For a while, it looked like we’d have to choose: labor or climate; jobs or the planet. But with unions like the CWA increasingly calling for action on climate change, some of these once-divergent interests appear to be coming into alignment. As Samantha Page wrote in an article in ThinkProgress last week:
The Climate and Community Protection Act passed the Democrat-led Assembly this week and is now at the Republican-controlled State Senate. NY Renew, a coalition which brought together labor, climate, and social justice groups, helped pass the measure. The bill sets a goal of 50 percent renewable electricity generation by 2030 and focuses on clean energy job creation, particularly in disadvantaged communities.
While unions have traditionally fought for workplace and economic improvements, climate change represents a serious threat to everyone, including union members, [CWA Political and Legislative Director Pete] Sikora said, so an alliance with green groups makes sense.
“We spend a lot of time fighting for retirement [benefits],” Sikora said. “But what does that mean when the temperature is 5-10 degrees hotter when you retire? Our members’ futures are in serious peril from climate change.”
However, while this realignment seems in many ways to be a sign of the times, some unions see things differently:
In 2012 at least one group, Laborers’ International Union of North America (LIUNA), left a longstanding environmental and labor organization, the BlueGreen Alliance, over the Keystone [XL pipeline] issue.
“We’re repulsed by some of our supposed brothers and sisters lining up with job killers like the Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council to destroy the lives of working men and women,” LIUNA General President Terry O’Sullivan said in a statement at the time.
Describing the nature of these two opposing positions, Page goes on to cite the work of Murphy’s own Sean Sweeney, writing:
The schism had already become starkly clear during the debate over the Keystone XL pipeline. Four unions signed work agreements in 2010 with the pipeline’s developer, TransCanada, before the application was even finalized. The ensuing battle over the future of the project pitted union against union.
“KXL could be a precursor to a more protracted and serious union leadership-level dispute in the years ahead,” writes Sean Sweeney, director of the Murphy Institute’s International Program on Labor, Climate, and the Environment. Sweeney refers to union support of the extraction industries — primarily oil, gas, and coal — as the Blue-Black Alliance.
“On the one side there are those who feel that the country’s rich coal, oil, and gas resources will ensure the U.S.’s economic prosperity in the years ahead,” he writes.
“On the other side of the U.S.’s energy war is the growing movement that sees the social and environmental costs of drilling, blasting, mining, moving, and burning of fossil fuels. The extraction, transporting, refining, burning, and waste by-products associated with fossil fuel use is inflicting intolerable damage on communities and ecosystems; further destabilizing the earth’s climate, and will ultimately weaken the U.S. economy over the longer term.”
For more on these emerging battle lines —and potential pathways forward — read the full article at Think Progress.
