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Workers are involved in climate action at every level from the global to the local. At the recent global COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, the organization that represents unions around the world joined a broad civil society coalition to fight for a rapid global transformation to a climate-safe economy with good jobs and a just transition for workers. In the US, Build Back Better legislation that would provide jobs by protecting the climate has passed the House of Representatives, but its fate in the Senate hangs in the balance. In the meantime, US states like Illinois and New York have begun passing strong legislation that cuts greenhouse gas emissions while creating union jobs. And the mayors of nearly 100 large cities around the world have joined with labor unions on a plan to deliver a just transition that provides good quality jobs for all.

Want to promote climate protection, racial and economic justice, and quality jobs? You can do all three by joining the 2022 Transit Equity Day on February 4. Public transit may well be the most cost-effective way to cut greenhouse gas pollution. It is also crucial to reducing health threats to low-income neighborhoods and providing good union jobs to inner city workers. The annual Transit Equity Day unites public transit campaigns in cities and states around to country to provide a national focus for public transit demands. It highlights how climate protection, jobs, and justice go hand in hand.  

Video: Compiled from testimony heard at Transit Equity Day/s 2021 during the Community Hearing on Transit Equity. Edited by Zoe Ellen Levitt. Copyright. Labor Network for Sustainability. Watch the video »

For the past four years on Feb. 4, a network of transit rider unions, community organizations, environmental groups and labor unions have organized Transit Equity Day–a national day of action to commemorate the birthday of Rosa Parks by declaring that public transit is a civil right. Rosa Parks is an iconic figure of the civil rights era who refused to give up her seat in the whites-only section of a bus to demand an end to segregation in the Montgomery, Alabama, transit system. Transit Equity Day makes the connection to this act of resistance to highlight the rights of all people to high-quality public transportation run on clean/renewable energy.

Hosted by the Transit Equity Network, the goal of this Day of Action is to promote public transit as a civil right and a strategy to combat climate change.

This day of action will help to support a broader strategy for a just transition from the fossil fuel economy to clean, renewable energy as a way to confront the climate crisis. Expanding non-fossil fuel, public transportation is a foundation to achieving this transition.

Everyone should have access to free (or at least affordable) public transportation regardless of age, race, or class. And workers should have the right to organize in the sectors that will build, operate and maintain public transportation infrastructure, as well as provide the services.

Ready to Get Transit on Track for the Future? Start here. You can also contact Bakari Height at bakari@labor4sustainability.org.

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The Amalgamated Transit Union, the largest transit union in North America, says the recently passed Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act bill will bring a 63 percent increase in funding for public transit. International President John Costa said, “This legislation is a game changer for public transit, workers, riders, and our country.”

It's a down payment on our future. With record funding for public transit, the bill provides a historic investment in fixing and modernizing our nation's crumbling transit infrastructure. It will help fight climate change with funding to replace thousands of gas-powered buses with clean, zero-emission vehicles and provides critical workforce development to ensure frontline transit workers are trained to safely repair, maintain, and operate vehicles with this new technology.

Costa called on Congress to pass the Biden Build Back Better plan “to make critical and overdue investments in working people and their families with funding for childcare, home care, clean energy jobs, health care, tax fairness, and support for worker organizing.” The vision of President Biden’s Build Back Better agenda is “a comprehensive agenda for how we move forward as a nation for generations to come. So much is on the line. It's time to deliver what the American people voted for." 

Photo: Graphic used for the ITUC Nov. 3 in Glasgow–a COP26 side panel of labor leaders, executives and international officials. 

At the recent COP26 global climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland, frontline health workers and refuse collectors, unions, scientists and Indigenous people from all over the world took to the streets when more 100,000 people joined together to call on governments to listen to the people and raise the bar on delivering for climate justice.

Reviewing the accomplishments and shortcomings of COP26, the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), which represents 207 million workers through 331 affiliated organizations in 163 countries, concluded,

The COP26 climate agreement acknowledged the science, recognized the gaps to realizing the 1.5C target, and embedded the call for just transition, but the compromises made in Glasgow fall short on ambition, finance, responsibility and inclusion.

Sharan Burrow, General Secretary of the ITUC, said,

Science tells us that the absolute priority must be rapid, deep, and sustained emissions reductions in this decade – specifically, a 45% cut by 2030 compared to 2010 levels. We are still knocking on the door of climate catastrophe. Now it is time to see all governments and all companies get serious about transition plans – with just transition measures in all industries – if we are to have a fighting chance of staying within the 1.5 target.

For workers and their communities, the social dialogue vital for just transition plans, with jobs at their center, must begin now. Nothing less than national jobs plans and company jobs plans can be accepted.

Sources: 

• C40
• CUPE

A new analysis by the Sierra Club of the Build Back Better Act, which passed the House of Representatives and is under consideration in the Senate, describes how they see the Act will provide to families and communities.

Here are a few examples:

Clean Transportation

• Make public buses and metro lines cleaner, more frequent, and more accessible for affordable housing residents
• Convert more than 60,000 diesel school buses to clean electric buses so schoolchildren can breathe clean air
• Cut the price of an electric vehicle by $12,500 for working and middle class families while supporting electric vehicle manufacturing at unionized U.S. factories
• Help build a half million electric vehicle charging stations in communities nationwide

Clean Water

Help replace over 5 million lead service lines — about half of the national total — to deliver clean water to communities nationwide

Clean Electricity

• Help the average family save about $500 each year in utility bills
• More than double the speed of wind and solar power expansion, bringing renewable energy to millions of additional homes each year
• Make it $7,000 cheaper on average to install solar panels on your rooftop
• Boost access to renewable energy in low-income and Indigenous communities by covering 40-50% of the cost of solar and wind projects

Healthy Buildings

• Enable working and middle class families to save up to $8,000 while weatherizing their homes to reduce utility bills and pollution
• Make it up to $10,000 cheaper to convert your home from fossil fuel-based to electricity-based heating and cooling to slash air and climate pollution

Clean Manufacturing

• Create more than 150,000 family-sustaining jobs by helping to establish and retool factories to manufacture electric vehicles, wind turbines, solar panels, and other clean energy goods

Regenerative Agriculture

• Enable more than 60,000 farmers to switch to renewable energy and machinery that uses less energy
  

A joint statement by the International Trade Union Federation (ITUF) and C40, a network of mayors of nearly 100 of the world’s largest cities, calls for urgent action right now to confront the climate crisis. It states,

In this era of truly global crises, we need a common response that tackles climate change and inequality together, so that everyone, everywhere can thrive for generations to come. This must be the defining decade for climate action, and we can only succeed if the economic and social benefits, including the good quality jobs generated by climate action are enjoyed by all, equitably. This includes supporting communities and workers dependent on high polluting industries to find new opportunities and jobs as our economies are transformed for the future. We want a just transition. 

In the lead-up to the COP26 global climate summit in Glasgow, the mayors and trade unionists pledged to:

• Deliver a just transition, providing good quality jobs for all
• Ensure people are educated and trained in the skills they will need for the future
• Act to tackle long-standing inequalities by addressing energy poverty, improving air quality and access to green space, investing in resilient city infrastructure and, when city powers exist, enhancing social services that benefit our communities most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change
• Work together in partnership to establish just transition pathways in cities
• Secure the investments necessary to deliver a green and just recovery

In a recent Op-ed, two labor leaders say, “The dual crises of climate change and extreme inequality are a threat to our society, and every one of us has a stake in pushing our elected leaders to build a climate-safe and equitable future.” But they add, “Fortunately, workers and their unions are making tremendous progress in advancing bold legislation at the state level to address these two existential crises.”

The authors are Vincent Alvarez, President of the New York City Central Labor Council, AFL-CIO and Pat Devaney, Secretary-Treasurer of the Illinois AFL-CIO. They write that labor unions

scored a massive victory for workers and the planet when Illinois enacted a landmark climate bill that sets the state on a path to a carbon-free power sector by 2045 with the strongest-in-the-nation labor and equity standards.

Thanks to the labor movement’s leadership on climate change, the Illinois bill will slash emissions, create thousands of new clean energy union jobs, expand union apprenticeships for Black and Latinx communities, increase energy efficiency for public schools, and safeguard thousands of union workers at the state’s nuclear plants that currently generate the bulk of Illinois’ zero-emissions energy. It also contains a transition program for families and communities currently reliant on jobs in the fossil fuel industry. This win shows what’s possible when workers and their unions lead on pursuing bold climate action at the scale that science demands.

Illinois isn’t alone. This summer, unions and environmental groups in Connecticut organized to pass strong labor and equity standards for renewable energy projects through the state legislature. The legislation they won includes prevailing wage and project labor agreement provisions and requires energy developers to partner with in-state apprenticeship and pre-apprenticeship programs, which will expand access to good union jobs, specifically in communities of color that have seen generations of underinvestment and underemployment.

Earlier this year, unions in New York built on the historic climate bill passed in 2018, the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, by winning labor standards that will ensure the state’s investments in renewable energy yield good jobs through strong worker protections and prevailing wage requirements, as well as post-construction labor standards and supply chain incentives.

And in Maine, unions pushed lawmakers to require a project labor agreement on the state’s first offshore wind project, which means that the Mainers constructing massive turbines to supply clean energy throughout the state will be paid family-sustaining wages with strong labor protections.

As longtime labor leaders, we know there’s a narrative out there that says we have to choose between creating good jobs and tackling the climate crisis. Our recent victory in Illinois proves just how false that logic is. If we act now, we can slash emissions, create millions of good union jobs in the clean energy economy, and address economic inequality. It’s a winning formula and unions across the country are leading the way.

Photo: Pixelillo via Wikimedia Commons. Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

The Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations, a union representing 900 family-owned fishing boats on the Pacific coast, is suing Chevron, Exxon, BP, Shell, and other oil and gas companies for covering up research that warned about the dangers of burning fossil fuels. The union wants compensation for damage caused by global warming and to meet the cost of new infrastructure to cope with the climate crisis. They also demand changes in fossil fuel industry behavior.

Mike Conroy, head of the PCFFA, said when he first heard of the lawsuit he thought, “This is ridiculous.” But his view shifted when he looked more closely at the actions of the fossil fuel industry, particularly its cover-up of the warnings from its own scientists and its continued efforts to undermine measures to contain global heating. “I learned that these oil companies were doubling down on these things they knew were bad.”

The PCFFA decided to sue after a pool of warm water known as “the Blob” caused blooms of toxic algae that docked two-thirds of the crab fishing fleet. “I know a number of folks that lost their boats, lost their homes, lost their families,” said Conroy. 

In its lawsuit, the PCFFA blamed the Blob on global warming caused by the burning of fossil fuels, and is seeking compensation for “a harmful algal bloom unprecedented in its extent and persistence.”

The union joins many states and cities that are suing fossil fuel corporations for contributing to global warming–and lying about it.

Sources:

• The Guardian
• Complaint
• PCFFA statement on “Combatting Global Warming and Acidic Seas”
  

According to Todd Vachon, director of the Labor Education Action Research Network (LEARN) in the Rutgers School of Management and Labor Relations and an active member of the Labor Network for Sustainability, the recent sharp increase in strikes–sometimes referred to as “Striketober”–is giving workers new power through solidarity.

Striketober is giving American workers and their unions more leverage than they've seen in decades. That provides a great opportunity to make long overdue corrections to wages and benefits and to readjust the generally lopsided balance of power that has existed between workers and employers for generations.

From entertainment workers represented by IATSE (International Association of Theatrical and Stage Employees) to BCTGM (Bakery Confectionery Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers) members employed by Nabisco and Kellogg’s, and now UAW members at John Deere, this is a dramatic moment. American workers are flexing their muscles, rejecting two-tier pension schemes, and pushing back against a lopsided compensation system that has seen the vast majority of all economic growth go to the top 1%. 

The real strength of a union is in its solidarity, the ability to speak in one unified voice. The strike is the ultimate exercise of that solidarity, but under U.S. labor law it can be risky because of the ability of employers to bring in replacement workers. However, the ongoing mass rejection of low-quality jobs by American workers right now restores the power of the strike to what it was when employers were not allowed to hire replacement workers, prior to 1947."

At LNS, Bakari is the organizer of Transit Equity Day and oversees LNS' participation in transit coalitions in Maryland. Bakari has a Master’s in City and Regional Planning from Georgia Tech, and has also worked for various transportation organizations, such as the Georgia Department of Transportation, Atlanta BeltLine, City of Atlanta, and the Dallas Area Rapid Transit, and the Philly Transit Riders Union.

Our Mission

To be a relentless force for urgent, science-based climate action by building a powerful labor-climate movement to secure an ecologically sustainable and economically just future where everyone can make a living on a living planet.

Making a Living on a Living Planet is published by the Labor Network for Sustainability: