Are green jobs also good jobs?

By Phil Mattera

As the federal government prepares to spend billions of dollarspromoting the creation of green jobs as part of the huge economyrecovery bill, a new report warns that the jobs already being createdin climate-friendly sectors of the economy do not always measure up interms of wages and other terms of employment.

The report, entitled High Road or Low Road: Job Quality in the New Green Economy,was produced by Good Jobs First (yours truly was the principal author).It was commissioned by the Change to Win labor federation, the SierraClub, and the Teamsters and Laborers unions.

Many proponents of green development assume that the result will begood jobs. The report tested that assumption and found that it is notalways valid. This is based on an examination of three sectors:manufacturing of components for wind and solar energy generation; greenbuilding; and recycling. In each sector, we found examples of employersthat compensate their workers decently and treat them with respect.

Yet we also found examples of purportedly green employers payingsubstandard wages and not treating their workers well. These include atleast two wind energy manufacturing plants--one run by Clipper Windpowerin Iowa and another run by DMI Industries in North Dakota--where workersinitiated union organizing drives in response to issues such as poorsafety conditions and then faced strong union-busting campaigns bymanagement.

Some U.S. wind and solar manufacturing firms are weakeningthe job security of their workers by opening parallel plants in foreignlow-wage havens such as China, Mexico and Malaysia.

The report finds that many wind and solar manufacturing plants arereceiving sizeable economic development subsidies from state and localgovernments. This use of taxpayer money provides an opportunity toraise wages and other working conditions. Many states and localitiesalready apply job quality standards to companies receiving jobsubsidies or public contracts.

In the report we urge wider and moreaggressive use of such standards by federal as well as state and localagencies. The report offers other public policy options and urges theprivate U.S. Green Building Council to consider adding labor criteriato its widely used LEED standards for green construction.

The overall message is: green jobs are not automatically good jobs. We have to make them so.

A version of this story originally appeared on the Dirt Diggers Digest.