This is the seventh piece in GLS's series on Labor and Global Warming.
By campaigning against the Kyoto agreement, and until recently remaining silent on the corporate strategy to bamboozle the American people into allowing carbon pollution to burgeon unabated, the U.S. labor movement will be widely seen as complicit in the growth of catastrophic climate change – unless it speaks out now.
Now that even energy corporations are admitting the reality of global warming, a serious “climate debate” is finally reaching the U.S. Labor is one of the few organized forces that can represent the interests of ordinary people in that debate. A constructive labor involvement is essential both for establishing the measures needed to counter global warming, and for ensuring a “just transition” in which workers and the poor are not forced to bear the burden while corporations and the wealthy further enrich themselves.
Both global warming and the effort to combat it will directly affect workers and unions. Global warming, if not halted, will lead to massive economic disruption and job loss. Some anti-warming measures will lead to job losses in particular sectors. At the same time, there are huge opportunities for job growth presented by many anti-warming measures.
Workers and unions will also be affected, directly and through their employers, by economic policies established to combat global warming. Those policies will change taxes; redirect investment; affect energy prices; and reshape much of our energy and transportation infrastructure.
Workers in workplaces can play an essential role in introducing, monitoring, and enforcing anti-warming measures. After all, who is in a better position to know whether a company is really reducing its carbon use than those who work for it? Unions are in a unique position to negotiate purchasing, transportation, and other company policies that affect global warming. But such a role raises the question of what does it mean to be a worker – are workers “hired to work not think,” or should they also play a workplace role as producer, citizen, and human being?
American labor’s political clout has greatly strengthened the energy companies and others who fought against the Kyoto Protocol and domestic efforts to cut carbon emissions and reduce global warming. Meanwhile, more than 140 countries joined the Kyoto Protocol, which set specific targets for reducing carbon dioxide emissions to 5% below 1990 levels. In the decade since Kyoto was first negotiated, U.S. carbon emissions have increased 15 percent.
American labor, with its significant political clout, can play a crucial role in bringing the U.S. into the global effort to deal with global warming. Here are key elements for a new labor policy for an aggressive attack on global warming combined with a just transition to a sustainable global economy:
1. Support a steady, compulsory reduction in greenhouse gasses. The 2% per year reduction demanded by the Blue-Green Alliance provides a reasonable starting point.
2. Support U.S. participation in a global agreement providing similar reductions worldwide.
3. Insist on a “just transition” in which workers who bear the cost of efforts to control global warming are adequately compensated.
4. Pursue a global jobs program that addresses the global deficit in good jobs for all.
5. Resist greenhouse gas policies that redistribute wealth to the wealthy and support those that redistribute it downward.
6. Push for recognition of the right and responsibility of workers and their representatives to participate in the planning, monitoring, and enforcement of measures to combat global warming in their workplaces and communities.
7. Include these rights and responsibilities in legislation and collective bargaining agreements.
8. Take responsibility for educating workers and their communities on the threat of global warming and the ways workers can participate individually and collectively in reducing greenhouse gasses.
9. Establish environmental stewards and/or incorporate environmental responsibilities in health and safety committees.
10. Act through negotiations and directly against employers who fail to meet their legal and moral responsibility to reduce greenhouse gasses.
11. Participate in coalitions to combat global warming locally, statewide, nationally, and globally.
12. Research and initiate local projects that create jobs by converting production and consumption to environmentally friendly, low greenhouse gas, forms.
13. Demand public responsibility for the protection of those most vulnerable to the effects of global warming. No more Katrinas!
Will American labor part of the global warming problem -- or part of the solution?
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