Green New Deals: Climate Movements and Labour Unions
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- Published on Thursday, 02 April 2020 10:58
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A Socialist Project e-bulletin ... No. 2042 ... April 2, 2020
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Green New Deals: Climate Movements and Labour Unions
The 2020 election is the first presidential race with climate at its center. Throughout the Democratic primary, the potential loss of good construction and fossil fuel industry jobs has helped prevent moderate Democratic candidates, including frontrunner Joe Biden, from taking policy positions that would aggressively confront the fossil fuel industry and the climate crisis. Whoever opposes Donald Trump in the general election will face a politics of climate denial built on an empty but alluring promise of job security in the oil, gas, and coal industries.
Jane McAlevey most recent book, A Collective Bargain: Unions, Organizing, and the Fight for Democracy, was published in January. She spoke with Alleen Brown of The Intercept about her work and debates about climate justice.
Alleen Brown (AB): In the Nevada Democratic debate, moderator Chuck Todd quoted a Pennsylvania labour leader who said, "If we end up with a Democratic candidate that supports a fracking ban, I’m going to tell my members that they either don’t vote or vote for the other... guy."
"What do you tell those workers?" the moderator asked.
Bernie Sanders responded by referring first to climate scientists’ dire projections, then added that his policies will create 20 million good-paying jobs. Elizabeth Warren said that we can have a Green New Deal and create infrastructure jobs tomorrow, then spoke of fossil fuel donations corrupting politics. Do you think these answers were sufficient?
Jane McAlevey (JM): I remember that moment in the debate so well. They really didn’t nail it. I was hoping that the first things out of their mouths would have been to guarantee that every worker in the fossil fuel economy holds onto the standard they have, as we raise millions more into standards like that, by putting a front-line priority on unionizing the jobs in the clean economy.
In the early 1970s, we started to move all the unionized jobs out of the US. As the capitalists are shifting the American dream jobs out of the US, they do a containment strategy. They create this union-busting consultant industry, and the capitalist class says, "We’re not going to allow the emerging sector, the service sector, to get unionized the way we allowed the manufacturing sector to get unionized."
So when people talk about, "Oh we’re going to create this next new economy," what do workers hear? "We’re going to lose all these good jobs, and we’re never going to have a union again," because that’s the lived experience in this country.