We have a powerful enemy in the form of fossil capital. To defeat it, we need a powerful low-carbon labor movement.
Organized labor has historically played a key role keeping capital in check and pushing for the expansion of public goods. But since the environmental legislation of the 1970s, the Right has pitted labor against the environment, driving a wedge between two of capital’s most significant twentieth-century challengers. Since then, the Right has bludgeoned every proposed environmental action with the threat of lost jobs, even as they gut worker protections. Unfortunately, it’s been a winning strategy. The Right’s anti-labor politics paradoxically make workers more dependent on the jobs they have and more anxious about the prospect of instability.
Progressives have tried to reassure workers that they won’t pay for environmental protection with their livelihoods. “Green jobs” has been the refrain of environmental policy for years. It was a major slogan of Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign: advisor Van Jones argued that a green jobs program could simultaneously address climate change, income inequality, and racial inequality. Yet Obama’s green jobs policies ultimately consisted of funding for worker training and an effective but temporary home weatherization program.
Ten years later, decarbonization will have to happen much faster. The transition could be brutal for workers in the fossil fuel and related industries—but it doesn’t have to be. Climate action doesn’t have to mean lost jobs—it can mean better work for most people than what’s on offer today. Mere job training, however, isn’t going to cut it. Beyond high-quality retraining and new work in the clean energy sector, a just transition for labor would transform work more broadly and increase the power of all workers in relation to their bosses, by offering real alternatives to bad jobs and strengthening labor’s right to organize.
To win all this, workers themselves will have to fight for it. That means we need a long-term vision that delivers material improvements along the way, building worker power step by step.
The Green New Deal resolution moves in this direction, calling for job training as well as high-quality union jobs, with comparable wages and benefits for affected workers. What most distinguishes it from previous green jobs schemes is the job guarantee—the idea that the government will provide a job to whoever wants one. The guarantee part is crucial. It represents a commitment to leaving no one behind amidst economic transformation and climate chaos. It also dramatically improves labor’s position by raising the floor for bargaining, providing workers with exit options, and tightening the labor market, all of which make it possible to fight harder for further change.
The original New Deal is still the landmark for worker protections and public sector employment in the United States. It shows what happens when the federal government offers people good work and protects their efforts to organize. Today, we need to go beyond the New Deal’s job programs and undertake a deeper economic transition.
That means expanding our understanding of what green jobs are. They tend to be seen as directly related to energy production, whether upgrading the grid or building renewable energy infrastructure. But truly greening the economy requires more fundamental transformations. We argue for expanding the green job framework to center work that is already low-carbon: caring for people and the earth. Labor can remake the world along carbon-free lines—and different kinds of labor can help us live good, low-carbon lives. To win those things, we need labor’s power.
Just Transitions
A familiar dynamic has developed around fights to “keep it in the ground,” with workers building oil and gas pipelines arrayed against climate and Indigenous activists organizing to stop them. These fights recall earlier battles, like the loggers-versus-spotted-owl fights of the 1980s that produced the slogan “Are You an Environmentalist, or Do You Work for a Living?” But the dichotomy is a false one. As labor historian Trish Kahle observes, “environmental protections and labor protections have historically risen and fallen together.”1 And workers have often recognized that companies that treat the earth badly usually treat their workers badly, too.
Take coal miners. In 1968, Kahle recounts, a mining disaster killed seventy-eight coal miners, leading rank-and-file miner Jock Yablonski to challenge the union’s incumbent president, Tony Boyle. As Yablonski asked, “What good is a union that reduces coal dust in the mines only to have miners and their families breathe pollutants in the air, drink pollutants in the water, and eat contaminated commodities?” He gave voice to a growing sentiment. In 1969, 60,000 miners took part in wildcat strikes focusing on safety issues, and 70,000 marched on the West Virginia capital to demand protections against black lung disease. Yablonski narrowly lost the election—and was later murdered by Boyle’s hitmen. After his death, a group called Miners for Democracy took up the struggle for health and environmental protections, proposing that miners who lost jobs to regulations be given union work restoring local land and infrastructure.2
Yet their power faded as energy giants bought up coal companies and crushed worker militancy. Coal companies have since slacked on safety measures and black lung disease has viciously resurged—yet Trump is poised to cut regulations still further. Giant companies blow the tops off mountains and tout the benefits of “clean coal,” even though there’s no such thing.
Meanwhile, there’s plenty of work to be had in the oil and gas industry as US extraction has expanded: jobs are up 60 percent from 2004 to 2016 despite the recession. Though fewer than 5 percent of extractive industry workers were union members as of 2018, even non-unionized workers can make good money. There’s a reason workers are skeptical that green jobs will be as lucrative.
Yet an early wave of blue-green alliances laid the foundations for addressing these challenges. In the 1970s and 1980s, Tony Mazzocchi, a leader in the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers International Union, argued for winding down industries that harmed workers, environment, and society while taking steps to safeguard livelihoods. He proposed a revived GI Bill for atomic workers who would be left unemployed by nuclear disarmament and a Superfund for fossil fuel workers. His vision was central to the idea of a just transition on which the Green New Deal draws—an economic transition that doesn’t make workers pay, and that workers will fight for.
Jobs for All
The job guarantee is another such idea. It goes back to FDR’s 1944 proposal for a Second Bill of Rights, known as the Economic Bill of Rights, which aimed to give a material foundation to the civil and political rights of the original. It called for the rights to “a good education,” “adequate medical care,” a “decent home,” “protection from old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment,” and a “useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation.”
Its ambitious aims remain a worthy touchstone for the American Left. Yet there’s a mismatch between the goods it declares people have a right to—health care, education—and the jobs they have a right to do—in mines, shops, and farms. What about the jobs in hospitals and schools that provide education and health care? The discrepancy is hardly limited to FDR. The archetypal worker has been a man in a hard hat or on the assembly line—not a teacher, nurse, or service worker, even as their numbers have grown.
Two decades after the New Deal, the idea of a job guarantee was at the heart of the Poor People’s Campaign led by an increasingly radical Martin Luther King Jr. After King’s death, his widow and political comrade Coretta Scott King carried on the fight, articulating a more transformative vision of work. As the historian David Stein observes, she wanted to create “jobs that would serve some human need.” She emphasized health care, education, and quality of life over jobs “created with the profit-making motive.”3
Her vision didn’t come to pass. Instead of guaranteeing meaningful work to those without steady employment, the state imprisoned millions of people deemed “surplus” to capitalism’s needs. As Ruth Wilson Gilmore shows, when economic growth began to falter in the 1960s, capitalists and homeowners revolted against their tax rates. The state lost its welfare mandate, but it still had money and capacity. It used them to build prisons rather than schools or public services. Gilmore is clear: “prison building was and is not the inevitable outcome.”4 It was a political choice. We can, and must, make a different one today.
Though Donald Trump boasts about his job creation success, an estimated 16 million Americans are currently unemployed or underemployed. The economist Pavlina Tcherneva suggests that in 2017, around 11–16 million people would have taken advantage of a job guarantee.5 What kinds of jobs would all those people do?
Under a radical Green New Deal, a job guarantee would offer low-carbon, socially valuable work—and there’s no shortage of that. Every year, Americans do millions of hours of unpaid labor in food pantries and senior centers—including service mandated by courts, schools, or workfare. In the national parks alone, there are over 315,000 volunteers, compared to a mere 23,000 paid staff.6 Other vital ecological care work is simply not being done at all. We don’t need to make work—we need to pay for it.
The economic question is whether this work can be done profitably. Much of it, we submit, cannot. Eventually, doing meaningful, socially useful work will require a break with capitalism. We can start by drastically expanding the amount of work that’s primarily oriented toward meeting ecological and human needs, not increasing profits.
Job guarantee advocates sometimes assure critics that it would supplement or stimulate private sector employment rather than crowding it out. But frankly, there are some jobs that ought to be crowded out. “Will you not be bewildered,” the socialist William Morris once asked, “as I am, at the thought of the mass of things which no sane man could desire, but which our useless toil makes—and sells?” Work worth doing, Morris thought, had the “hope of rest, hope of product, hope of pleasure in the work itself.” We should crowd out jobs that offer none of these—folding clothes in H&M or flipping burgers made from factory-farmed cattle—especially when their business model relies on wrecking the planet. A job guarantee would give workers options to leave socially and environmentally harmful jobs, and would strengthen the position of workers organizing in the private sector.
Shitty work also takes a toll on your soul. The great modernist writer Virginia Woolf once made a living from odd jobs of the kind then available to women—in her words, “addressing envelopes, reading to old ladies, making artificial flowers, teaching the alphabet to small children in a kindergarten.” It was dull work, and usually poorly paid. “What still remains with me,” she recalled afterward, “was the poison of fear and bitterness which those days bred in me.” Then she inherited five hundred pounds a year from an aunt who fell off a horse in Bombay. It wasn’t a fortune—about $40,000 today, a little more than the median individual income. But it set her free. “Watch in the spring sunshine,” she wrote, “the stockbroker and the great barrister going indoors to make money and more money and more money when it is a fact that five hundred pounds a year will keep one alive in the sunshine.”
A colonial inheritance isn’t something to aspire to. But the freedom Woolf experienced should be available to all—and that’s what a job guarantee can offer. In the 1930s, Lula Gordon, a Black woman living in San Antonio, wrote to FDR: “I was under the impression that the government or the WPA would give the Physical [sic] fit relief clients work. I have been praying for that time to come … I have registered for a government job and when it opens up I want to take it.” Gordon had long worked as a domestic servant and had been offered a job cleaning a white woman’s home. Without other options, Gordon wrote, “I have to take the job in the private home or none.” But she hoped for something else. “Will you please give me some work,” her letter concluded.7 A government job would offer an alternative to the intimate, racialized domination that usually comes with domestic servitude.
Employers know this, too. During the New Deal, Southern politicians protested that Civil Works Administration wages were too high: Southern agriculture relied on Black workers who would plow the fields for five cents an hour, which they wouldn’t do if the federal government were paying forty. Indeed, public sector jobs have long been important in countering the racial discrimination that makes Black and other workers of color “last hired, first fired.” A job guarantee could help combat the rampant obstacles to decent employment for formerly incarcerated people. And it would help people escape abuse in families and households, which women, queer, and trans people are most likely to suffer.
The domination of the workplace still keeps most of us unfree. Bosses belittle and sexually harass workers, deny them bathroom breaks and vacation time, steal their wages, and drive them to exhaustion. But under capitalism, you have to work to live, so workers take what they can get. Real alternatives are essential. Only when workers can threaten to walk away can they build the power to fight back.
Building a New World
To decarbonize, we need to remake everything from how we travel to where we live. That entails a huge amount of work: retrofitting millions of existing buildings and constructing millions of units of no-carbon public housing, erecting a continent-spanning smart grid, and constructing vast networks of train lines, among other tasks. The Right has mocked the Green New Deal resolution’s call to “retrofit every existing building in America” and rebuild American infrastructure as “insane,” “unserious,” and “unrealistic.” But where do they think the highways came from?
The New Deal is famous for its public works projects. Workers hired under the Works Progress Administration constructed 651,000 miles of highway and 124,00 bridges, including the Oakland-San Francisco Bay Bridge and the Lincoln Tunnel. They built 125,000 public buildings, including 41,300 schools, and 469 airports. They built 8,000 parks, and 18,000 playgrounds and athletic fields. They built a multistate power system through the Tennessee Valley Authority.8
Today, we need to build fewer miles of roads and more miles of train tracks, fewer airports and more bus stations. We should dismantle oil derricks and pipelines. But the scale and ambition of these famous projects remind us of what’s possible.
Discussions of this kind of scale-up often invoke not just the New Deal but “wartime mobilization”—the drastic increase in industrial capacity leading up to the US entry into World War II. Bill McKibben takes inspiration from the “wholesale industrial retooling that was needed to build weapons and supply troops on a previously unprecedented scale,” arguing that today we need to “build a hell of a lot of factories to turn out thousands of acres of solar panels, and wind turbines the length of football fields, and millions and millions of electric cars and buses.”9 Those projects are necessary—though we’d suggest more buses and fewer cars—and will create thousands of jobs for whose who now work in extractive industries.
UK Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has echoed union leader Mazzocchi in calling for a GI Bill equivalent that would “guarantee that all energy workers are offered retraining, a new job on equivalent terms and conditions covered by collective agreements, and fully supported in their housing and income needs through transition.”10 We could do the same.
But building solar panels and wind turbines is a transitional strategy—not a model for a new economy. We can’t just ramp up the production of “green” technology indefinitely. We need a plan for what comes next. After World War II, expanded productive capacity was restored to capitalists and redeployed toward mass production of consumer goods—with disastrous environmental consequences. And although the war ended, military Keynesianism did not: military spending is still a major source of employment and economic stimulus. But we don’t need to build solar panels forever—and we certainly don’t need any more multi-billion-dollar military boondoggles. We do need to go all out for a decade or two to build a world that will last—a world of things that are functional and beautiful, a world of restored nature and communal luxury. And then we need to live in it.
Making a Life
What kind of work does living well require? Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ed Markey’s Green New Deal resolution calls for “high-quality health care; affordable, safe, and adequate housing; economic security; and clean water, clean air, healthy and affordable food, and access to nature.” Both Republicans and climate wonks scoffed: what do health care and housing have to do with climate change? Weren’t these just the “socialist wish list”?
In fact, the resolution got it exactly right. These aren’t add-ons to the real climate program of clean energy production—they’re essential to a new economy. We need more work that’s oriented toward sustaining and improving life, human and nonhuman, in low-carbon ways. Hospitals and schools need to run on clean energy, of course, but care and education are inherently low-carbon.
The New Deal is often thought of as a Keynesian program for reinvigorating production. But as historians Salar Mohandesi and Emma Teitelman argue, it was also a program for social reproduction.11 Amid the collapse of the world economy, millions struggled to survive: shanty-towns sprang up, infant mortality rose drastically, and disease and suicide increased.
The federal government provided a lifeline in the form of direct relief and jobs created through an array of agencies. Teachers were among the first workers hired by the Federal Emergency Relief Agency, working in Emergency Nursery Schools and providing classes for adults in everything from basic literacy to general education. Other relief jobs were tailored to unemployed workers’ skills: statisticians helped hospitals study disease; bookbinders helped libraries repair books; historians catalogued significant buildings. As the sculptor Gutzon Borglum wrote, the goal of the Civil Works Administration was “to make more livable our towns and cities, our schools more cheerful, our playgrounds and our parks a pride and a delight.”12 Like teaching and caring, repairing books and cataloguing buildings can be no-carbon work. In this spirit, Tcherneva calls for designing a job guarantee program as a “National Care Act,” centering jobs that provide care for the environment and communities—for example, organizing after-school activities, working in community gardens, or running compost centers.13
From this perspective, proposals such as Medicare for All and College for All aren’t distractions from decarbonization—they’re part of a broader project about living a good life.
Public universities are already the largest employers in nine states; hospitals are the largest in another eleven. A drastic expansion of public higher education, on the scale of that in the 1960s, would give more people the chance to continue their education without going into life-destroying debt. It would also mean a huge number of new jobs—in teaching and research, but also in vital janitorial, food service, and administrative work.
Medicare for All could similarly mean the expansion of publicly funded work and with it, significant improvements in health care. Private hospitals realize profits just like any other company—by squeezing more labor out of fewer workers. The result is worse outcomes for patients, as health care workers have long emphasized. The crisis of care hits vulnerable patients the hardest. Pregnancy and childbirth kill Black people at nearly 3.5 times the rate of whites, for example; Black babies are twice as likely to die as white ones. New parents must have access to pre- and postpartum care regardless of race or class.
Federally funded childcare, meanwhile, would employ childcare workers at higher wages and give everyone time off—and not only to go to a different job. To paraphrase the Marxist feminist Silvia Federici, every parent is a working parent—and parents should have time for themselves, too.14 Everyone should have access to quality mental health care, as the ongoing mental health crisis makes clear—a crisis likely to be exacerbated as a growing number of people watch their homes burn or neighbors die in hurricane gales. Making health care a public good would also make it possible for people to choose socially and ecologically beneficial work without worrying about losing their benefits. And providing public care of various kinds will lessen the burden of unwaged care work that still falls on women, and working-class women in particular.
The care crisis will only intensify as the country keeps aging. By 2030, all Boomers will have reached retirement age. We could be heading for an economic and social catastrophe of people in need of long-term care without the resources to pay for it. Under a radical Green New Deal, we could guarantee good care to the growing population of elderly, linking the well-being of younger generations faced with climate change to that of older ones faced with the crisis of care.
Care work can be rewarding, but it can also be tedious, emotionally bruising, and physically straining. It’s real work, however nice “care” sounds. It is also intensely gendered and racialized. The vast majority of caregivers are women; a quarter of caretakers are immigrants, many undocumented. This work is unevenly regulated and its wages are much too low. But it’s no less crucial for social and ecological well-being than that of solar panel installers. Better pay and social recognition are crucial for both building the no-carbon economy and addressing a division of labor that gives women and people of color the worst paid and lowest status jobs.
Caring for the Earth
We need to care for one another. Climate breakdown also demands that we take better care of the planet we live on.
The most famous example of an ecologically oriented jobs program is the New Deal’s Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC). At its peak it employed over half a million men at a time—and only men. In total, between 1933 and 1941, it employed more than 3 million. CCC members prevented forest fires and fought them; they undertook flood control, disaster relief, soil conservation, and wildlife aid. They built recreational facilities—cabins, picnic tables, amphitheaters, and thousands of miles of hiking trails, on the principle that “Uncle Sam wants every worker to get the rest and relaxation necessary to send him back to his job doubly efficient.” (We’re okay with just the rest and relaxation.) Pay was lower than the standard union wage; CCC participants lived in barracks and worked long hours. Like other New Deal jobs programs, it was temporary.
Many of those elements persist in the CCC as it exists today—the California Conservation Corps. The program offers year-long positions to Californians from the ages of eighteen to twenty-five, touting the slogan “hard work, low pay, miserable conditions, and more!” Both the original and contemporary CCC treat conservation work as something that young people can do for a year or two before moving on to a real career. But why should we expect the work of caring for our planet to come with long hours, bad pay, and self-sacrifice? Why should it be something that you do only as a learning experience or as a stepping stone to a longer term job? We should treat these jobs as real work that you can do while living a real life.
A renewed, permanent version of the CCC could create new hiking trails and nature reserves in rural areas—and could also do more to care for ecosystems themselves. A new CCC could restore areas that have been damaged by industrial production, like the hundreds of Superfund sites awaiting cleanup. In places like West Virginia and Wyoming, former coal miners could turn abandoned coal mines into national parks dedicated to labor and environmental history. In cities, a CCC could employ people to plant trees and gardens amid miles of concrete—simultaneously improving quality of life, absorbing carbon, and keeping cities cooler amidst the heat waves to come.
The original CCC employed nearly 15,000 Indigenous people in the first six months and 85,000 overall; it also supported Indigenous self-rule. A revived version could be paired with a new program for Indigenous sovereignty and control over Indigenous lands. It should also draw on Indigenous knowledge, looking to Indigenous communities as leaders in ecological restoration and care. Indigenous scholar Nick Estes, for example, describes Water Protectors at Standing Rock as “working to protect their land and water.”15 We embrace the Red Nation’s call for a Red Deal that includes multispecies caretaking, land, water, air, and animal restoration, and the enforcement of treaty rights, among other demands for environmental and social justice.16 We could also take cues from programs to employ Indigenous workers in land management in Australia in recent years, which have been enormously beneficial both socially and ecologically.
Ecosystems do a lot of work to keep our planet habitable; we need to put in more work to keep them alive and flourishing in return. Restoration and rewilding can help absorb a huge amount of carbon: plants absorb carbon dioxide and use sunlight to convert it into roots, leaves, and branches. Prairie grasslands are excellent carbon sinks, storing huge amounts of carbon in roots that stretch far underground. But much of America’s prairie land has been converted into cattle feedlots, which dump greenhouse gases into the air in the form of—yes—cow burps. Restoring the stunning landscapes of the Great Plains would also draw down carbon.
Still, already-emitted carbon will wreak havoc for a long time. There will be more fires, more floods, more tornadoes, and more heat waves. We’ll need more people trained to respond, capable of guiding large-scale evacuations and in some cases, long-term displacements. (Today, incarcerated people make up a third of California’s firefighting force; in 2018, around 1,700 incarcerated people were paid a dollar an hour to fight the deadly fires that swept the state. Yet when they leave prison, many can’t get firefighting jobs.)17 We’ll need construction workers to rebuild homes and neighborhoods, and social workers and therapists to help people put their lives back together.
Healthy ecosystems also protect human communities from extreme weather. In southeastern Louisiana, coastal wetlands are rapidly eroding as a result of a levee system that disrupts the Mississippi delta and intensive fossil fuel activity along the coast. If current trends continue, one-third of existing coastal land will be gone by 2050. Thousands of miles of wetland ecosystems home to hundreds of species would be lost to the Gulf and over 2 million people forced to migrate. New Orleans would be significantly more vulnerable to hurricanes and flooding, threatening its survival. By contrast, restoring Louisiana’s wetlands could employ thousands of former fossil-fuel workers to dismantle miles of gas pipelines that crisscross disappearing marshes, and to plant new vegetation.
Our current agricultural system doesn’t include much care for the earth—and that should change. American agriculture is built to produce as much as possible as quickly as possible with as little labor as possible in fields organized like factories, owned by giant “family farmers” working in tandem with agribusiness companies to squeeze as much as they can out of land and labor, at high cost to both. Better farming, which uses a range of techniques to sequester carbon and sees the food system as embedded in broader ecosystems, would involve more—and more humane—human work close to the ground: careful pruning in orchards, tending to scarcer livestock that will eat farm scraps and provide natural fertilizer, and cultivating of plants that support the insects that pollinate crops, and feed birds and frogs. It would mean better systems for irrigating scarce water and flexible adaptations to extreme weather.
The conditions of agricultural work must also improve. Farming is often grueling, and farm workers are among the most exploited in the country. Around two-thirds are immigrants, mostly from Mexico and other Central American countries whose own agricultural sectors have been undermined by US trade policies. An estimated half are undocumented, leaving them at the mercy of hard-driving bosses. Their wages are exceedingly low, keeping food prices down so that other workers can get by on lower paychecks. This means that raising the wages of farm workers goes hand-in-hand with raising wages for workers more broadly.18 Federal support for sustainable, carbon-sequestering farming can also tackle endemic poverty in rural communities. And while farming will always be hard, it doesn’t have to be thankless.
Time for What We Will
Redefining work is crucial—but so is reducing it. That’s long been a demand of the labor movement, which famously fought for the eight-hour day and the weekend. Early in the twentieth century, labor leader William Green thought imminent “the dawn of a new era—leisure for all.”
Even some capitalists supported shorter hours: after all, workers needed time off to consume the goods they produced. But Harvard economist Thomas Nixon Carver warned at the time that
there is no reason for believing that more leisure would ever increase the desire for goods. It is quite possible that the leisure would be spent in the cultivation of the arts and graces of life; in visiting museums, libraries, and art galleries, or hikes, games and inexpensive amusements
which “would cut down the demand for the products of our wage-paying industries.”19 The trick was not to let leisure go too far—it should never replace work and consumption as the centers of life.
In the early days of the New Deal, Labor Secretary Frances Perkins supported a thirty-hour work week. But when business complained, “full-time full employment” was instead defined as forty hours a week. Later, wartime production locked in longer hours. Ultimately, the decision to stimulate consumption instead of promoting leisure was a way of avoiding deeper structural changes—to grow the pie rather than ask who was eating most of it. The environmental consequences have been dire. Today, the forty-hour week is still the standard, even though full-time work is hard for many to come by—and with wages stagnant, even forty hours often isn’t enough to pay the bills. “One Job Should Be Enough,” the slogan of striking hotel and grocery store workers, expresses the exhaustion of cobbling together a living across several part-time, low-wage jobs.
But under a radical Green New Deal, with efficiency gains and automation controlled by people rather than bosses, we could meet everyone’s needs working far less than we currently do—and we should. Study after study shows that shorter workweeks lower carbon footprints—the shorter the better. To cut carbon, we need to work less and share the remaining work more evenly.
That would give people time to go to the theater or the movies, the club or the bar, to read or paint or become an underground hip hop sensation. With more time, we can learn how to do new things—take up surfing with the help of a publicly funded instructor or finally learn a new language. We can enjoy the arts and culture created by people employed by programs following in the model of the Works Progress Administration, which funded an efflorescence of cultural production, especially for the racialized working class. Singers and actors performed for communities around the country instead of just for the wealthy, while the Indian Arts and Crafts Board celebrated native folk art traditions. New Deal arts funding strengthened the Harlem Renaissance. It also helped launch the careers of Paul Robeson, the great Black Communist actor and singer, and of leading Abstract Expressionist painters like Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, both employed by the Works Progress Administration. That’s what we call a creative economy.
Carbon-free leisure doesn’t just mean wholesome hobbies like hiking and gardening—we’re firm believers in eco-friendly hedonism. Give us time for long dinners with friends and plenty of organic wine; outdoor adventures enhanced by legal weed grown and harvested by well-paid agricultural workers; skinny-dipping in lakes that reflect moon and starlight.
From Coal Power to Union Power
We won’t achieve any of this without revitalizing labor militancy. Labor’s power has always come from its ability to bring business as usual to a halt. We need that power more than ever today, because business as usual threatens life on earth. Labor organizing can also mobilize working class communities, building powerful movements rather than accepting the divisions the boss tries to draw between workers and the public.
Past blue-green coalitions of environmentalists and unions have focused on workers in extractive industries. But a Green New Deal coalition would fight to make life better for working people more broadly. This isn’t just a matter of principle: a just transition that’s limited to moving men from oil rigs to wind turbines doesn’t bring enough workers into the Green New Deal fight to win. There are only around 50,000 coal miners working in the United States today and around 1.4 million oil and gas workers. That’s a lot of people, and they all deserve to have good work after we abolish their industries. But they’re not the entirety of the labor movement by a long shot.
By comparison, there are roughly 18 million health care workers, and 3.6 million teachers already doing low-carbon work. These workers are part of a labor movement that’s fighting for good union jobs in connection to a larger expansion of public goods and services, while undertaking new kinds of organizing that reach beyond the workplace. And these workers are at the forefront of labor militancy. In 2018, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics reported twenty “major work stoppages” in which 485,000 workers went out on strike. Workers in education, health care, and social assistance accounted for over 90 percent of striking workers in 2018; workers in those sectors conducted half of all strikes between 2009 and 2018.20
That’s still a ways off from the turmoil that produced the original New Deal. In the 1920s, there were over 500 strikes a year even at the low point in 1927. But the Red Scare of 1919–20 had been devastating to labor militants. No one would have guessed that fifteen years later, labor would be transforming national politics. By 1937, the number of strikes had spiked to 3,500. When political momentum is growing, things can change fast. Even just a few years ago, a wave of militant teacher strikes was unimaginable.
Recent strikes also show how labor organizing can organize the working class more broadly. Bosses win when the storyline pits unions against the public good. So labor organizer Jane McAlevey argues that unions win when they do “whole-worker organizing”—organizing that sees workers as connected to broader communities, and that organizes those communities alongside them.21 And when unions fight and win this way, the whole community wins, too, building the foundations for further gains.
The United Teachers of Los Angeles have organized in the workplace and the community for over a decade, on a model known as bargaining for the common good. When teachers went out in the streets early in 2019, the community went out with them. They won better contracts, more teachers, more counselors, more nurses. They created an immigrant defense fund. They won a commitment to more green spaces and more gardens. They won, that is, a lot of things we imagine as part of a radical Green New Deal.
Strikes teach people how to fight and win. When workers organize their workplaces, they’re ready for other political battles. In 2019, seven years after the Chicago Teachers’ Union strike, six socialists were elected to the Chicago City Council. The current wave of teachers’ strikes will surely seed new political movements, too. In West Virginia and Louisiana, teachers have fought to make the fossil fuel industry pay more in taxes to fund schools and teachers’ salaries: teachers in West Virginia echo the struggles of coal miners before them. Public sector workers could do the same with technology in the Bay Area and finance in New York.
When teachers go on strike, they don’t stop capitalists from making money—but they do have a direct line to the state. Many workers in health care and education are public employees, and even private institutions in those sectors rely on state funding. So those workers are well positioned to organize alongside movements pushing for the expansion of social services. The Amalgamated Transit Union has backed the Green New Deal, calling for “public transit, free for all, arriving on time, available around the clock, and completely powered by the wind, sun, and seas.”22
Workers in health care have supported climate action because the people they serve are vulnerable to environmental harm and climate breakdown. National Nurses United, for example, argues that “bold action is needed to address the catastrophic health impacts of global warming, and the associated extreme weather conditions such as widespread drought, wildfires, and flooding all over the world.”23 That kind of solidarity can extend beyond local communities: Hector Figueroa, the late president of Service Employees International Union 32BJ, which endorsed the Green New Deal early on, explained that many union members have family in the Global South, where climate change is likely to have major effects. More generally, the workers of the world could be a source of power for climate action in the United States. Immigrants constitute a sixth of the American workforce; including undocumented workers, the number is even higher. Many have direct connections to people living in countries likely to be hit hard by climate change. And historically, it was the multiracial, multi-ethnic proletariat that formed the basis of militant CIO union power.
Today, the Green New Deal’s most prominent labor supporter is Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants. She rose to prominence when flight attendants, along with federal air traffic controllers, called out sick a month into the 2018–19 government shutdown, forcing Republicans to back down from demands for a border wall. Nelson has argued that “our federal government must spearhead a national mobilization that … harnesses American ingenuity, creates millions of well-paying union jobs, and saves the planet for our children.”24 She’s also reminded climate activists to take workers’ concerns seriously.
Much work is required to bring other sectors on board—extractive sector workers as well as the building trades. Paradoxically, many unions whose workers would likely benefit most directly from a Green New Deal have remained skeptical, on the premise that a job in the hand is worth two promises from a politician.
The building trades have long been among the most conservative forces in the American labor movement—but they have much to gain from the kinds of large-scale public works and infrastructure projects that a Green New Deal would undertake. Building trades unions already work on renewables projects and could organize for higher wages in the green sector. And construction workers, like others who work outdoors, are on the frontlines of rising temperatures.
There are other openings. Coal companies that have gone bankrupt are stiffing workers on pensions and health care; climate activists can show solidarity with miners by backing their fights to preserve their benefits. When United Steelworkers members struck at oil refineries around the country in 2015, they were joined by environmental justice groups and nurses’ unions in the Bay Area, where a refinery explosion in the multiracial working-class city of Richmond had recently sickened 15,000 people.
We need to imagine many more such coalitions: bargaining for the common good isn’t just for public sector workers. Imagine a coalition of construction workers’ unions and housing movements rallied around a commitment to building dense, no-carbon public housing on a mass scale, accessible to all. Imagine health care workers organizing alongside day laborers affected by heat waves, or fast food and meatpacking workers organizing alongside animal rights activists against the treatment of both human and animal lives as disposable. Imagine transit workers shutting down a major city for a day in conjunction with groups organizing for free transit, or sanitation workers refusing to pick up the trash until cities commit to building recycling and compost facilities and hiring workers to staff them, backed by communities affected by landfill contamination. We don’t have these movements yet—but it’s time to start building.
Unionizing green jobs is crucial for making them good jobs. The renewables industry currently has a low unionization rate—but that presents an opportunity for union growth. Public sector investment can set the standard for good work. More robust labor protections will also help. The Wagner Act—also known as the National Labor Relations Act—was the labor standard of the New Deal. To date, it offers the most sweeping set of labor protections American workers have ever had. But its shortcomings are well known. Its protections against the boss, restricted by the Taft-Hartley Act a little over a decade after its passage, are far too weak. And today, bosses are richer and stronger than ever.
We’re long overdue for an update—one that institutes card check, making it easier to form a union; forcefully sanctions bosses who try to dissuade organizing; protects workers’ rights to picket and disrupt; regulates labor markets above the level of the firm; recognizes the vast number of workers who land in the gray areas of labor law, from home health aides to farmworkers; and decriminalizes areas that land firmly outside of it, like sex work.
Labor organizers themselves have often argued that being alive in the sunshine is key to the good life. In 1912, Pauline Newman, the socialist organizer of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, wrote an editorial about what workers stood to gain from working less.
What a glorious time is Spring! Despair vanishes, gloom is forgotten … How would you like to run about the recently awakened country rather than sit at the machine! Oh, how you would like to drink in the pure air and be warmed by the sunshine! How you would like to roam about in the fields, dreaming and admiring the beauty of Nature!25
Instead of roaming the fields, though, garment workers sat in the factory for ten hours a day. It could be otherwise, Newman insisted: “A six-hour day in Spring! What a delight it would be to leave the factory, the mill, the department store, while the sun is still shining!” If—and only if—workers stood together in the union, they could win the most precious thing of all: their time. “Spring is here, everything is alive, everything is awakening,” Newman exclaimed. “Come, girls, wake up and demand your own!”
We, too, can have our time in the sunshine. But we, too, will have to fight for it.
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1 Trish Kahle, “Take on the Fossil Fuel Bosses,” Jacobin, March 14, 2019, jacobinmag.com.
2 Trish Kahle, “Austerity vs. the Planet: The Future of Labor Environmentalism,” Dissent, Spring 2016, dissentmagazine.org.
3 David Stein, “Why Coretta Scott King Fought for a Job Guarantee,” Boston Review, May 17, 2017.
4 Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (University of California Press 2007), p. 88.
5 Pavlina R. Tcherneva, “The Job Guarantee: Design, Jobs, and Implementation,” Working Paper No. 902, Levy Economics Institute, 2018, p. 33.
6 National Park Service FAQs, nps.gov/aboutus/faqs.htm; National Park Service Budget Justifications 2019, nps.gov/aboutus/upload/FY2019-NPS-Budget-Justification.pdf.
7 Cited in Evelyn Nakano Glenn, “From Servitude to Service Work: Historical Continuities in the Racial Division of Paid Reproductive Labor,” Signs, 19:1–43 (1992), p. 13; originally in Julia Kirk Blackwelder, Women of the Depression: Caste and Culture 1929–1939 (Texas A&M 1984), pp. 68–9.
8 Michael Hiltzik, The New Deal: A Modern History (Free Press 2011), p. 421.
9 Bill McKibben, “A World at War,” New Republic, August 18, 2016.
10 John McDonnell, “A Green New Deal for the UK,” Jacobin, May 30, 2019, jacobinmag.com.
11 Salar Mohandesi and Emma Teitelman, “Without Reserves,” in Tithi Bhattacharya (ed.), Social Reproduction Theory (Pluto Press 2017).
12 Quoted in Nick Taylor, American-Made: The Enduring Legacy of the WPA: When FDR Put the Nation to Work (Bantam 2008), p. 127.
13 Tcherneva, “The Job Guarantee.”
14 Silvia Federici and Jill Richards, “Every Woman Is a Working Woman: Silvia Federici interviewed by Jill Richards,” Boston Review, December 19, 2018, bostonreview.net.
15 Nick Estes, Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock versus the Dakota Access Pipeline and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance (Verso 2019), p. 49.
16 The Red Nation, “Call to Action: The Red Deal, Indigenous Action to Save Our Earth, June 19–20,” therednation.org.
17 Annika Neklason, “California Is Running Out of Inmates to Fight Its Fires,” Atlantic, December 7, 2017, theatlantic.com.
18 Raj Patel and Jim Goodman, “A Green New Deal for Agriculture,” Jacobin, April 4, 2019, jacobinmag.com.
19 Benjamin Hunnicutt, Free Time: The Forgotten American Dream (Temple University Press 2013), p. 114.
20 Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Work Stoppages Summary,” bls.gov. February 8, 2019.
21 Jane McAlevey with Bob Ostertag, Raising Expectations (And Raising Hell): My Decade Fighting in the Labor Movement (Verso 2012).
22 ATU Media Center, “Can Public Transit Help Save the Planet,” atu.org.
23 National Nurses United, “Environmental and Climate Justice,” nationalnursesunited.org.
24 Sara Nelson, “Flight Attendants Know the Real Job Killer Isn’t the Green New Deal. It’s Climate Change,” vox.com, April 17, 2019.
25 Pauline M. Newman, “The Long Working Day and Spring,” Life and Labor 2, January 1, 1912.