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Just as the missiles are about to hit their target, a pseudo-scientist-entrepreneur and major presidential campaign contributor persuades the president to call off the attack. The reason? He says the comet is rich in minerals that would provide vast wealth. He proposes instead an untested plan to break the incoming comet into many small fragments that – he confidently asserts – will fall harmlessly into the ocean. The plan fails to break up the comet and it hits the earth as scientists predicted and puts an end to human life.

Why is this allowed to happen? Even though the comet can be seen day by day drawing closer to the earth, and even though scientists have designed an effective means to divert it, multiple causes synergize to prevent effective action. The president and other political figures concentrate on their impending elections, not on the existential threat to their planet and people. The media either ignores or trivializes the threat – it’s just too downbeat to present seriously. Business and political leaders opt for untested schemes based on foolish fantasies. Workers are told that these schemes will result in economic benefits that will provide them jobs. As the comet draws nearer and nearer, a mass popular campaign tells people they can escape worry about the comet as long as they “don’t look up.”  

Here at the Labor Network for Sustainability we’ll continue to look up. Although we fight every day for the needs of working people, we won’t advocate a course that will destroy the world on a dubious claim that it will save or create jobs along the way. We will continue to demonstrate that creating a climate-safe economy is also the best way to create a prosperous and just society for workers. We will continue to show, as we do in this newsletter, that actions like Transit Equity Day and #ArminArm, studies like “A Green New Deal for All,” and job opportunities like the U.S. Clean Energy Corps are setting a course that will allow everyone to make a living on a living planet.

Don’t Look Up set the record for the highest weekly viewership for any film ever on Netflix. The moral? Look up – you won’t be alone!

Photo: Taylor Mayes

By Elizabeth Bunn, LNS National Policy Director

In 2018, LNS and Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) launched the first Transit Equity Day to honor Rosa Parks on her birthday, February 4, by continuing to strive for social and economic justice. On Transit Equity Day we recognize transit as a civil rights, workers’ rights, and climate justice issue. Since 2018, the number of groups participating in TED activities has grown every year.

Transit Equity Day 2022 brings new energy and new partners into the fight for transit justice by including a focus on transit workers as an equity issue. Without transit operators, maintenance, and other employees, there would be no transit service. Transit employment has still not recovered to pre-COVID levels and cities across the country have cut service because of inadequate staffing. To achieve transit equity, we must prioritize investment in our transit workforce.

LNS, partnering with Alliance for a Just Society and Transit Center, have issued a report outlining the connection between worker justice and transit equity. The report calls on transit agencies to engage with their employees—through their unions—to address staffing problems. Workers know better than anyone how to build a stable, skilled, professional workforce. The report urges agencies to make full use of funds available from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) to invest in their employees.

Transit rider groups around the country will highlight the report on February 4. Groups in dozens of cities will participate in Transit Equity Day activities around the country and many more transit equity fights will be amplified throughout the day through social media.

For more information on Transit Equity Day:

www.labor4sustainability.org/transit-equity-2022/

Register your actions:

labor4sustainability.ourpowerbase.net/transit-equity-day-2022

Endorse Transit Equity Day:

https://labor4sustainability.ourpowerbase.net/sponsor-transit-equity-day-2022

Check out the 2022 organizing toolkit:

bit.ly/TED_toolkit2022

Photo by Leo Blain. Graphic by Sydney Ghazarian.

Workers at the Kingspan Light and Air skylight factory in Santa Ana, CA, a subsidiary of Irish-based global building materials maker Kingspan Group, have been organizing for clean air, clean water, and a fair process to decide whether to unionize. Workers went public with their demands in October 2021. Their struggle illustrates the strategic power workers can bring to the environmental justice movement.    

Workers are in a unique position to witness and monitor how companies are behaving when it comes to pollution, but they are rarely at the center of environmental organizing. This campaign is an exception. Kingspan workers spent months documenting issues, meeting with local allies, and talking to coworkers before going public with their findings and demands. 

At an on-line briefing sponsored by the Labor Network for Sustainability, Kingspan Light + Air workers described:

• their efforts to document unhealthy levels of air pollution and other unsafe working conditions inside the Santa Ana Kingspan facility and the steps they took with Dr. Shahir Masri of UC Irvine and the Madison Park Neighborhood Association-GREEN to prove it;
• how Kingspan misrepresented its environmental clean-up efforts to the CalEPA and the Santa Ana Regional Water Quality Control Board regarding the Santa Ana Kingspan facility and the steps workers took to blow the whistle;
• how Kingspan misrepresented and mis-marketed its K15 insulation product's fire safety over many years, revelations that were discovered in the UK Government Inquiry of the 2017 Grenfell Tower Fire in London, which is still ongoing, with Kingspan as a core participant. Kingspan workers in Santa Ana have stood in solidarity with victims of the Grenfell Tower Fire.
• The Clean Up Kingspan campaign is calling on the green building community to stop partnering with Kingspan.

If your organization is able to sign a letter of concern, please click here.

If you as an individual are able to sign a letter of concern, please click here.
 

A new paper published in the journal Political Geography argues that “labor and community-led advocacy efforts towards a just transition are fundamental to delivering the promises of a Green New Deal (GND) and a just post-carbon world.”

The paper reports on the findings of the Labor Network for Sustainability’s Just Transition Listening Project. The Project interviewed over 100 individuals, including rank-and-file union members, union officials, environmental, climate justice, Indigenous and community advocates. The Listening Project explored what makes transition “just,” what opportunities exist for a broad coalition to advance a GND-style proposal, and the struggles facing working people and communities in transition across the U.S.

The paper is written by professors J. Mijin Cha of Occidental College, Dimitris Stevis of Colorado State University, Todd E. Vachon of Rutgers University, Vivian Price of California State University, and Maria Brescia-Weiler of the Labor Network for Sustainability. They conclude,

As we have learned from the over 100 oral histories collected through the JTLP, the workers and communities experiencing transitions know best what it is that they want and need, and it is most often those voices that are not heard and thus those demands are not met. Community-led efforts ensure that diverse needs and communities are included, which expands both the coalition advocating for a just transition and its demands.

Read “A Green New Deal for All” here.

Read “Workers and communities in transition: Report of the just transition listening project” here.

Photo: United States Department of Energy via Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.

The U.S. Department of Energy has just announced the formation of a Clean Energy Corps – and it is hiring “talented, diverse, kind, and hardworking people” to join the team.

The Clean Energy Corps is charged with investing more than $62 billion to deliver a more equitable clean energy future for the American people by:

• Investing in American manufacturing
• Creating good paying jobs
• Expanding access to energy efficiency and clean energy for families, communities, and businesses
• Delivering reliable, clean, and affordable power to more Americans
• And building the technologies of tomorrow through clean energy research, development, and demonstrations

With a focus on deploying next generation clean energy technology, the Clean Energy Corps aims to help America meet its goals of a carbon-free power sector in 2035 and a decarbonized economy in 2050. 

For more information: www.energy.gov/CleanEnergyCorps

For job applications: www.energy.gov/applicant-portal

This January 10, California governor Gavin Newsome announced a five-year, $22.5 billion “Climate and Opportunity Budget” to provide equitable climate solutions and to prepare and protect communities. The expanded commitment to climate protection comes in the wake of record-breaking heat waves, a vanishing Sierra snowpack, and life-threatening historic wildfires.  

The budget proposes a climate and opportunity agenda to deliver community resilience, affordable housing, and expanded access to health care and education. It promises that communities that have suffered disproportionately from pollution will be at the forefront of these solutions. The program will focus in particular on transportation, which generates more than half of California’s climate emissions while disproportionately poisoning low-income and underrepresented communities. Newsom noted in his presentation that "We don't see oil in our future."

For the first time in the state's history, the budget includes support for gas and oil workers facing displacement: $50 million over the next three years. There's also $215 million over two years to support an oil and gas well capping initiative- promising to improve the safety of communities while providing high-quality jobs. Adding to the state's investments in forest management last year, the budget allocates $648 million to support firefighters.

You can read a summary of the Climate and Opportunity Budget here.

The climate action organization Arm in Arm is holding a National Assembly February 18-21 in Birmingham, AL to kick off a mass escalation of community-based climate action. They write,

The future is coming #ByDisasterOrDesign.  We can passively accept this fate, or we can join together and take back our power. If we so choose, our best days are ahead. Join #ArminArm as we ignite a transformational era that ends the climate crisis centering racial and economic justice.

Register for the Arm in Arm National Assembly February 18-21 in Birmingham, AL

Watch the ByDisasterOrDesign video: www.youtube.com/watchv=rrtdu7UpMOw

By Nancy Romer, PSC-CUNY (AFT local #2334)

On December 10, over 150 members of the Professional Staff Congress of CUNY (AFT #2334), met to develop a "Climate Justice Agenda for CUNY".  The PSC represents the 30,000 FT and PT faculty and professional staff at the City University of New York. The conference was organized by the union's Environmental Justice Working Group which started in 2016.  The 4-hour conference devoted 3 of the hours to breakout groups discussing a range of changes to demand of our employer, including transformation of the food service, environmental education across the curriculum, community collaborations, infrastructure improvements and divestment of university funds from fossil fuel holdings. With full support from the PSC, we are continuing to advance these ideas both CUNY-wide and on our campuses through ongoing workgroups, sharing and coordinating as we move forward.  

We are particularly appreciative of the PSC leadership's support through communications staff and assigning an organizer on a part-time basis to support our work.  We see environmental work as a way to further engage the membership and advance our union's social justice agenda. Our EJWG has been active in City and State-wide climate coalitions and has been engaged with LNS and TUED.  For more information, please contact nancyromer@gmail.com.

Nancy is a veteran union and climate justice activist, a co-founder of the Environmental Justice committee of her union PSC-CUNY (AFT local #2334), and on the steering committees of Divest NY and Peoples Climate March-NY.  She recently retired after 42 years of teaching at Brooklyn College, City University of New York and served on her union’s executive committee for nine years. She reports in this issue on the latest climate justice activity of the 30,000 member City University of New York Professional Staff Congress (AFT).

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: