On Earth Day 2009, there is a growing recognition that green jobs will play a key role in fighting global warming, creating energy self-sufficiency, helping the nation recover from the current recession and moving workers into stable middle-class jobs.
To promote the growth of good green jobs, the SMWIA and the affiliated unions of the AFL-CIO unions have embraced projects ranging from making their own buildings more energy efficient to taking the lead on large-scale public policy issues.
Yesterday, the AFL-CIO, together with the leadership of its new Center for Green Jobs, announced a plan to reduce energy consumption, cut down waste and reduce the carbon footprint of its national headquarters.
In February the AFL-CIO launched the Center for Green Jobs, with $1 million from the Working for America Institute, (WAI), the AFL-CIO’s workforce and economic development arm. The center will partner with affiliated unions to help pave the way to good union jobs in a variety of the country’s unionized and greening industries. The center also will spread the lessons of AFL-CIO affiliates who have successfully joined the green economy, especially in manufacturing.
We recently set up a Green Jobs website, which includes an interactive map that shows how much a state could receive for green jobs under President Obama’s economic recovery plan and how it would affect that state’s employment. Click here to check out the site.
Here are some other actions where the AFL-CIO unions are taking the lead to create a greener future:
- To ensure the green jobs created under the Obama economic recovery bill are family-supporting jobs, the WAI and the Center for Green Jobs have created standards to help community-level unionists assess the quality of jobs created under the Recovery Act. They also are urging the forming of new partnerships among employers, government, labor, community groups, environmentalists and other stakeholders to make sure the standards are carried out. Click here to find out more about the standards.
- SMWIA members are building more green buildings that use renewable energy to run more efficiently. One example is the David Lawrence Convention Center in Pittsburgh, site of the AFL-CIO’s upcoming 2009 convention. Built with union labor, it is the only entirely green convention center in the country.
- The Apollo Alliance, a coalition of business, labor, environmental and community leaders working to create a clean energy revolution in America, has developed Make It In America: the Apollo Green Manufacturing Action Plan (GreenMAP), a series of policy recommendations aimed at revitalizing America’s manufacturing sector by investing significant federal funding in the domestic manufacture of clean energy components.