Posts tagged clean energy
Chicago Teachers Union secures clean energy wins in new contract
April 22, 2025 // If approved, the contract will result in new programs that prepare students for clean energy jobs, developed in collaboration with local labor unions. It mandates that district officials work with the teachers union to seek funding for clean energy investments and update a climate action plan by 2026. And it calls for installing heat pumps and outfitting 30 schools with solar panels — if funding can be secured. The Southeast Environmental Task Force led the successful fight to ban new petcoke storage in Chicago, and the group’s co-executive director Olga Bautista is also vice president of the 21-member school board. People for Community Recovery was founded by Hazel Johnson, who is often known as “the mother of the environmental justice movement.” And ONE Northside emphasizes the link between clean energy and affordable housing.
Workers in climate change and clean energy-related jobs make new push to unionize in Colorado
February 19, 2025 // Organizers said there is always pus back when trying to organize. Right now, there is a debate at the Colorado state legislation over a proposal to lower the threshold to negotiate and bargain. The City of Denver, that’s been a driving force behind a lot of green jobs, said top priorities including making sure people can make a career out of this industry, while providing a safe and equitable work place.
There’s a huge pay raise on the way for clean energy workers
December 9, 2024 // To qualify, projects have to hire registered apprentices, who are paid for their work and earn credentials while doing it, and pay the prevailing wage to their workers, a level of minimum pay generally set for workers on government contracts. While prevailing wage has "long applied" to federal projects, according to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, this is the first time it's been applied to clean energy tax incentives.
After Democrats lost the working class, union leaders say it’s time to ‘reconstruct the Democratic Party’
November 18, 2024 // “We can’t communicate with every nonunion laborer. We can only communicate with a portion of our members,” said Booker, who thinks Democrats could have performed better with a fierier populist message on the economy and a cooler one on cultural issues that make some of his members feel like Democrats are out-of-touch elitists. “A lot of our members own guns. A lot of our members hunt.” Booker said that when he toured job sites this year, he heard about inflation, immigration and the demise of the Keystone Pipeline, which would have created jobs for his members but was killed for environmental concerns — all issues that played to the GOP’s favor.
Biden Administration Unveils Historic Rules for High-Paying Clean Energy Jobs The White House
June 19, 2024 // Clean energy projects that meet the requirements of these final rules will receive a fivefold increase for clean energy tax credits for deployment of wind, solar, nuclear, hydrogen, and other clean energy technologies, as well as for projects receiving allocations under the Section 48C Advanced Energy Projects credit., providing a significant incentive for project developers to pay prevailing wages to workers for construction, alteration, and repair of clean energy projects and to hire registered apprentices to earn while they learn by working on those projects. Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen and Acting Secretary of Labor Julie Su also published a blog highlighting the use of Project Labor Agreements as a best practice for large construction projects and a tool to help project developers comply with the prevailing wage and apprenticeship requirements. Project Labor Agreements, or pre-hire collective bargaining agreements that set the terms and conditions for employment on a construction project, help workers and developers alike by providing strong worker and wage protections while ensuring a reliable supply of skilled workers to help deliver projects on time and on budget.
Opinion: Construction Unions Face Fork In The Road: Shrink Or Seize The Moment
February 16, 2024 // “This is the best shot the unions have had in decades,” said Joshua Freeman, a Queens College, City University of New York history professor. “There’s low unemployment, a sympathetic administration, an infrastructure ramp and sympathetic public attitudes. Lots of things are going in the right direction for unions.”
Labor unions are still giving Democrats climate headaches
December 6, 2023 // The United Steelworkers, whose members operate oil refineries around the state, has endorsed a 12-year transition roadmap developed by economists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, which proposes California spend $470 million annually to support workers laid off from fossil fuel jobs. In October, USW joined a new labor coalition, including chapters from United Auto Workers, Service Employees International Union and American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, that released policy priorities including wage replacement, healthcare coverage, retraining and relocation support for displaced workers.
Trump Makes Appeal to Unions Emboldened Under Biden Administration
July 28, 2023 // F. Vincent Vernuccio, senior fellow at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy and the Center’s director of labor policy between 2012 and 2017, said that some of the UAW jobs could be going away because of the president’s push for electric vehicles. He pointed to a recent report estimating that the new electric vehicle targets could eliminate 117,000 manufacturing jobs. “You’re seeing it reflected in jobs moving down south to right-to-work states,” he said, referring to states that make forced unionization illegal. Employees who want to cross the picket line and work when unions have issued a strike have to do it legally, else face fines or other disciplinary action from the unions. He said that large, industrialized unions tend to have one-size-fits-all contracts that benefit some but not all workers, making the administration’s push for unionization where there was none before a net negative. He advocates instead for term flexibility for workers, unionized or not.
Biden pushes a strong role for unions in tech jobs, even as potential strikes are on the horizon
July 20, 2023 // Biden spent part of this week focused on efforts to expand unionization into new industries. On Monday, he met with younger workers trying to unionize at Starbucks, minor league baseball, bus-maker Blue Bird and Sega. Labor Department data shows that workers younger than age 35 are much less likely to belong to a union than their older peers, meaning that the future of the union movement might depend on bringing in younger generations. Unions also aided Biden’s election victory over President Donald Trump in 2020. Just 16% of voters in 2020 lived in a union household. But 56% of people in union households backed Biden for president against Trump, a Republican, according to AP VoteCast. Union votes generally matter more in Northern states with an industrial legacy such as Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, key states for a Democrat seeking to win the electoral college. But there are few union votes in sunbelt states such as Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina, where Biden hopes to compete in 2024 and where many of the investments in new computer chip and battery plants are being made.
OP-ED: BIDEN IS INVESTING IN GREEN ENERGY ACROSS THE SOUTH — THROWING SWING STATE UNION WORKERS UNDER THE BUS
July 12, 2023 // The success of the climate program will require continued federal commitment. Biden is placing a bet that clean energy investments could ultimately work the same way as the military-industrial complex. The military and its allied contractors have made sure to set up bases and/or manufacturing facilities in nearly every congressional district in the country, with extra attention paid to areas represented by key lawmakers. That has produced durable support for ever-expanding military budgets. Whether the same could be accomplished for the clean energy industry is an open question, but so far, Republicans from districts that have won federal awards have nevertheless voted to repeal the Inflation Reduction Act, which funds the tax breaks. By subsidizing the decline of union jobs, the Biden administration risks empowering lawmakers who will then move to end the subsidies altogether. “The total lack of consideration for workers could certainly make the difference in 2024.” “What Biden is doing is politically insane, environmentally bankrupt, and it’s poor economics,” Larry Cohen, former president of the Communications Workers of America and board member of Our Revolution, told The Intercept.