Good job! New York State shows climate work can be union work
What if we could take bold steps to create thousands of good union jobs that also help save the environment? That’s the proposal of a New York State coalition of unions and environmentalists. Building trades, energy and transport workers unions have banded together to address the dual problems of inequality and climate change across New York State – and they’re winning.
Without public policy that protects workers’ livelihoods as part of protecting the environment, many workers have to choose between good jobs or a healthy environment – a growing concern in New York State, and elsewhere. Climate change has hit New York hard. There was Super Storm Sandy as well as Hurricane Irene, unprecedented snowstorms, and more recently, Lake Ontario flooding, all of which have devastated communities across the state.
To ensure cleanup and prevention jobs are good ones, Climate Jobs NY (CJNY) is a union-driven campaign to implement a pro-worker, pro-union, good-climate program in New York State. CJNY has already won an increase in funding for solar and energy efficiency work in public buildings along with a Project Labor Agreement requirement for the work, labor representatives on a statewide working group, and a prevailing wage requirement for all of the state’s renewable energy solicitations. But CJNY has bigger ambitions: a plan to construct high-speed rail, develop a robust offshore wind industry in New York, and put solar on as many public buildings as possible.
The plan for the building sector calls for reducing energy use in all public buildings by 40% and retrofitting all public schools to reach peak energy efficiency by the year 2025. That’s an ambitious timeline, considering the 212 million square feet of real estate owned by the state. It would also be huge for workers: every $1 million dollar investment in commercial building retrofits creates between 13 to 17 new jobs, all of which, under this plan, would be good jobs.
The energy plan calls for using the 100 million square feet of public school rooftops to harness two billion watts of solar energy, with a further two billion watts produced through the construction of large solar utilities throughout the state. Meeting those energy goals could create up to 210,000 new jobs in construction and installation of solar panels. The plan also calls for the generation of 7.5 billion watts through offshore wind – a project that would generate another 17,000 jobs.
“This initiative represents the best hope for protecting my members,” said Utility Workers Local 1-2 President James Slevin, while simultaneously “ensuring new energy jobs are good union jobs, and addressing climate change.”
The transportation plan calls for a $20 billion investment in restoring the New York City subway system to a state of good repair and an additional $14.71 billion for expanding statewide regional railroads. The subway work would create 20,000 jobs, while the statewide railroad investment could add almost 300,000 more.
This campaign grew out of a Cornell University initiative to find the overlapping self-interest in addressing the inequality and climate crises facing all New York State workers and residents, according to Lara Skinner, associate director of the Cornell Worker Institute. “The Climate Jobs NY campaign shows that ‘jobs versus the environment’ is a false choice.”
“We started by asking the people who do the work what might help. By starting with people who do the work of building our buildings, moving New Yorkers around, and powering both, we knew we’d find solutions that the usual debate leaves out,” Skinner said.
The “usual debate” might be best reflected in the battle over the proposed construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, which bitterly divided unions over the question of creating jobs or protecting the environment. Some politicians and corporations like to stoke those divisions, offering environmental exploitation as an engine of good jobs. President Trump’s campaign bluster about bringing coal mining back to West Virginia is just one example of this.
After Super Storm Sandy, Skinner launched a four-year process of figuring out a pro-worker, pro-union environmental agenda would look like, called Labor Leading on Climate. The slow and steady approach, which included a lot of meetings, trainings, and a research report) paid off, as unions created the CJNY campaign and now champion what’s known as a “just transition” to a more equal economy and one that respects environmental limits. “Unless we’re talking about good jobs and a good environment, the conversation just doesn’t go anywhere productive,” says Skinner.
That’s why CJNY calls for a “just transition” for workers who lose their jobs due to climate protection policies. Without public policy that protects workers’ livelihoods as part of protecting the environment, many workers feel the need to cheer environmentally harmful job creation.
But Christopher Erikson, Business Manager of IBEW Local 3, points in another direction “We need an energy transition to clean energy and we need to do it so we protect the good union jobs of those who construct, operate, and maintain power plants in this country,” he says.
Skinner agrees. “Jobs in the clean energy sector are growing – solar and wind installers are among the fastest growing jobs in the U.S. right now,” says Skinner. “If labor isn’t involved, there’s a good chance these won’t be union jobs.” For example, a 2014 plan by New York City Mayor Bill deBlasio to install solar panels on two-dozen school building was going to be done on a non-union basis until a coalition of unions, environmental justice organizations and community groups intervened to negotiate a Project Labor Agreement.
Labor leaders – from stewards to the New York State AFL-CIO president– see the potential. “Expanding the state’s commitment to renewable energy projects is not only an opportunity to make New York a leader in the clean energy industry,” adds NYS AFL-CIO President Mario Cilento, “it’s an investment in long term, sustainable middle class jobs in our state.”
[This piece originally appeared at Unionist.com.]
This job is killing me: Not a metaphor
You are more likely to be killed at work than in a terrorist attack or plane crash. On average, thirteen workers die on the job every day. Most of these deaths are completely preventable. And yet the complex web of state and federal agencies and insurance programs meant to protect worker’ssafety and incomes are persistently under-funded and under attack.
Two new books shed light on the dangers we face at workand the laws that are letting us down. Jonathan D. Karmel’s Dying to Work: Death and Injury in the American Workplace (Cornel University Press) is a compelling call for action on a national health crisis that’s hiding in plain sight.
The conventional narrative is that coalmine disasters and factory fires have been extinguished through reform laws. And also that efforts to pass new regulations are “red tape” that threatens jobs. At the center of those somewhat conflicting arguments is the controversial and widely misunderstood Occupational Health & Safety Act (OSHA).
Pushed by a strong labor movement, a Democratic Congress forced Richard Nixon to sign it into law in 1970. The federal agency it created, also called OSHA, has the authority to promulgate industry-specific workplace safety rules and to fine companies that violate them. The law also provides for workplace safety inspectors, whistleblower protections for workers who report potentially unsafe conditions and legal protections for workers who go on wildcat strikes to put an end to a dangerous situation.
Republican politicians – including the president who signed it into law – and the business interests who fund them have hated it since the day it became law. Corporations routinely block its efforts to update safety rules in the courts and appeal the puny fines it levies for their willful violations. As a result, our workplaces are becoming more dangerous
The heart of Karmel’s book is a series of heart-breaking (and stomach-turning) stories about preventable workplace injuries and deaths, and the broken lives left behind.
These are just a few: Yvonne Shurelds suffered an “internal decapitation” when the forklift that she was not properly trained to operate backed up into a metal bar. Her employer was fined $7,100 for safety violations. Hannah Phillips lost her arm to a meat grinder at a Kroger grocery store when her ill-fitting uniform snagged on the power switch. She feels “lucky” because the amputation was below the elbow and she was able to get off worker’s comp when she landed a $10.50 an hour job (with no health insurance) at a non-union Honda plant. Paul King was electrocuted on the roof of Terminal 3 at Logan airport while doing routine maintenance work. He was not trained as an electrician and his employer – a subcontractor of a subcontractor – did not provide him with protective gear or electrical test equipment. It contested its $54,000 OSHA fine, and neglected to include his last deadly hours of work in the final paycheck it sent to his widow.
Seemingly every widow in these stories is tormented by unannounced visits from inspectors, hoping to find her remarried so the state can discontinue its paltry workman’s comp survivor benefits. None of these families left behind gets a big payout, or even returns to the standard of living they had scraped together before the fateful accidents.
Karmel notes that the workers comp system was a “grand bargain” that preceded the New Deal by decades. In exchange for providing some insurance for workers who lose life and limb, it shields employers from greater liability for their callous disregard for their human resources. Workers compensation laws generally prevent survivors from directly suing an employer for damages. Successful suits must include a third party like a subcontractor or machinery manufacturer.
Even this insufficient “varied system of state laws” is under attack. The Koch brothers and other deep-pocketed bosses are funding Republican efforts to reduce benefits or repeal the protections in every state. Right wing governments like Indiana’s compete against their neighboring states by advertising lower insurance rates, in a deadly race to the bottom.
Workplace safety can also be imperiled by intentional acts of violence. That’s the subject of Jeremy Milloy’s excellent new book, Blood, Sweat, and Fear: Violence at Work in the North American Auto Industry, 1960-1980 (University of Illinois Press). This largely forgotten period of routine fistfights, stabbings and shootings in the factories and parking lots of Detroit’s “Big 3” automakers was, Milloy argues, a harbinger of today’s depressingly common mass shootings.
Threatened by foreign competition from Germany and Japan, U.S. auto executives in the 60’s and 70’s – particularly at Chrysler – decided to forgo badly needed modernization of their infrastructure and instead tried to squeeze every last ounce of productivity out of their factories and workers. This produced a toxic culture of speed-ups and bullying that escalated into acts of violence between workers, management and even union representatives.
Milloy dives into the grievance records of union locals in Detroit and across the river in Windsor, Ontario. Violence was pervasive throughout the auto industry, but it was more common and deadlier in Detroit. One explanation is that the American factories had recruited black workers from the south in order to run the plants around the clock, while Canada’s workforce was more racially homogeneous. The racist hostility of some white workers combined with black workers’ own frustrations about being at the bottom of the seniority list and thus first in line for the companies’ annual layoffs to add to the already poisoned environment.
But America’s gun culture also played a role. Then – as now – easy access to firearms made it likelier that what might have been a mere fistfight became a workplace massacre. Milloy notes that in 2009 Ontario passed a law that requires employers to assess and report on the risk of violence to workers and that allows workers to refuse assignments that expose them to that risk. In America meanwhile, 22 states have passed laws that prevent employers from banning guns from the workplace.
Towards the end of Dying to Work, Karmel concedes, “there is no doubt that reported deaths and injuries have declined over the years.” But he poses the provocative question, “is there a number that is acceptable as the cost of doing business? Is one preventable death acceptable?” Of course, anyone who believes in the dignity of workers and the sanctity of human life would answer no. But 40 years of successive Republican administration rolling back workplace protections – and Democratic ones moving too slowly to roll back those cuts and advance new safety rules – makes every workplace a potential Massey Energy mine disaster.
Massey was the company that was criminally liable for a 2010 methane gas explosion that killed 29 mineworkers in West Virginia. Several executives including CEO Don Blankenship were convicted – not for violating OSHA standards but because a crusading federal prosecutor put together a solid conspiracy case for their cover-up of unsafe working conditions in the mine. Blankenship retired with a $12 million golden parachute before being sentenced to one whole year in jail. He is currently a leading contender to represent the Republican Party in November’s U.S. Senate election. That race is emblematic of the pathetic left-right divide on workers rights, as Blankenship seeks to replicate Donald Trump’s success with the economically-depressed state’s working class voters who are – in all senses of the phrase – dying to work.
The size of the American workforce has doubled since OSHA was passed in 1970, and many of those new jobs are “temporary” or sub-contracted in order to evade our various labor laws. One study showed that temps in construction and manufacturing suffer twice the rate of injuries as directly-employed workers. Clearly, OSHA needs to be updated to keep up with corporate chicanery.
Karmel suggests a list of reforms that’s longer than an amputated arm.
For starters there’s a bill that’s been gathering dust. The Protecting America’s Workers Act – which would amend OSHA to expand coverage and increase penalties – was first introduced by Sen. Ted Kennedy a decade and a half ago. It’s time to pass it.
Karmel also calls for enhanced civil penalties and criminal prosecution. Usually the idea that stiffer sentences act as deterrence against future crimes beggars belief. Who calmly weighs the consequences during a crime of passion or desperation? But corporate crimes – which unsafe workplaces must be viewed as – are coolly calculated in boardrooms as matters of dollars and sense (and the continued comfort of the far-removed executives).
Why is Don Blankenship running for the Senate instead of learning yoga in a minimum-security jail for another decade or more? And how much does his example of acting with impunity encourage more bosses to write off their workers’ lives as an everyday cost of doing business? Attention must be paid.
Financial penalties, which were set as a specific hard-dollar amount in the original Act, have been raised just once – in 1990. Obviously, a company that kills an employee through willful negligence should pay more than a pittance in fines. Those statutory fines should not only be exponentially increased, but indexed to inflation like almost every other federal regulatory penalty is.
To fix our nation’s patchwork of worker’s compensation laws, Karmel has a slew of proposals. A “know your rights” posting requirements at every workplace – like we have for the minimum wage – is long overdue. A mandate that medical professionals who treat injured workers have no affiliation with the employer and a Medicare-style insurance system to pay for their treatment is pretty common sense. The fact that attorney’s fees for these cases have been reduced or remained stagnant is ridiculous if one believes that “you get what you pay for.” Finally, he calls for a streamlined process to replace the “complex and oppressive legal system that requires employees to bear the burden of establishing their entitlement to benefits.” That sounds to me that we should just federalize the system under a well-funded OHSA (and stop voting for Republicans).
This is a sound agenda, and one that unions should prioritize as a literal matter of life and death.
[This post originally appeared at Unionist.]
Beyond Bread and Butter: Labor Disputes for Social Justice
Football player Colin Kaepernick’s epic protest for Black civil rights has finally become an explicit labor relations dispute. As hundreds of players spent this season taking a knee during the national anthem in solidarity with Black Lives Matter and in defiance of Donald Trump, Kaepernick – who inspired the actions – was not there. The quarterback’s contract with the 49ers came to an end in between seasons. Although he is ranked as better than half of all players starting in that position this season, no team has signed him.
In response to this obvious retaliation by team owners for his political activity, Kaepernick has filed a grievance under the contract’s prohibition against collusion, and the players union has offered words of support.
The grievance, and the collective protest that Kaepernick’s symbolic action sparked, suggest two areas where unions should be doing more work to push beyond our traditional issues of wages and benefits. We should be fighting more for our right to free speech and greatly expanding the scope of issues that we bring to the bargaining table.
Consider the case of the Twin Cities-area Jimmy Johns sandwich chain, which fired workers who protested their employer’s sick leave policy. Actually, “policy” is a tad generous. Their boss’s rule was: come in to work – sick! – unless you can convince a coworker to cover your shift. When workers circulated leaflets to customers in protest, Jimmy Johns fired the organizers. Obama’s NLRB recognized this as retaliation for protected concerted activity and ordered Jimmy Johns to rehire the activists.
This summer, however, a federal circuit judge ordered the workers to remain fired because he did not approve of their speech. The workers, he ruled, were being disloyal when they aired Jimmy Johns’ dirty secrets in public. (Unsurprisingly, the judge had little to say about the fast food chain’s need to reciprocate this loyalty by letting its workers take a day off when they’re sick!)
Incredibly, the judge was citing a half-century-old Supreme Court precedent. In that case, called Jefferson Standard, the Court majority thundered, “There is no more elemental cause for discharge of an employee than disloyalty to his employer.” But how can workers call for improvements at work and disagree with their boss’ priorities without committing acts of “disloyalty?” This is one of the many laws that ties union organizing campaigns in knots.
It’s possible to consider Kaepernick’s protest “disloyal” – not to the nation or the armed services, as the president and right-wingers whined, but to the reputation of the National Football League for highlighting that the game has devolved into a spectacle of mostly black and brown men breaking their bodies and brains for a largely white audience of consumers who are so easily offended by a silent and respectful request to respect the basic human dignity of people of color.
It’s a little-known fact that only very recently that the NFL began making players come out on to the field during the national anthem, part of a lucrative advertising contract with the Department of Defense. That makes Kaepernick’s taking a knee a protest over a change in working conditions, albeit not one that his union has a legal right to force the league to bargain over.
The obligation to bargain in good faith has been drastically narrowed by the Supreme Court to apply only to “mandatory” subjects of bargaining like wages, hours and some working conditions. “Permissive” subjects carry no legal obligation to bargain, and the Court has privileged “managerial decision, which lie at the core of entrepreneurial control” in this manner.
But the “voice at work” that people want include a say in those core decisions. Teachers form unions to gain a say in advanced placement offerings, student discipline and extracurricular activities. Nurses organize to gain a voice in staffing ratios, treatment regimens, patient billing and discharge.
Some unions are pushing well beyond the legal scope of bargaining. In a project called Bargaining for the Common Good, key unions in some cities align their contract expirations and bargaining demands with community demands advanced by partner organizations. Through protest actions, they try to drag the actual power brokers – banks, multinational corporations and large political donors – to the table along with the direct employers.
One common demand by teachers unions has been to stop banks from foreclosing on family homes during the school year. Teachers in St. Paul, MN, in tight partnership with community organizations fighting foreclosure, forced their district to divest from banks that continue to do so. They continue to press for other demands, including removing police from schools and expanding recess and the arts. This union was also in the streets in support of Black Lives Matter after police shot and killed one of their own members, Philando Castille.
Much as Colin Kaepernick didn’t show up for work merely focused on how to win his team’s game, these unions go to the table concerned about the health of their communities. To fight back against the relentless corporate agenda, workers cannot surrender their free speech in the workplace nor limit their demands for a better world to simple shop floor issues.
[This article originally appeared in the January 2018 issue of The Unionist.]