WASHINGTON – Two of President Joe Biden’s prevailing priorities – fighting climate change and protecting workers – are colliding as his government prepares for an ecological and comprehensive reinitiation of the United States economy.
Biden’s attempt to move quickly to electric cars, renewable energy and clean manufacturing is bringing up long-standing tensions between organized work and environmentalists, two credible Democratic voters whose interests do not always converge. At stake are millions of well-paid jobs that support the American middle class, but are concentrated in highly polluting industries that Biden hopes to eliminate.
The “green versus blue” division is coming into focus as Biden prepares a multi-trillion dollar infrastructure and jobs package with the aim of stimulating the economy after the Covid-19 pandemic, even while his government is pushing for oil pipeline breaks and some oil and gas drilling projects that offer the promise of well-paying jobs.
No one seriously questions Biden’s pro-work good faith. After campaigning under the promise of being “the most pro-union president you have ever seen,” he made a dramatic entrance this week, publicly supporting Amazon workers in Alabama who are voting on unionization.
Likewise, most climate hawks could not be happier with Biden’s commitments to aggressively cut greenhouse gas emissions from exhaust pipes and power plants. But the pressure to raise the nascent green industries needed to achieve this has sometimes come at the expense of workers.
“The clean technology industry as a whole, whether you’re talking about renewable energy or other clean technologies, is typically lower wages, non-union jobs – and that has to change,” said Anna Fendley, regulatory director for United Steelworkers, who endorsed Biden and whose more than one million members include oil and gas workers.
Take the electricity. Biden, in an executive order a week after taking office, set a target of zeroing the energy sector’s carbon dioxide emissions by 2035, a high target that requires a rapid acceleration of wind and solar energy. He also wants workers who do this to receive current wages and have the right to join a union.
Here’s the problem: as it is, wind and solar jobs just don’t pay as well. An energy plant operator, for example, earns an average of $ 79,400 per year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics from the Department of Labor, compared with $ 46,900 for a solar installer and $ 56,700 for a wind turbine technician.
Overall, this is still better than the average job available today for someone looking for work in an economy affected by the pandemic. But the wage cut, compared to wages offered for jobs with fossil fuels, complicates efforts to find new jobs for those who lose their livelihoods as the United States abstains from the dirtiest fuels.
One reason may be that almost all wind and solar jobs are not unionized. In installations that produce electricity from natural gas, 11% of workers are union members and 10% work with coal. That drops to 6% in wind power generation and just 4% in solar, according to 2020 data from the US Energy and Employment Report, an annual survey.
“Putting a pipe or becoming a coal miner has not always been a good job. They have become a good job because of decades of organization,” said Robert Pollin, who teaches economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and is a consultant to the Department of Energy .
Wind and solar jobs are mainly concentrated in the facility, which means that there are fewer long-term jobs when the sites are up and running than with oil and gas. And much of the hardware is imported from abroad, including from China, rather than manufactured by American workers, energy analysts said.
As the sector has taken shape over the past two decades, wind and solar companies have argued that, with high costs and narrow profit margins, they could not grow and replace coal and gas so quickly if they paid union wages at the same time.
“That argument is wrong,” said Jason Walsh, executive director of the BlueGreen Alliance, which aims to bring together labor and environmental groups. He said that higher wages are not an important factor in how quickly renewable energy can expand because projects are capital intensive, with most of the budget spent on purchasing solar panels and wind turbines – not labor. . “Even if you pay workers a family support wage, it won’t really increase the overall cost of the project.”
Likewise, Biden wants Americans to exchange their gas-consuming vehicles for electric cars and trucks, targeting the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States: the exhaust pipe. Since Biden took office, General Motors has announced plans to become fully electric by 2035, and other major automakers have taken similar steps.
For workers who have relied on skilled, high-paying jobs for decades, this change injects serious uncertainty into their future. That’s because electric vehicles, which use simpler electric motors instead of multigear transmissions and combustion engines, may require far fewer workers to build the same number of cars. The United Auto Workers union said earlier that some 35,000 jobs could be at stake.
All electric vehicles manufactured in the USA today are made with non-unionized labor, such as Tesla’s, or with most imported parts, failing Biden’s “made in the United States” test. Even the heart of electric vehicles, lithium-ion batteries, are largely outsourced to other companies that supply them to automakers, but they may not pay the same wages and benefits.
“Electric vehicles have some of the lowest content in the US and Canada in general,” said Kristin Dziczek, vice president of industry at the Center for Automotive Research, based in Michigan.
Biden’s move to eliminate the Keystone XL pipeline also caused initial tension with some elements of organized work. TC Energy Corp., a Canadian company that plans to build the controversial pipeline, said it laid off 1,000 people following Biden’s decision in January.
Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO, who supported Biden, criticized the president for not having other jobs ready for the same workers when he rejected the pipeline, although Trumka and other union leaders praised Biden’s work plans and climate.
With the Biden government preparing to shift its focus to the jobs and infrastructure package after the pandemic relief bill is completed, lawmakers and labor groups are already trying to figure out how best to ensure that the president’s dual objective of protecting the workers and the climate is not achieved each other’s expenses.
A broad climate bill, tabled by Democratic House committee chairmen this week, that would determine the increase in the use of renewable energy included a clause that requires all money spent to go to contractors who pay “no less than the salary prevailing location “- a rate set by the Department of Labor. Senator Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., Told NBC News this week that she plans to reintroduce a bill that would provide Medicare and free higher education to unemployed coal workers.
Last month, Biden met with top infrastructure union leaders and promised that good jobs don’t have to be sacrificed. And Gina McCarthy, her domestic climate czar, told Vox in a recent interview that jobs in “well-paid unions” would be central to the package, adding that “President Biden does not think this is a secondary consideration”.
“Biden has the manual,” said Walsh of the BlueGreen Alliance. “Now we are going to see them do that.”