Global Labor Strategies

Fighting Doom: The New Politics of Climate Change

[Editor's Note: The following article was written by GLS Co-Founder Brendan Smith for the Labor Network for Sustainability in preparation for the upcoming climate meetings in Cancun.]

I am not an environmentalist. But all I think about these days is the climate crisis.

I admit I have arrived late to the party. Only recently have I begun to realize what others have known for decades: The climate crisis is not, at its core, an environmental issue. In fact it is not an "issue" at all; it is an existential threat to every human and community on the planet. It threatens every job, every economy in the world. It threatens the health of our children. It threatens our food and water supply. Climate change will continue to alter the world our species has known for the past three thousand years.

As an oyster farmer and longtime political activist, the effects of climate change on my life will be neither distant nor impersonal. Rising greenhouse gases and ocean temperatures may well force me to abandon my 60-acre farm within the next forty years. From France to Washington state, oystermen are already seeing massive die-offs of seed oysters and the thinning shells science has long predicted. I can see the storm clouds and they are foretelling doom.

But my political alter ego is oddly less pessimistic. Rather than triggering gloom, the climate crisis has surprisingly stirred up more hope than I have felt in twenty years as a progressive activist. After decades of progressive retreat it is a strange feeling. But I am haunted by the suspicion that this coming crisis may be the first opportunity we have had in generations to radically re-shape the political landscape and build a more just and sustainable society.

The Power of Doom

The modern progressive movement in the U.S. has traditionally grounded its organizing in the politics of identity and altruism. Organize an affected group -- minorities, gays, janitors or women -- and then ask the public at large to support the cause -- prison reform, gay marriage, labor rights, or abortion -- based on some cocktail of good will, liberal guilt, and moral persuasion. This strategy has been effective at times. But we have failed to bring these mini-movements together into a force powerful enough to enact broad-based social reform. It takes a lot of people to change society and our current strategy has left us small in numbers and weak in power.

The highlights of my political life -- as opposed to oystering -- have been marked by winning narrow, often temporary, battles, but perennially losing the larger war. I see the results in every direction I look: growing poverty and unemployment, two wars, the rise of the right, declining unionization, the failure of the Senate's climate legislation and of Copenhagen, the wholesale domination of corporate interests. The list goes on and on. We have lost; it's time to admit our strategy has been too tepid and begin charting anew.

This time can be different. What is so promising about the climate crisis is that because it is not an "issue" experienced by one disenfranchised segment of the population, it opens the opportunity for a new organizing calculus for progressives. Except for nuclear annihilation, humanity has never faced so universal a threat where all our futures are bound inextricably together. This universality provides the mortar of common interest required for movement building. We could literally knock on every door on the planet and find someone -- whether they know it or not -- who has a vital self-interest in averting the climate crisis by joining a movement for sustainability. With all of humanity facing doom, we can finally gather under one banner and count our future members not in the thousands but in the millions, even billions.

But as former White House "Green Jobs Czar" Van Jones told the New Yorker in 2009, "The challenge is making this an everybody movement, so your main icons are Joe Six-Pack, Joe the Plumber, becoming Joe the Solar Guy, or that kid on the street corner putting down his handgun, picking up a caulk gun." The climate crisis is carrying us into uncharted waters and our political strategy needs to be directed toward making the climate movement an "everybody movement."

Let me use a personal example. As an oysterman on Long Island Sound my way of life is threatened by rising greenhouse gases and ocean temperatures. If the climate crisis is not averted my oysters will die and my farm will be shuttered.

Saving my livelihood requires that I politically engage at some level. Normally I would gather together my fellow oyster farmers to lobby state and federal officials and hold a protest or two. Maybe I would find a few coalitions to join. But we would remain small in number, wield little power, and our complaints about job loss would fall on largely unsympathetic ears in the face of so many suffering in so many ways. And what would we even petition our government to do about the problem? Buyouts and unemployment benefits? Re-training classes? Our oysters will still die and we will still lose our farms.

Globalization, Neoliberalism, and Climate Change

As the global economy hurtles toward Great Recession II, the earth hurtles toward climate catastrophe.  Both represent the results of a neoliberal deregulation that has left humanity no means to shape our economies to serve human needs -- not even the need for economic and environmental survival.

How global movements respond to these intertwined environmental and economic crises will be key to our common survival. The politics will surely be complicated.  A case in point is an article in today's New York Times about the United Steelworkers union's WTO complaint against China for providing "illegal clean energy subsidies" to domestic solar, wind and other green industries.

To promote international dialogue on these questions, we thought it might be useful to post a recent paper, entitled "Globalization, Neoliberalism and Climate Change", which was prepared by GLS at the invitation of Professor Liu Cheng of Shanghai Normal University for an international conference this April on "Global Economic Recession vs. Deregulation" jointly organized by the Peking University Law School and the Shanghai Normal University Faculty of Law and Politics and supported by the ILO Beijing Office.  The paper stresses the interest of workers around the world in cooperating to create an alternative to neoliberalism based on making the transition to a green economy.

Globalization, Neoliberalism, and Climate Change: Toward a New Regulatory Regime

For thirty years, global and national economies have been guided by policies of neoliberal deregulation, often known as the "Washington Consensus." Neoliberalism has been disastrous for workers in most countries, pitting workers against each other in a race to the bottom and making it all but impossible to protect working class interests. There is now a growing consensus that the Washington Consensus has been a failure.

There is also a growing global recognition that we are in the midst of an unprecedented climate crisis. Ready or not, that crisis is affecting every nation, every locality, and every worker. Its effects are already serious, and unless decisive global action is taken to counter it, they will soon be catastrophic. Neoliberal deregulation, by dismantling the means for public steering of society to meet social needs, has also made it nearly impossible to correct global climate crisis.

These twin realizations, the failure of neoliberalism and the climate crisis, will define the struggle for the interests of poor and working people for the next century. At the same time, the necessity to counter climate change may provide an opportunity to address the broader problems of neoliberal deregulation.

This article argues that it is only by rolling back neoliberalism that we can protect the rights of workers globally and solve the crisis of climate change. In Part 1 we provide a short history of globalization. In Part 2 we discuss the climate crisis and its effects on workers. In Part 3 describes proposals for a "global green new deal" to create full employment through climate protection. Part 4 argues that a new global and national regulatory regime is necessary both to counter both climate change and the race to the bottom. Part 5 discussions the role of organized labor nationally and globally in bringing about such a transformation.

Labor and Climate Change: A Briefing Paper for Activists

by Tim Costello and the Labor Network for Sustainability

["Labor and Climate Change" is a briefing paper that provides activists inside and outside the labor movement a way to understand the interests and concerns of different segments of organized labor in climate change issues.  It was the last major work by Tim Costello, who died in December, 2009.]

This briefing paper provides a strategy for addressing organized labor’s stake in climate change. Its goal is to provide activists inside and outside the labor movement with the information they need to help shape effective, worker friendly climate protection policies and garner support for them from organized labor.

The findings are based primarily on a detailed survey of the climate change record, self-interest, and decision making process of 17 labor organizations.  These unions and federations were selected to reflect the range of industries, occupations, and organizational cultures of the US trade union movement. The results of these surveys were compiled into profiles which include basic information, analysis, contact data, and other relevant information. The complete profiles are over 300 pages. They draw on both available public information and on a series of private conversations with top union officials and other knowledgeable sources.  And we have identified over 400 labor leaders at the local, regional and national level.

Protecting the Climate

[Third in the series “Labor Goes to Copenhagen]

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a UN-sponsored scientific body that was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for its work, keeping global temperature within 2 degrees C of historic levels requires reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by specific targets.

The global trade union movement has committed itself to the IPPC’s science-based targets.  In its statement to the Copenhagen negotiations, the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), which represents 170 million workers in trade unions around the world, said,

“We reaffirm the commitment of the global trade union movement to achieving an agreement that will limit the global temperature to raise no more than 2 degrees C. . . .  trade unions urge Governments at the UNFCCC [climate change negotiations] in Copenhagen to follow the IPCC scenario for reducing global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to 85% lower than their 1990 levels by the year 2050 and emphasize the need for interim targets for this to be achieved, including a corresponding reduction of at least 25-40% by developed countries by 2020 below 1990 levels.”

A Just Transition

[This is the second in a series of posts as representatives of trade unions around the world head off to Copenhagen.  It is cross-posted with the Labor Network for Sustainability]

At the core of global labor’s strategy for climate protection is the idea of a “just transition” to a low-carbon economy.

A just transition means that the burden of change that benefits everyone will not be placed disproportionately on a few.  It means that those most vulnerable to change will be protected.  It means that the process of change will increase social justice for workers, women, the poor, and all oppressed groups. 

Such a just transition is essential to produce the “broad and sustainable political consensus” necessary to make climate protection policy work in the long run.

The International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), which represents 170 million workers in unions all over the world, campaigned for language embodying the just transition principle in the negotiating text of the Copenhagen agreement.  Such language was submitted by Argentina and proposed as part of the “shared vision” by the Chair of the negotiations in May.  It read:

An economic transition is needed that shifts global economic growth patterns towards a low emission economy based on more sustainable production and consumption, promoting sustainable lifestyles and climate-resilient development while ensuring a just transition of the workforce.

Since then this language has been “bracketed,” meaning that at least one government has questioned or opposed it.  Unions around the world have been lobbying their governments to keep it in.

World Leaders Fiddle While the World Burns: Time for a New Climate Strategy

Obama’s climate czar Carol Browner said last week there will be no U.S. climate protection legislation before the Copenhagen conference and that she doesn’t know if a global agreement on binding cuts in greenhouse gas emissions can be made in Copenhagen.  She added that she had hope for progress because the world's top leaders recognize global warming is a problem.  

As the torturous Copenhagen negotiations and the already-inadequate U.S. climate protection legislation falter, the earth is being imperiled by a failure of its political systems.  We know what needs to be done to halt global warming; we have the technology and resources to halt it; we know the consequences of not doing what we know must be done.  If the “world’s top leaders” recognize that “global warming is a problem” and do nothing about it, they are part of the problem, not part of the solution.

While the earth burns, the “world’s top leaders” are standing around pointing the finger at each other like a bunch of arsonists trying to distract the world’s attention from their handiwork.  The U.S. attacks China for its growing carbon emissions.  China, backed by 130 other third world countries, justly attacks the developed countries for their failure to take responsibility for their damage to the planet’s atmosphere – but then continue their plans to build new climate-destroying coal-fired power plants week by week.  The EU piously condemns the U.S. position, but doesn’t care enough to take the Americans on.   

The failure of current climate protection strategies tells us that the current strategy of lobbying governments to fix global warming will not work.

In the past, the failure of establishments to solve problems that they and their people recognize has often led to the emergence of radical movements demanding real change.  Remember, for example, how betrayed government promises for racial equality and nuclear disarmament helped spawn the civil rights, ban-the-bomb, and new left movements of the 1960s.  

The complicity of governments and the corporations and investors for whom they are so often speaking to halt the destruction of our biosphere may similarly help spawn a new climate protection movement: a convergence of those in the environmental, labor, food, globalization, anti-poverty, peace, student, and other movements who grasp urgency and believe radical action as the only way forward.

We have learned a great deal more about the science of climate change and what must be done to halt it.  But we have barely begun to discuss what kind of political change is necessary to do what must be done.  Here are some principles to discuss for an alternative climate protection strategy:

1.  Existing institutions, specifically states and markets, have decisively proven themselves unable to halt the plunge toward destruction of the biosphere.  

2.  National and world political systems are as dysfunctional for survival today as feudal principalities were for protecting their people in the face of capitalism and the modern nation state.

3.  States are not legitimate if they allow their terrain or their institutions to be used to destroy the global environment.  They have no right to govern.  They are climate outlaws whose authority it is not only our right but our obligation to challenge.

Will Workers Be Left Behind in a Green Transition?

[Editor's note: This week GLS is posting an article by our colleague Joe Uehlein entitled "Will Workers be Left Behind in the Green Transition?" originally published at TheNation.com. We think this piece is a must read for trade unionists, environmentalists and others struggling to address the impacts of the climate crisis on workers around the world.  Joe is the former secretary-treasurer of the AFL-CIO's Industrial Union Department and former director of the AFL-CIO Center for Strategic Campaigns; he is a founder and board member of Ceres and a member of the National Advisory Board of the Union of Concerned Scientists. He is now organizing the Labor Network for Sustainability dedicated to rallying trade unionists for economic, social and environmental sustainability.]

Will Workers Be Left Behind in a Green Transition?

by Joe Uehlein, originally published at TheNation.com

As Congress gears up to craft much-needed legislation to protect the earth from global warming, many American workers are wondering what it will mean for their jobs. They may be wondering even more if they hear about the House Energy and Commerce Committee's proposal for carbon regulation legislation, The American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009, released March 31. It is 648 pages long. But Section 424 on "Worker Transition" has only three words: "to be supplied."

Unfortunately, "transition assistance" in the past has often meant little more than a funeral for workers and communities threatened by the side effects of globalization, environmental protection and other public policies. Without a clear program to protect workers from the effects of climate protection, the struggle against global warming can all too easily come to be perceived as a struggle against American workers. Workers have often felt threatened by measures to protect the environment. Today such fears are likely to be augmented, especially in a time of soaring unemployment, by the large changes necessary to protect the planet from global warming.

Environmentalists have often addressed this challenge by pointing out that a transition to clean energy would create far more jobs than it would eliminate. While that may be true, it entirely misses the point. The fact that some people get new jobs provides little solace for the people and communities who have lost theirs.

As Carl Wood of the Utility Workers Union of America put it at this year's Good Jobs, Green Jobs national conference, "Workers are used to being ground up and spat out by any change in society. In the United States there is no safety net for the victims." He cited mechanics in a southeastern Ohio coal-fired power plant represented by his union whose jobs would be eliminated by the phasing out of coal as a very real example of how climate protection could threaten specific workers even if it produced more jobs in general.

Coal miners and their communities are particularly at risk. In a September 2008 op-ed, United Mine Workers of America president Cecil Roberts cited a study showing that the Climate Stewardship Act of 2003 would have reduced coal production by 78 percent by 2025, which would have "just about wiped out the coal industry in southern West Virginia and elsewhere in Appalachia." He added that the more recent Lieberman-McCain bill would have cut Appalachian coal production by 30 percent or more.

How the G-20 Can Pay for a Global Climate Deal

The G-20 summit convening in London on April 2 is preparing to create a quarter trillion dollars of brand new stimulus money to help poor countries battle the global recession.

World leaders plan to use a little-known form of global currency to pay the freight, a currency known technically as "Special Drawing Rights" (SDRs) but often referred to as "paper gold." It’s a currency that can be issued by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the Telegraph has reported that the U.S. government is keen on the idea.

Senior figures in the U.S. Treasury have been encouraging the Fund to issue hundreds of billions of dollars worth [of SDRs] to prevent the recession from turning into a global depression.

If leaders at the G-20 summit can create "paper gold" to jump-start the global economy, they can also turn it in a green direction to jump-start protection of the global climate.

They should put much of paper gold stimulus under discussion into an international fund, to help developing countries pay for climate protection. Such an action would remove the greatest stumbling block in the way of international climate action -- the lack of financing to pay for energy conservation, technology transfer, adaptation, forest conservation, clean energy, and research and development. It would allow negotiators to arrive in Copenhagen for climate talks at the end of the year with the finances in place to negotiate and sign a global deal. 

Without the financing, the chances of success in Copenhagen are slim. Yves De Boer, the UN's climate chief, left no doubt about that in comments he made this week criticizing EU finance ministers for putting conditions on financial help for developing countries, contrary to promises made in Bali in 2007:

I think without clarity on finance from industrialized countries there will be no commitment from developing countries.

"Paper gold" offers a way out of this stalemate -- a way to mobilize resources without either taxing or borrowing. That’s why G-20 leaders are proposing to issue a quarter trillion dollars worth of new SDRs – and why paper gold can play a crucial role in protecting the climate, too.

Measures that would fight both global warming and global economic meltdown simultaneously are being called a "Green New Deal." At the climate talks in Poznan last December, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called a "Global Green New Deal" the best chance for securing a climate agreement in Copenhagen in late 2009.  And in a February op-ed in the Financial Times, Ban together with Al Gore wrote,

What we need is both stimulus and long-term investments that accomplish two objectives simultaneously with one global economic policy response -- a policy that addresses our urgent and immediate economic and social needs and that launches a new green global economy.

World leaders convening at the G-20 have the opportunity to do just that.

The SDR Backstory

Countries normally set aside reserves, most often in gold and U.S. Treasury bills, as insurance to protect their currencies against speculation, runs, and other forms of economic adversity. If a country’s currency starts to plummet in value, the government can use the reserves to buy back its own currency and stabilize it.

Global Labor’s Forgotten Plan to Fight the Great Depression

In the early 1930s, as global unemployment tripled in two years and the world plunged into the Great Depression, the world’s labor movements developed a program for fighting the global crisis through international public works.  It’s a little-known historical might-have-been that could have helped halt the Great Depression, the rise of Adolph Hitler, and the Second World War.  And, as the efforts of world leaders to address today’s “Great Recession” threaten to break down in nationalist rivalry and petty political bickering, it bears lessons – and perhaps an alternative vision – for today.

Workers and organized labor have historically advocated government public works as a solution to unemployment.  Not only would they provide jobs and income for those directly employed, but they would raise overall purchasing power, thereby creating demand for the products of other workers and creating a virtuous circle of economic growth.  In the context of swelling unemployment in the early Depression, discussion of national public works programs developed in many countries.

The proposal for international public works originated with General German Trade Union Alliance (ADGB), which included most of Germany’s trade unions and represented the great majority of its workers.  The plan won the support first of the German union alliance, then of unions around the world, and finally of the League of Nations’ International Labor Organization. 

The plan was worked out by the head of the Alliance’s statistical department, W.S. Woytinsky.  Woytinsky was a Russian émigré who had been president of the St. Petersburg Council of the Unemployed during the 1905 revolution and had organized mass action to force the city to provide public works employment.  Observing Germany’s combination of spiraling deflation and spiraling unemployment in the early 1930s, he came up with the idea of using credit expansion to finance massive public works.

Taking a cue from recent League of Nations policy proposals, Woytinsky proposed an international agreement that would allow the lowering the gold reserve requirements for national currencies.  That would let central banks create new money that could finance international public works and thereby create the purchasing power needed to reflate the economy.

In a June, 1931, article, Woytinsky proposed an “Action Program for Reviving the Economy.”  It called for the labor movement to “assume the role of conveyor of the idea of an activist world economic policy.”  It was up to the labor movement to “force the state and all public institutions to implement measures to revive the economy.”

Labor’s policy “must be a global economic policy.  All nations are suffering because the world economy is sick, and therefore they must all concentrate their forces upon joint action to overcome the worldwide crisis.”  The international agreement would provide an alternative to the rise of economic nationalism, supporting “tariff reductions and European economic unification” as well as “internationalization of wage policy and social policy.”  The program would also support workers’ fight for higher wages, shorter hours, social rights, and regulation of business.

"Buy American?": Buyer Beware!

Economic nationalism is back and that is not a good sign for working people. “Buy American” or “Buy French” or “Buy [add your country here]” campaigns are often presented as a way to protect workers and undo the damage done to workers by 30 years of corporate-dominated globalization."  But such efforts are out of touch with today’s realities; they can backfire on the workers they claim to support and could even push the global economy deeper into the abyss.  Workers desperately need an alternative to the economic practices, frequently but misleadingly referred to as "free trade," that let corporations promote a worldwide "race to the bottom."  But economic nationalism provides only the illusion of such an alternative.

In the US, economic nationalism has recently emerged around the "Buy American" provision requiring that U.S.-made products, in particular steel, be used in projects funded by the recent $790 billion stimulus bill.  One of the most vocal corporate supporters of the legislation has been Dan DiMicco, CEO of Nukor, the largest steel producer in the US. He recently told CBS’s 60 Minutes that the goal of the stimulus package “is to stop the bleeding of jobs and to create jobs here in American, not overseas, not in China, not in Europe."

Some Americans who have seen DiMicco's TV interviews may feel reassured that an American businessman is finally willing to act in the interest of American, rather than moving American jobs abroad. What DiMicco forgot to mention is that Nukor has also been partnering with Chinese steel maker Shougang Corporation to build a new steel plant in Australia.

Corporate led globalization has produced a global economy in which goods, services, and capital are like a global ball of yarn which has become so tangled that it can only be untangled with great care. US corporations produce or buy goods in China employing Chinese workers; Chinese money finances the US debt keeping the US economy afloat; complex manufactured goods produced almost anywhere in the world are assembled from parts produced in the global supply chain; and we all now know how toxic financial instruments assembled from loans made to poor and working class Americans spread from the US to infect economies everywhere. If we start untangling the global ball of yarn without considering the consequences for people throughout the world we will accelerate and deepen the crises we find out selves in.

This is not an argument for perpetuating the kind of globalization that just means the right of corporations to roam the world doing anything they want without restraint by democratic governments and institutions.  That kind of globalization, fortunately, is currently collapsing. But it needs to be replaced, not by an economic war of all against all, but by democratic decision making that is as decentralized as it can be while still being effective.

The task for the world’s labor movements, global justice activists, progressive political forces, and NGO’s is to demand that a new order be based on mutual consultation and mutual gain and not on beggar-thy-neighbor policies. That means “re-localizing” a great deal of the global economy, but in ways that benefit, rather than harm, the interests and living standards of ordinary people and helps restore a more sustainable environment.

In this post we open a thread on ways to avoid both destructive economic nationalism and failed corporate globalization.  We start with a little known history -- the reactionary history of Buy America campaigns in the US, which are driven by the same impulses that pushed for Buy American provisions in the stimulus package.  This history, as revealed Dana Frank’s book Buy American: The Untold Story of Economic Nationalism (Beacon Press, 1999), teaches us that steel magnate Dan DiMicco represents a great American tradition: the very business leaders who have demanded that American workers Buy American have often secretly sought foreign assets and played workers around the world off against each other in a never ending race to the bottom.

The Boston Tea Party
Buy American campaigns are as American as the Boston Tea Party. On the night of December 16, 1773, between fifty and a hundred colonists, with faces blackened, climbed onboard three ships moored in Boston harbor to dump 90,000 pounds of tea into the ocean. The nation’s first Buy American protest was attended by an audience of 2,000 or 3,000, watching silently from the harbor docks.