2009 – year of the ‘green collar’ job?

Happy new year everyone.

The Taoiseach and First Minister have both put the economy of this island top of their to do lists for 2009. We did not hear from the Deputy First Minister on new years day – but then SF have a habit of leaving the economy to the DUP for reasons better known to themselves.

The economy is more than just big banks and multinationals. It is every corner shop, every local solicitor and accountant. The bars, small factories and building sites and in recent years new industries and services like recycling for example all make up the ‘economy’. Some businesses are privately owned, others are stock market listed. Then there is the social economy where businesses are not to achieve specific goals which are not simply about the generation of profits for their owners. We have an emerging social economy on this island. In the North our largest recycling company, Bryson, is one such company.

Bryson’s employees are among the first ‘green collar workers’ in Ireland, as are the employees of non social economy wind energy companies, which now total several thousand. These are real jobs with good wages and good career prospects.

The term first came to prominence during the 2008 US presidential election campaign when Barack Obama promised to spend $150 billion over 10 years to create 5 million new green-collar jobs. Hillary Clinton also referenced the term repeatedly on the trail, saying her energy plan would create millions of new green-collar jobs as well.

This all sounds great — we clean up the environment, control global warming and create an entirely new sector of employment while we’re at it.

The Guardian ran a feature on this last year noting that academics in the States have released lots of studies trumpeting the potential for green jobs — one report by the RAND Corporation and University of Tennessee found that if 25% of all American energy were produced from renewable sources by 2025, we would generate at least 5 million new green jobs in the US. But there are just a few questions: what is green-collar? What makes it different from blue- or white-collar? And where will those jobs come from?

According to the Guardian, Phil Angelides has the answers — or at least one of them. A venture capitalist and the 2006 Democratic candidate for governor of California (he lost to the political world’s best-known Austrian-American), Angelides is the chair of the Apollo Alliance, a coalition of business, labour and environmental groups championing green employment. Here’s how he defines a green job: “It has to pay decent wages and benefits that can support a family. It has to be part of a real career path, with upward mobility. And it needs to reduce waste and pollution and benefit the environment.
Sounds simple enough. And there are some jobs that fall obviously into the green-collar category, like the hundreds of employees who now work for the Spanish wind company Gamesa at its new plant in Pennsylvania — a plant built on the site of an old U.S. Steel manufacturing facility. If you make wind turbines or solar panels, your job is reliably green. But Angelides and his allies want to cast a wider net. To them, a green-collar job can be anything that helps put the economy on the path to a cleaner, more energy efficient future. That means jobs in the public transit sector, jobs in green building, jobs in energy efficiency — even traditional, blue-collar manufacturing jobs, provided what you’re making is more or less green. (Bombardier build old planes? Blue-collar. Building new energy efficient ones? Green-collar.) The category can get a little messy. “You don’t want to greenwash,” says Angelides. “You don’t want to call something a green-collar job that doesn’t have the wages or background to support it.”

But there can be a strong temptation towards what might be called green-collar inflation, because the idea that environmentalism can actually add jobs is key to the new arguments for global warming action. On the surface, cap and trade and other anti–climate change policies look like short-term economic losers that will raise the cost of energy and lead to job loss. Certainly that’s the argument of many conservatives — a study by the National Association of Manufacturers estimated that one of the main carbon cap-and-trade proposals before Congress would cost the U.S. economy up to 4 million jobs by 2030.

But environmental groups like the Apollo Alliance flip that criticism around, arguing that the hard work of decarbonising the American economy will actually create millions of new jobs. Someone, after all, will need to produce alternative power, increase energy efficiency and overhaul wasteful buildings. Angelides notes that between now and 2030, 75% of the buildings in the U.S. will either be new or substantially rehabilitated. Our inefficient, dangerously unstable electrical grid will need to be overhauled. The jobs that will go into that kind of work can be green-collar — provided that the government adopts the kind of policies that incentivize environmentally friendly choices. “Green jobs won’t be sprouting up only in new technology fields” like solar energy, says Angelides, whose group is calling for a $300 billion investment in green jobs over the next 10 years. “We’ll be creating jobs in the industrial sector.”

In other words, blue-collar can become green. It’s no surprise that one of the biggest supporters of the Apollo Alliance is the United Steelworkers Alliance — labour leaders see green jobs as a way to fight outsourcing and keep manufacturing alive in America. And there is a strong political component to green-collar jobs, which is why presidential candidates love talking about them so much. Environmentalism has usually been the reserve of the elite — but we’ll never have the power to tackle global warming unless we create a coalition that extends well beyond traditional white-collar greens. Touting green-collar jobs can convince sceptical, blue-collar Americans that they have an economic stake in curbing climate change. It’s far from certain that green-collar jobs will ever reach the critical mass that supporters like Angelides hope, but they are now on president elect Obama’s to do list and that can only be a good thing.

The Assembly and Oireachtas could look seriously at green collar job creation. It would fit in well with the medium term opportunities identified in the Matrix Report into innovation, suit our dispersed population and tie in with the undoubted potential for renewable energy here. It also builds on the transformations already happening in companies like Wright Bus and Bombardier as well as in the energy sector. 

All Peter Robinson needs to do is convince Sammy Wilson that Climate Change is happening!