Green Jobs? Good Jobs? Just Jobs? Us Labour Unions Confront Climate Change

Abstract

During recent years US labour unions, largely in manufacturing, construction and infrastructure, have advanced ‘green jobs’ as an effective and equitable response to climate change (AFL-CIO 2008; Global Labor Institute 2011a; BlueGreen Alliance 2011b). The argument is that green jobs are the route to good jobs as well as the best foundation for a ‘just transition’ to a climatefriendly economy (AFL-CIO 2008). The US’ continued rejection of binding global regulation and the failure to adopt domestic climate policy in 2009 have raised green jobs and technical innovation to the status of the most promising, albeit indirect, routes to climate policy. The primary goal of this chapter is to place the green jobs strategy of US unions within the broader political economy and to explore its implications in the absence of comprehensive climate policy. In the first and shorter part I establish the parameters of US labour environmentalism by asking whether any US labour unions have moved beyond an instrumental approach to the environment or whether their green language masks other priorities. This account will highlight the contested and often contradictory approaches to the environment and climate change within the US labour movement. In the second part I place the US unions’ green jobs strategy within the broader political economy by expanding the scale and scope from which we look at it. Combined, then, this chapter serves both an empirical and a methodological purpose. On one hand it outlines, however briefly, the state of US labour environmentalism while on the other it suggests some tools that can be used to evaluate the environmentalism of any labour union.