "Our clean transition teams work alongside labor on
modernizing school buildings, for instance," he says, "and then
partner with the AFT on developing curricula for children that's not
so focused on the need for fossil fuel. Our theory of change is that
any transition has to start with workers and communities."
Labor-environmental coalitions, he believes, "have to develop
permanent relationships between unions and environmental and just
transition groups and move beyond a transactional way of working." 

“We can't continue on the same path if we want to change the
structures that are killing people on this planet."

ORGANIZING IN THE REFINERIES

In Los Angeles, David Campbell, secretary treasurer of United
Steelworkers Local 675 [[link removed]], believes that
building relationships and coalitions among union members and
environmental activists depends on winning support among rank and file
workers. And he's doing this work in one of the most challenging
arenas, among his union members in the huge Southern California oil
refineries, one of the largest concentrations of oil processing in the
country. The Chevron complex in El Segundo, among several in Los
Angeles where Campbell's union represents the workers, is the largest
on the West Coast. It processes over 276,000 barrels
[[link removed]] of oil per
day. 

According to Campbell, "Refinery workers are open to new ideas, but
they're also terrified that they'll lose a job that can pay $150,000
to $200,000 a year for a high school graduate. That's why we start by
simply asking them what they think will happen because of climate
change. Our members could see change coming when the pandemic started
and people stopped buying gas. They saw the ads for electric vehicles
during the Super Bowl. So we ask them what they think California will
be like when the state converts to zero-emission vehicles. We ask them
what they need. The answer has to come from them. And the same with
the question about who are our allies."

Workers are suspicious of false promises. Campbell remembers bitterly
the jobs lost when the North American Free Trade Agreement took effect
at the beginning of the 1990s. "We were promised that the Trade
Readjustment Assistance program would provide training, but there was
no job at the end," he says. "So now we want something way beyond
hollow promises."

To give workers more information, the union needed a study about the
impact of transition away from fossil fuels. Local 675 was among the
labor groups, including the California Federation of Teachers, that
asked Robert Pollin to write _A Program for Economic Recovery and
Clean Energy Transition in California
[[link removed]]._ "Using
it, we concentrated on building a coalition of unions in manufacturing
and the public sector, with environmental organizations," Campbell
says. "We pushed in the legislature and governor's office for a just
transition that would meet California's climate goals and create a
million new jobs."  

California is one of the most ambitious states on climate action but
also one in which the oil industry holds enormous power. For refinery
workers, that corporate power is felt very directly, on the job. Local
675 therefore applied for and received a foundation grant to train
in-plant organizers to counter company efforts to stir up fears of job
loss. "I can't go into the refinery and have conversations about
climate change and transition," Campbell explains. "I'm escorted by a
management person everywhere I go, and that chills any discussion. We
need our rank and file members to be the organizers in the
field—inside organizers, who can talk to workers on the job."

United Steelworkers leaders don't have illusions about the power of
industry or its opposition to changes that threaten profits. To
Campbell, "this is an industry that has overthrown national
governments [as BP helped to do in Iran
[[link removed]] in
1953], so we need real power if we're going to fight with it. They
won't take our proposals lying down. We have to mobilize our rank and
file and look for allies. That's how we'll build political power."
 

MOBILIZING COMMUNITIES OUTSIDE THE GATES 

Alliances outside the refinery gates start with a clear understanding
about who the workers are inside them. The stereotype of an oil worker
is a white man, but the demographics of the oil workforce have
changed. According to Campbell, white men are still the largest racial
group, but not the majority, among workers in LA-area oil refineries.
The union has significant numbers of women, and Latino, African
American, and Asian/Pacific Island workers. "In addition, most of our
members live in the community they work in, which means they're
exposed to all the emissions that come from the plant," he says. 

The relationship between refinery workers and members of the community
around them is the basis for a coalition being built in Richmond,
California, where a Chevron refinery explosion 10 years ago
[[link removed]] led
to 15,000 city residents seeking medical treatment. “The 2012 fire
had a big role in creating a generation of young people who are
looking at the status quo and saying, ‘Enough is enough,’” says
Alfredo Angulo, member of the Richmond Listening Project
[[link removed]]. 

The fire led many community activists to reach out to workers in the
refinery itself. Marie Choi, communications director for the Asian
Pacific Environmental Network [[link removed]], helped organize
a march to the refinery gate on the anniversary of the disaster. "Ten
years ago, when the refinery exploded, it was the workers who had to
go through the flames," she emphasizes. 

Earlier this year those same workers, members of United Steelworkers
Local 5, went on strike. "We were on their picket line every week,"
Choi recalled at an August 6 rally at the plant gate. "They were on
strike over safety, to prevent future incidents like the one we're
remembering today. That's common ground we share. The reality is that
the transition is underway already. Unless we work together, we won't
get the things we need—cleanup for the toxic site, safety nets for
the workers, or gap funding for public services." 

Connie Cho, a staff attorney at Communities for a Better Environment
[[link removed]], says, "We need a plan for a full,
coordinated phase-out of oil refineries by 2045, so that we can put in
place a strong safety net for fossil fuel workers, invest in
developing healthy local economies with good family-supporting jobs,
and clean up toxic sites. If we wait until the industry is on its
deathbed, we’ll be too late.” 
 

UNITY AT THE GRASSROOTS 

That sense of urgency has infected other unions in the Bay Area as
well. Starting in 2016, activists in the Alameda Labor Council (the
county that includes the cities of Berkeley and Oakland) began
participating in the upsurge of protests over climate change. In 2017,
the People’s Climate March led to organizing a labor/environmental
climate convergence at the hall of the International Brotherhood of
Electrical Workers Local 595, in its zero-pollution building. More
than 200 people came.

Michael Eisenscher, a founder of US Labor Against the War and a former
delegate to the council, was one of its organizers. "We put the issue
of just transition on our council's agenda," he recalls, "and talked
about what it would require." Eisenscher and his coworkers organized a
caucus that had official status in their labor council, and others
were set up in nearby Contra Costa and San Francisco Counties as
well. 

Many participants sought a comprehensive analysis of the sources of
climate change. "We wanted to make the connection between US foreign
policy, militarism, and environmental issues," he says. "The military
produces a large share of carbon emissions, and it defends the oil
industry internationally in a struggle over the global control of
resources." 

Activists then organized an independent committee, Labor Rise for
Climate, Jobs, Justice, and Peace. Others participated in forming the
Labor Network for Sustainability, a national advocate for a labor
policy based on the ideal of a just transition. As in Washington
State, however, some building trades unions took a different approach.
According to Eisenscher, industry proposals for carbon capture and
storage were presented as an alternative to mandated limits on
emissions. 

Building labor support for a just transition obviously isn't a smooth
road. Eisenscher, Johnson, and Campbell all agree that winning
rank-and-file support is the key to coalition building based on
rank-and-file mobilization. But, they wonder, is progress fast
enough? 

"We have less and less time," Johnson warns. "I'm not a
doomsayer—that if X doesn't happen, we'll all die. In reality, as
the crisis gets worse, the poorest people in the world will pay the
price, migrating and looking for a safe place and something to eat.
Climate change will become a leading cause of death. So our tactics
have to change dramatically. We have to get into the streets and be
willing to go to jail. We have to get truly progressive candidates
elected. We must be committed that no one will be left behind." 

In Los Angeles, veteran labor/climate organizer Veronica Wilson
agrees. "But while it's inspiring to see young people 11 or 12 in the
streets, it's terrifying at the same time. They're using tactics the
labor movement has prided itself on—disrupting meetings and going
into the streets. And where are we?" she asks. "We still have a huge
base of thousands of members, but incrementalism doesn't do it." 

Wilson also warns that in coalitions with environmental justice
organizations, especially those with younger activists, "We have to be
willing to stand behind, not try to dominate. We have to listen to
Native voices in particular, accepting that they and others outside
our ranks have the knowledge and understanding we need."  

And in dealing with their own members, unions need patient education
to help them understand the systemic sources of climate change, job
loss, and the basic problems workers face. "Given our dire situation,
it's hard to do. Convincing people that our economic system
contributes to all this can be too much to take on all at once. But we
can't continue on the same path if we want to change the structures
that are killing people on this planet."

_[DAVID BACON is a California journalist and photographer, and the
author of In the Fields of the North/En los Campos del
Norte (University of California Press).]_

_More articles by this author
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* Climate Change
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* Climate Crisis
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* Climate disaster
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* environmental disaster
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* Labor Movement
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* Trade Unions
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* Environmental Activism
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* Green New Deal
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* Environmental Justice
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* Racial Justice
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* social justice
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