Planting Liberally

Right on time for the 2009 Green Jobs Conference, this week Change to Win released a report titled High Road or Low Road?  Job Quality in the New Green Economy.  The report looks at wages and conditions for jobs in a variety of green workplaces, and finds that not all is well in the green collar economy.

The bad news is that some green jobs are low-paying and subject to union-busting and off-shoring, just like jobs anywhere else.  The report cites wages as low as $8.25 / hour in a recycling plant and $11 / hour in renewable energy manufacturing.  Like other manufacturing jobs, green manufacturing for products like windmills can be offshored, and that is already happening.  And jobs everywhere are subject to aggressive anti-union activities - in fact, the head of the National Green Building Committee (an initiative of Associated Builders and Contractors) is W. Brewster Earle, president of Comfort Systems USA Energy Services, a large heating, ventilation, and cooling systems company which has sought to undermine union activity in its workforce for years.

There is, on the hand, plenty of good news to go around too.  That includes reports of stellar green employers, like wind energy manufacturerGamesa, and examples of good municipal initiatives to give workers good, green jobs, like the LA Clean Trucks program and the Newark weatherization training program.

As Tod wrote yesterday, it now appears that the stimulus package will be passed by the Senate within a few days.  Despite the out-of-whack priority given to tax cuts over spending, the stimulus should still include a good chunk of change for green spending.  The question now is, how much of that spending will support good jobs?  There is some language in the bill for enforcing wage protection laws, but that's about it in terms of worker protection.

While I'd ideally like to see stronger worker protection languge in the bill - for example, language which allows workers at any company which receives stimulus spending money to organize by card-check - it looks like that is unlikely to happen.  I think it will be incumbent on the Obama administration, as well as any local and state agencies to which the funds are distributed, to attach reasonable regulations to this money.  At a bare minimum, companies which receive stimulus spending should be paying a living wage.  More than that, they should not be allowed to engage in union-busting, and should be compelled to remain neutral in the face of union organizing drives (it also follows that they should also contract in good faith with their workers, although I'm not sure how easily good-faith bargaining requirements could be written into regulation.)  Such requirements will not water-down the green nature of the stimulus; on the contrary, they will make the green collar economy more attractive to workers, and will incentivize more and more people to enter this workforce and become available for the massive task of greening the economy.

Yesterday Andrea Batista Schlesinger and Rep. Jerry Nadler co-authored a piece on cleaning up our ports in the Huffington Post. The piece, partially inspired by the Clean Trucks Program in the port of Los Angeles, calls for a reversal of trucking deregulation in the early 80s which allows truck companies to classify their drivers as independent contractors.

That deregulation was a double-whammy hurting both the labor movement and the environment. On the one hand, allowing trucking companies to classify their drivers as independent contractors effectively prevents truckers from unionizing and negotiating for fair wages and working conditions. The Teamsters have been complaining about these unfair regulations for years; this argument is at the heart of their FedEx Watch campaign. On the other, it also allows the companies to force drivers to pay for their trucks; consequently, the trucks going through are ports tend to be poorly-maintained and not fuel efficient. And they tend to pollute the air, disproportionately hurting low-income communities that surround the ports.

Schlesinger and Nadler are calling for New York to follow LA's lead and to implement a Clean Trucks Program of its own. They argue that regulations which compel trucking companies to hire their drivers, coupled with clean truck regulations, will benefit the environment while helping workers.

The push to clean up New York's port prompted Jason Lefkowitz at Change to Win to remind us that green jobs must also be good jobs.  I think that is a key point as we move forward with the economic stimulus package - that greening the economy and making it equitable must go hand-in-hand.  I discussed this a bit in last week's review of The Green Collar Economy; as Van Jones argues, environmentalists need the support and participation of low-income people in order to assemble a winning political coalition.  But I think there's an essentialist argument to be made that's economic as well as political, and the cause of clean ports draws that argument into focus.  In an economy organized around pollution, green goods and services cost more money.  So long as the economy is inequitable, more and more people will be unable to afford to green themselves, their homes, and their workplaces, and environmental action will continue to be a boutique option for the rich.  But, as wealth and the externalities of business are more fairly shared throughout society, transitioning to a green economy will become more and more accessible.  Really, that's what the clean ports campaign is about - transferring the externality of trucking pollution to the trucking companies, where that burden properly belongs, in order to reduce the burden and raise the standard of living for truckers.

This isn't exactly a full-blown labor links roundup, but I've recently found a couple examples of unions using Facebook in interesting ways, and I thought I'd share them here.

First is Change to Win's Facebook app, Smack the CEO. Written by CtW online communications director Jason Lefkowitz, Smack the CEO is a fairly straightforward game that allows you to compare your salary to that of prominent union-busting CEOs. When you sign up, the app asks for your salary. After signing up, you're asked to invite friends to join you in the game. As you recruit more friends to the application, their salaries add up; hopefully, after recruiting about a bazillion friends, your combined salaries add up to the CEO's. For disclosure's sake - I've worked with Jason a bit on fine-tuning the instructions and help text for this application, so I have a bit of a stake in its success (although not a monetary one). Although at first I was a little put off by the way it asks for your salary up front, more and more I think it's appropriate. The most popular Facebook applications are really, really simple - they basically involve ornamenting your profile, playing a game, or dressing up the traditional Facebook wall/poke mechanism. This application falls into the game genre squarely, and still it manages to a) educate Facebook users about the wage gap, and b) give users some idea of what union organizing is actually about - adding up enough of your friends to take on powerful people. That's pretty impressive, considering the fairly rigid formula for success as a Facebook application.

Incidentally, Jason and I have discussed using Facebook for more elaborate quasi-organizing. I'd really like to see something like that take shape. For example, I'd love to see a some kind of widget which allows coworkers to gripe about work online, perhaps with some anonymization to prevent recriminations at work. Or I'd love to see a "sign a union card" Facebook application, perhaps similar to Younionize but with the advantage of higher exposure. I've suggested similar kinds of approaches to online union organizing before, but I think it would take a fairly sophisticated online community builder to make it work, since my hunch is that most people are generally very cautious about openly discussing work gripes online.

The second example of unions using Facebook recently was this clever guerrilla event which takes advantage of Facebook's new Pages feature. The idea is to support the WGA strike by signing up as a fan of one of the shows which is currently on strike; I chose The Office. Once the friend request is approved, you can pursue all kinds of mayhem, light writing comments on the show's wall, or changing your user photo to some graphic which indicates your support of the writers. Of course, the idea is to embarrass the networks and encourage them to negotiate in good faith already. This is a pretty simple idea, but I think it could have some potential. Why not replicate this same tactic with WalMart, Verizon Wireless, American Eagle, or FedEx - all of which are currently targets of various union campaigns? Moreover, it seems to me that this kind of campaign opens up a new avenue in eActivism applications. Currently eActivism for non-profit advocacy organizations is limited to some pretty simple functionality - make a donation, signup for an email list, send an email to your congress person, and sign a petition (and actually, those last three actions are pretty much identical). But why not expand the capabilities of non-profit eActivism applications to include this kind of Facebook activism? It'll be interesting to see if the large non-profit web developers like Convio, Kintera or Grassroots Enterprise pick up the slack on this.

Finally, while it's not on Facebook, I encourage you to take American Rights at Work's FedUp with FedEx pledge: don't ship with FedEx this holiday season, unless they change their union-busting ways and allow their drivers to unionize.

Anything else interesting in the world of labor on the intertubes? Add a link in the comments!

I've got some great new labor links to share with you this week! Check 'em out, and if there's something you don't see here, add it in the comments...

• A huge victory in New York: 28,000 child care workers joined the United Federation of Teachers, with help from both ACORN and Gov. Eliot Spitzer. This is great news, both for the workers and the children they care for, as standards of care for children, and quality of life for the workers, will both rise, and the city as a whole will benefit.
• American Rights at Work recently re-launched its website; they are now using the open source Joomla content management system. I know this is a very geeky thing to get excited about, but I'm lovin' their new RSS feed - it's the kind of thing that makes a blogger's day. Check out the new site and, while you're there, flip through ARAW's new report on Verizon's Broken Promises (PDF).
• An alert reader pointed me to U1TV on YouTube - it's a channel dedicated to pro-labor video clips. Bravo to David Williams for putting these videos online, and for adding some great Billy Bragg songs to the soundtrack. Next up? I'd love to see some videos about how to deal with abusive bosses, how to contact and join a union, what a union is about, etc. Even better? I'd like to see some of these videos make their way into mass media TV shows.
• A second round of bravos for David Williams are again in order for the recent launch of NoBusters, a site which exposes union-busting and leverages some of the videos on U1TV.
• There's a great piece in Alternet this week about Young Workers United, a new labor group which seeks to protect young workers from workplace abuse. In These Times has also published an interesting look at the Change to Win labor federation, asking whether the split from AFL-CIO resulted in tangible results.
• Last but certainly not least - some of you may remember my series of posts about an idea for an anti-union-busting blog aimed at employers and business owners. Well, we're all grown up now, with our own Google Group and everything. But we're still recruiting. So if you want to join an interesting project to help turn the tide against union busters, sign up! Just request to join the group (either in the comments or directly through the Google Groups interface) and I'll get you signed up.

Got anything else to share? Drop it in the comments!

There's been a lot going on in labor news lately. The UAW strike was the big story, but there's more: another state joined the ranks of card-check states (where public employees may organize through card-check campaigns); Change to Win had its second annual convention; and the Teamsters suffered a setback in their School Bus Workers United campaign. Follow me across the flip for more...

• The United Auto Workers held a nationwide, 73,000-worker strike against GM for the first time in decades... and won. Well, they might not have won outright, but they came away with what appears to be a pretty solid deal. There are two major outcomes from this strike: First, the contract itself, which creates a Voluntary Employee Benefit Association (VEBA) which will provide employee and retiree health care in GM's stead. Second, UAW initiated a massive strike, and won. I am not sure what I think about the VEBA - it seems like it could cause a lot of trouble down the road, unless we ever manage to create a national health care system. (In which case, I'm guessing, it would become irrelevant.) I'd be curious to see how much influence UAW will be able to hold over the VEBA. Since the organization will control billions of dollars in investment capital, it could potentially have a very powerful voice, through the stock market, in preventing union-busting by other companies. Then again, union pension funds also have this theoretical capability, and as far as I understand things, they don't really act on it. What is clear is that this strike was one of the most successful high-profile strikes in recent memory. It was massive, covering 73,000 workers across the country; it had second-order effects, with Teamsters and the machinists union (IAM) respecting the UAW picket lines; and it resulted in what looks like a pretty reasonable compromise (although the UAW membership will be the final judge of that.) That's a remarkable contrast to AMFA's strike of Northwestern two years ago, where the most salient news seemed to be that the labor movement was in disarray. I'm also curious to see how this contract affects UAW's future moves. Will the union target Ford or Chrysler for its next round of contract negotiations? Will this agreement strengthen the UAW's hands in organizing Toyota workers?
• In Massachusetts (where I live), Gov. Deval Patrick signed a bill giving state public employees the right to organize by card check. Much like the national Employee Free Choice Act, this bill will help public employees organize unions and prevent supervisor intimidation. I'd be curious to see what the long-term effects of this bill, and other efforts to organize public employees, will be. The percentage of the public sector which is organized is already pretty high - something like 30%. As that number grows, how does the labor movement's collective power change and increase? What does this concentrated strength mean in terms of new kinds of pressure which can be brought to bear on private employers?
• Change to Win held its annual convention this week, releasing the latest in its series of surveys on the American Dream. The survey is pretty damning for our economy and the way voters feel about it. Voters are also heavily inclined to believe that unions can help them achieve the dream, with 90% of voters saying that unions can help them achieve a job with a living wage, good health care, good retirement, and opportunities for their children. From a political point of view, these are very interesting results, and I think the presidential candidates would be well advised to take note. From an organizational point of view, these results make me wonder whether it's possible to design new kinds of unionization campaigns, similar in some ways to the kinds of religious outreach done by evangelical churches. For example, would it be possible to develop a mass media campaign which would reach out to unorganized workers, and encourage them to join a union (regardless of where they work)? I'm not sure, but these results, combined with the AFL-CIO's 2005 Labor Day survey (which showed that over 50% of workers want to join a union) certainly suggest that such a campaign could be successful.
• In a decision which is sure to impact the School Bus Workers United campaign, First Group and Laidlaw reached an anti-trust agreement with 11 states, which should allow the $2.8 billion merger of the two companies to proceed. In the agreement, the merged company will sell some of its existing operating contracts to other school bus operators, in order to prevent monopolistic practices in certain areas. It's hard to determine how much influence the Teamsters attempted to exert on attorneys general in negotiating this deal. Unfortunately, it appears that the merger will considerably hamper the campaign, as First Group has a long history of union-busting.

Any other tidbits? Drop them in the comments!