[Editorial Note: Best Wishes For 2024 from your Just Transition For All Team! To bring our readers the most in-depth analysis and comprehensive information from around the globe curated by our small staff, we have moved to a monthly newsletter schedule. Please send us ideas and feedback!]

Leading Off: COP 28—A Pointless Exercise

One year ago, we wrote:

Though hardly surprising, COP27 made it abundantly clear that workers just don’t explicitly figure into the calculations of the parties gathering in the negotiating rooms who bicker over the details of climate change.

More explicitly, in the wake of COP27, unions must confront a fundamental question: why should precious and finite resources (time and money) be spent trying to play within a framework that is entirely oblivious of workers?

A year later, it’s the same tune. The summit was a grand failure if we are judging success by any progress towards a “high bar” Just Transition for workers. Indeed, it is abundantly clear that virtually the entire set of national negotiators have no interest in, or even recognition, that they are setting the state for generations of economic wastelands created because of low wages.

Let’s pick this apart.

There was a grand announcement that countries had agreed to the “beginning of the end” of fossil fuels. And, then, this:

The Green Climate Fund (GCF) received a boost to its second replenishment with six countries pledging new funding at COP28 with total pledges now standing at a record USD 12.8 billion from 31 countries, with further contributions expected.

Eight donor governments announced new commitments to the Least Developed Countries Fund and Special Climate Change Fund totaling more than USD 174 million to date, while new pledges, totaling nearly USD 188 million so far, were made to the Adaptation Fund at COP28.

Followed quickly by this:

However as highlighted in the global stocktake, these financial pledges are far short of the trillions eventually needed to support developing countries with clean energy transitions, implementing their national climate plans and adaptation efforts.

The admission that pledges fall far short of the trillions needed doesn’t scratch the surface of the problem: nowhere is there a clear statement, or policy, that workers should not bear the brunt of “energy transitions”. This isn’t simply a developing country problem—although, clearly, developing countries face a dire shortfall in financial resources to confront climate change.

It is quite clear: the negotiators who attend COP28—and are wined and dined by corporate lobbyists—accept the idea that millions of people will lose jobs and face an economic catastrophe. They don’t care.

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Spotlight: Tesla Attacks The Swedish Model

A recurring theme in our newsletter explores the notion that future “green jobs” are a shiny object to be embraced because, so the rhetoric tells us, those are jobs workers can look forward to when coal mines shut down or fossil fuel refineries are shuttered.

Every day, Tesla makes the opposite case every day. Not just in the low-standard, hard-to-unionize U.S.:

Tesla’s refusal to sign a collective agreement in Sweden risks undermining the long-term future of the Swedish model that has underpinned decades of economic success in the Scandinavian country, according to the union leader taking on Elon Musk’s carmaker.

Marie Nilsson, the head of the IF Metall union behind the strike against Tesla, told the Financial Times that the famed Swedish model — developed in the 1930s — was at the heart of the country’s prosperity, with employers and unions taking joint decisions on the labour market.

“If you look at this in a long-term perspective, it could be a threat to the Swedish model. It’s really important for us,” she added.

If it can happen in Sweden, the fraying of any decent wage base is clearly a global truth. Especially when led by a gargantuan company like Tesla, which is projected to have a potential market value of one trillion dollars in 2024. Telsa is clearly setting standards in the electric vehicle market—and receiving encouragement to pursue its wage destruction strategy:

The White House is lending its support to an auto industry effort to standardize Tesla’s electric vehicle charging plugs for all EVs in the United States, part of a broad effort to stimulate their sales to help combat climate change.

Handing Tesla the keys to the EV charging industry while the company pursues an open anti-union strategy, even in countries where standards are high, is nothing less than a subsidy to advance a low-wage vision for workers.

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Ideas: An Alternative To COP

As we note in our lead item, and have observed a year ago, the COP gatherings are pointless exercises for advancing a “high bar” Just Transition for workers. So, we would advocate, as we did a year ago, two easy, concrete and, to us, obvious steps:

• A unified stance, and declaration, on the part of all national and international labor unions that labor will stay away from COP29 because it offers little.
• Organization of an alternative summit to the official COP to work on a real strategy for fighting for “high bar” Just Transition—the summit should not be a lot of jabbering and rehashing of the rhetoric around Just Transition. Instead, it should be organized in a way that is a working meeting—and it should include, in the organizational leadership, as many non-official union bodies in recognition that the vast majority of workers who will be swept up in the decarbonization process are not members of unions.

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Opinion: Why The Renewable Energy Industry Needs Unionizing

By Daniel Lozano and Michael DiGiuseppe

The COP28 climate summit recognized we are at “the beginning of the end” of the fossil fuel era and need to speed up transition to renewable energy. But union-busting by renewables companies, including the top solar provider on Long Island, threatens to slow it down.

Renewables are big business in the US, stoked by many tens of billions in federal funding. But insiders know that renewables companies are often chaotic, with underpaid, demoralized workers, unsustainably high turnover, and difficult, dangerous working conditions. Solar installers’ median income is just under $45,000 — 40% less than fossil fuel workers. Getting off fossil fuel will require fixing the renewables industry’s labor problems, which requires unions.

Historically, organized labor grew up with fossil fuel industries. At their peak, unions represented 60% of autoworkers. Today it’s about 16%, and 17% across the fossil fuel sector. But only 4% US solar workers and 6% of wind power workers are in unions, reflecting how fiercely renewables companies oppose them.

Big federal subsidies and tax credits compound the problem. Renewables companies are exempt from prevailing wage and other labor requirements under the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) if they stay below utility scale (25 megawatts a year). So, the more they cut costs and squeeze workers, the more of the IRA money they can pocket, and the easier it is to spend money on union-busting. That is a perverse incentive effectively diverting public resources to private gain while hurting workers and limiting how fast renewables grow.

EmPower Solar, a Bethpage, NY-based solar company serving Long Island, is a case in point. Rather than pay its workers fairly, it pays lawyers and lobbyists to prevent them from organizing. It hired the Cincinnatti-based lobbying firm National Labor Relations Advocates, which advertises a 90% success rate at helping clients “avoid any threat of a union coming into your business,” and charges hefty fees for the service.

EmPower faces unionization because of its labor practices. It pays installers low base wages plus an untransparent per-panel bonus. Typical monthly take-home pay might be around $2500 plus a $1200 bonus, but the bonus is unreliable. It falls in slower seasons and can be heavily docked for such things as breaking a lamp. There are cases where the bonus suddenly tanked, and installers had to rely on friends and family for rent and food. Some skipped meals and lost weight. Many installers are in debt because the job does not pay enough to live on.

EmPower foremen are paid little better than installers, and often take second jobs like driving for Uber. While they worry about their crews’ safety on rooftops around high voltage equipment, they also worry about making their car payment. When accidents happen, foremen are scapegoated and penalized with demotion and pay cuts, as if it is their supervision at fault rather than unsafe company practices.

Quick to cut pay, EmPower is slow to raise it. It lacks a clear, accountable compensation structure, delays performance reviews, and has high turnover, so workers who keep their jobs often stay stuck at or near entry-level pay. It is also slow to reimburse their outlays for driving to jobsites.

EmPower hires workers for the peak summer season, then fires them, often after a month, and in some cases as little as two weeks. Workers are so stressed and insecure about getting laid off that they are afraid to take lunchbreaks or refuse dangerous jobs they should not accept. When they brought their concerns to management, they got canned talk-points from its union-busting lawyers instead of action.

Finally, after watching Shawn Fain and the UAW stand up and get results for auto workers, EmPower workers reached out to the UAW Local 259, which agreed to represent them. It filed a notice of election with the National Labor Relations Board last month. EmPower workers vote on unionizing this Friday.

Since the filing, the company changed tactics. It said it cared about worker concerns, the layoffs stopped, the compensation problems improved a little. But this only happened once the workers got organized. It seems tactical, designed to peel off support to swing the vote against a union.

Another tactic is EmPower’s false claim the UAW is a “bad fit” because its workers do not build cars. But the truth is, the company would fight any union. The UAW had famous successes at Big Three car companies, but it is a fallacy to pigeonhole unions in the old manufacturing, fossil-fuel based economy. They are more relevant and needed than ever for the high-tech economy and renewables ramp-up. Today’s UAW represents technicians, National Institutes of Health scientists, defense workers, office workers, environmental workers, and more. It can and should do for renewables workers what it did for autoworkers.

Working in renewables could be a great job, but the industry needs a healthier balance of power between management and labor to make growth sustainable. These are the jobs of the future. They ought to pay a living wage, be safe, and be unionized.

Lozano is an Empower installer. Michael DiGiuseppe is Vice President of U.S. United Auto Workers Local 259

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Links

United Nations Climate Change: The official home page for the COP 28 summit.