On May 7, 2020, Ntebo Mokuena, digital campaign manager of Daily Kos posted the above photo on Twitter saying: "Today, I took action with @charlieyj12 @nathanypark @greenpeaceusa @dailykos and thousands of community members across the country demanding the House pass the Essential Worker Bill of Rights. Join me in calling on the House to #ProtectEssentialWorkers" Photo credit: Tim Aubry, visual communications director, Greenpeace.

Whether they are healthcare workers, bus drivers, janitors, factory workers, or firefighters, people who are declared “essential workers” and are therefore required to go to work in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic face many of the same threats. Demands from these workers have been synthesized into an Essential Worker Bill of Rights that has been endorsed by labor organizations including Service Employees International Union, the American Federation of Teachers, and the National Domestic Workers Alliance; environmental and climate groups like the Sunrise Movement, Greenpeace, Sierra Club, Oil Change International; and many other progressive groups including MoveOn and Daily Kos.

The Labor Network for Sustainability has helped coordinate a campaign by labor, environmental, and climate justice organizations that helped win the incorporation of many elements of the Essential Worker Bill of Rights in the HEROES Act, which was passed by the House of Representatives May 15 and now facing a battle royale in the Senate.

As COVID-19 spreads across the nation, our nurses, healthcare professionals, public employees, teachers, school staff and many others are trying to keep us alive and healthy under extraordinary and unimaginable circumstances. They are our heroes and heroines. 

Want to learn more and take action? Here are a couple of resources:

• Here’s an evolving toolkit; last dated used for 5/21/2020 »
• Watch “AFT Members on the Frontline of COVID-19 »

On May 7, 2020, RNs and members of National Nurses United, one of the signatories on Labor Network for Sustainability's April 7, 2020 letter to Trump and Pence, placed shoes outside the White House, each pair representing a nurse lost due to insufficient PPE during #COVID19. Photo credit: @NationalNurses.

As reported in The Hill, a letter to president Donald Trump from more than 100 unions, advocacy organizations, and environmental groups demanded that the administration immediately provide equipment to hospital workers, cleaning staff, restaurant workers, manufacturers, and others who cannot work from home. 

The desperate need for personal protective equipment (PPE) goes far beyond healthcare workers. Janitors are deep cleaning buildings, teachers’ aides are delivering meals to children at home, warehouse and manufacturing workers are making and distributing essential goods, home care providers are caring for the most vulnerable, public service workers are maintaining essential services, bus operators are taking essential workers to their jobs.

The letter grew out of a series of teleconferences in which the leaders of seven unions described to the leaders of major environmental organizations the impact the COVID-19 pandemic is having on their workers. (Watch: LNS Building Support for Workers in the COVID Crisis).

The letter was signed by the Service Employees International Union and unions for flight attendants, transit workers, manufacturing, and telecom workers, as well as the Sierra Club and other environmental groups as well as civil rights groups such as the NAACP. 

For more about labor-environmental cooperation in the struggle to protect workers against coronavirus, check out “Unions Fight to Protect ALL Essential Workers.” 

Graphic: Taylor Mayes, Connecticut Roundtable on Climate and Jobs

More than 70 unions, civil rights groups, transit organizations, and coalitions in the labor and environmental justice movements led by the Labor Network for Sustainability and Institute for Policy Studies are campaigning to include funding for transit workers in the HEROES Act now before Congress. One “essential worker” noted,

Public transit is essential for getting me to my shift at a Pittsburgh grocery store but as a response to COVID-19, our transit agency cut back on the number of buses that run routes. That means it’s harder for me to get to work and that the buses are more crowded. It’s stressful to get onto a packed bus after spending so much effort distancing the rest of the day. As someone who's also being called an ‘essential worker,’ I can relate. We're risking our lives, but we're workers, not martyrs. It's critical that our employers and public transit agencies give us the compensation and protection we deserve.

Stay informed, take action for workers' rights with regard to transit amid the pandemic:

• Check out LNS' resource page
• Get the Transit Equity Letter to Congress Action Toolkit
• Visit the Amalgamated Transit Union’s memorial page, “Remember Our Fallen”
• Here why Sherry B. Williams, an Atlanta area transit equity organizer believes it's necessary to keep public transit operating during pandemic.

Graphic: Taylor Mayes, Connecticut Roundtable on Climate and Jobs

By Judy Asman, LNS Communications and Information Director

At the end of March, it seemed for a minute like Earth Day to May Day actions would be non-existent with the devastating spread of COVID-19—especially with executive orders throughout the states that suspended (and rightfully so) live events to mandate social distancing.

But in the 50th year of honoring and fighting for the existence and sustainability of our planet, environmental and climate justice organizations, civil rights groups, environmental groups, unions, and labor allies around the country were not about to let that happen. Nor was May Day, the International Day of Labor, which in 1886 resulted in workers’ rights still threatened in the current day, about to be forgotten. The existential threat of a global pandemic would not eclipse the preceding and increasingly existential threat of the climate crisis but instead bring to light that the two crises are very much linked.

Throughout the country, unions and climate allies teamed up to hold panel discussions, digital rallies and Twitter storms that aimed for the attention of lawmakers. Some activists developed templates for live, in-person actions, adhering vigilantly to CDC guidelines and shared online so they could be heard and seen on the streets without causing further damage amid the pandemic. At home in Takoma Park, where LNS was founded, an idea was launched to perform one song each day, first on Earth Day to honor sustainability, then on to solidarity on May 1 (May Day), and then about peace on May 4—50 years since the massacre at Kent State. Music and the arts remained at the core of this year’s #ED2MD as songwriters and musicians contributed their songs to the LNS video library.

If you missed any part of it, you can still see a roundup of actions organized by groups and individuals who understood and acted on the inherent relation between the climate emergency, the COVID crisis and their obvious higher impact on lower income communities, the working class and ethnic minorities. What resulted was 10 days of dialog, mobilization and education on what the COVID-19 crisis currently means to the labor-climate movement and how going back to “normal” will not be an option in the post-pandemic era if we continue to strive for making a living on a living planet. See #ED2MD highlights »

Carly Ebben Eaton is Development Director for the Labor Network for Sustainability. She has a Ph.D. in Chemistry from Northwestern University, focused on the chemistry of nitrogen oxides, ozone, and aerosol particle production, and the impacts of this chemistry on air quality and climate. She was an organizer with United Autombile Workers 5810 and a member of the Executive Committee of the Alameda Labor Council. In a recent article “Science and Crisis,” she describes how years ago work was started on a vaccine for the virus SARS that might have been at least partially effective against COVID-19. But for failure to invest $3 million the research was dropped.

A $3 million investment in basic science could have helped save trillions of dollars, millions of jobs, and hundreds of thousands of lives.

And this is just one example of the consistent, systemic, horrifyingly short-sighted undervaluing of basic research on the part of policymakers.

It boggles my mind and makes me furious that facts and evidence have become so politicized that our government is blatantly ignoring the tremendous value of investment in research. Robust public investment in science is, and has always been, good for the economy. It should be common sense. And yet, here we are.

Eaton points out the relevance of this story to climate change. “We’re going to need new and innovative solutions if we have any hope of addressing the climate crisis in a way that is equitable and just, and as scientists have been saying for what feels like forever, we’re running out of time.”

Read Carly's entire piece » 

Above: Caption text about live video; screenshot will be above with link to video.

The need for a large-scale Just Transition for workers and communities has never been more urgent as more than 30 million workers have applied for unemployment in the past month. Many face the likelihood that they will never go back to their previous jobs. The Coronavirus pandemic and the economic crisis developing as a result offer an important barometer of whether and how we are prepared socially, politically and economically for massive changes to our economy. The shift to the green economy we need in order to confront the climate crisis will require economic shifts on a similar scale.  

On May 27, the Labor Network for Sustainability launched its Just Transition Listening Project with an online panel on “The Pandemic, The Economic Crisis and Just Transition.” The panel will feature renowned linguist, historian and philosopher Noam Chomsky and economic experts Thea Lee, President of the Economic Policy Institute, and Robert Pollin, Co-Director of the Political Economy Research Institute. The panelists will offer their perspectives and projections of how the economic crisis will unfold in the months and years to come and what we must do about it.

The Just Transition Listening Project will offer us important lessons, shared through the experience of workers and community members who have been through such transitions, are going through them now and who face them in the near future. Watch “The Pandemic, The Economic Crisis and Just Transition.”

Illustration by Cord Lopez. Instagram: @mclopezart

The transition to a climate-safe economy will produce millions of new jobs. But it will also require the elimination or transformation of millions of jobs—and any job is important if it is your job. Such job loss will affect not just individual workers, but also whole localities and regions.

Labor Network for Sustainability Policy and Research Director Jeremy Brecher has just published “No Worker Left Behind: Protecting Workers and Communities in the Green New Deal” in the New Labor Forum.  

It provides the first review of “just transition” provisions in the recent proposals of presidential candidates and other figures designed to protect workers and communities against side effects of a climate-protecting Green New Deal. It identifies policies that could be actionable by Green New Deal programs at national and state levels—proposals that are or could be readily translated into legislation and executive orders.

As the Coronavirus Pandemic leads into the Coronavirus Depression, our very survival depends on putting our people to work fighting the coronavirus; meeting the needs of all for food, shelter, healthcare, and other basic necessities; and reversing the destruction of the earth’s climate. LNS Policy and Research Director Jeremy Brecher has authored a series of commentaries proposing to do so through an Emergency Green New Deal.

• "As Workers Fight Coronavirus, They Are Laying the Basis for an Emergency Green New Deal" describes the need for emergency employment to meet the Coronavirus crisis and the economic devastation it is bringing to American workers; tells how worker action on the job, in the community, and in the political arena is already addressing that need; and explains how their action can be the start of an Emergency Green New Deal.
  
  
• "An Emergency Jobs Program for an Emergency Green New Deal" lays out a practical plan for a Green New Deal Jobs Program that can start right now. 
  
  
• "Momentum Builds for Emergency Green New Deal Jobs" describes a cascade of new Green-New-Deal-style proposals for not only recovering from the Coronavirus recession, but using that recovery to address our longstanding problems of climate catastrophe and economic inequality.
  
  
• "The Coronavirus Depression and the Emergency Green New Deal"  explores a program tailored to the realities of the economic emergency.