climate change

By staff - Labor Network for Sustainability, April 30, 2024

For two years, the GKN auto parts plant in Florence, Italy, has been occupied by laid-off workers. In late March, thousands of people from all over Italy marched in solidarity with workers from the plant. The call for the March 25 demonstration was signed by hundreds of organizations.

The workers issued a plan for “reindustrialization from below” with reconversion toward sustainable mobility and renewable energy. A Reindustrialization Group has identified the skills of the workers, mapped the factory’s layout, and inventoried its machinery and infrastructure. It is now seeking projects to make use of their machinery and skills. The workers are negotiating with a company that specializes in clean energy production to explore the possibility of producing cutting-edge photovoltaic panels and batteries at the plant. Meanwhile, an “Ex GKN for Future” crowdfunding campaign is laying the groundwork for a future based on “popular shareholding.” It raised nearly 60,000 Euros in the first two weeks – anyone can invest.

To learn more: https://jacobin.com/2023/04/italy-gkn-factory-occupation-transform-production-workers-jobs-climate-change

For the crowdfunding campaign portal (in English, French, German, and Spanish, and Italian): https://www.produzionidalbasso.com/project/gkn-for-future/

By Jeremy Brecher - Labor Network for Sustainability, April 30, 2024

The Green New Deal from Below represents a unique formation which therefore requires – and has developed — a unique strategy. It is not the same as an electoral campaign, a civil disobedience struggle, a neighborhood organization, a union recognition or contract campaign, an issue campaign, or other familiar forms of social action, though it may have similarities to all of them. It is necessary to recognize this uniqueness to avoid being caught up in familiar but inappropriate tactics.

If power were distributed equally in American society there might well be Green New Deals by now in a majority of American cities and states. But in reality, power is concentrated in the hands of a tiny minority – far smaller even than the notorious “1 percent.” Under normal circumstances the rest of the people have little influence over the basic decisions that determine our lives. The right to vote is precious, but it confers only limited influence over governments and even less over the corporations that shape economic decisions and in practice largely shape the policies of governments.

Yet ultimately the power of the powerful depends on the rest of us accepting and even enabling them. The withdrawal of our acquiescence and cooperation can render them powerless – as the old labor anthem goes, “Without our brain and muscle not a single wheel can turn.”

The problem of Green New Deal strategy is in essence how to organize and mobilize the potential power of the people. One way is to use the power that we have within existing institutional structures. But in a grossly unequal system, voting and other institutionalized forms of action are likely to have only limited impact. From its start, the Green New Deal has combined action within the political system with direct popular action in the streets – and, uninvited, in the halls of power.

By Katie Myers - The New Republic, April 28, 2024

(excerpt...)

Climate regulations and the Inflation Reduction Act’s generous incentives are now stimulating electric vehicle manufacturing. Despite the Biden administration’s pro-labor economic agenda, IRA funding—and thus billions of dollars in public and private investment—has largely gone to areas with low union density, spurring worries among autoworkers that the E.V. shift could create a second tier of lower-paid, nonunion workers spearheading the transition to electric vehicles, working in dangerous conditions with flammable elements like lithium.

In 2022, Volkswagen broke ground on E.V. production and assembly; the same year, the Mercedes plant in Tuscaloosa, Alabama—UAW’s next battle, organizers tell me—began manufacturing an electric SUV. In the most recent union contract between UAW and the Big Three automakers, General Motors and Stellantis agreed to allow joint-venture E.V. manufacturing plants under the union umbrella, and now, Tennessee may be the next step.

Since the beginning conversations about reducing dependence on fossil fuels—a necessary transition that nonetheless could have deleterious impacts on workers across steel, coal, oil, auto, and building trades industries—workers have demanded a “just transition”: an energy transition that prevents as much of the workforce as possible from being dislocated, allows for training and opportunity, and provides jobs equal to or better than the ones that came before. Environmental organizations have taken up the demand, too, seeing that a united front for labor rights and environmental justice is more powerful than keeping the two at loggerheads, as right-wing politicians might prefer. A just transition is what workers in the South are demanding as the IRA funds flood in.

“We’re seeing a bunch of E.V. manufacturers come here,” said Michael Adriaanse, “and they should be union.” Adriaanse organizes with the Blue Oval Good Neighbors Committee. In rural, working-class Black communities in west Tennessee, this labor and community coalition is mobilizing to bargain with Blue Oval City, a Ford joint-venture electric vehicle plant that’s the recipient of the largest public investment the state of Tennessee has ever made, with an added $9.2 billion in funding from the Department of Energy. The VW victory has given workers hope for their efforts to negotiate good jobs and community benefits with the E.V. industry, he added. But it’s going to be hard-won.

By Stephen Franklin - In These Times, April 26, 2024

The statistics are sobering, and it’s likely we’re still undercounting: Only one-fourth of injuries suffered by Latino workers on small construction jobs are regularly reported, one study found.

A burst of shouts cascades as three men plunge downward. Other workers reach for them as the scaffold plummets.

But no one can grab hold of them.

Thinking he can still save them, a middle-aged construction worker scampers to aid the three men, one a long-time friend, he had helped get hired on the site. 

“I saw everything,” he says and then repeats himself. ​“I saw everything. In a video you can see me removing planks from them because I thought they were alive, but they were dead.”

Jose Canaca, 26, Gilberto Monico Fernández, 54, and Jesus ​“Chuy” Olivares, 43, had been putting up an outer brick wall for a 17-story apartment building in a popular neighborhood in Charlotte, N.C., when they fell from the 10^th floor. They hit a patio rooftop on the fourth floor — a 70-foot drop. 

Months after the fatal construction accident in January 2023, the tragedy haunts him. He quit the risky construction work he’d done for about 15 years and has been taking lower-paying jobs.

“I don’t wish this on anyone, what happened there,” says Diego Sanchez, the construction worker who tried to rescue the three men. Sanchez, who came to the United States from Honduras, asked to use a pseudonym because he fears retaliation from immigration authorities. 

The deaths of Canaca, Fernández and Olivares added to the increasing numbers of Latino workers killed on the job, a death count that has grown steadily year after year. Latino workers today have the highest workplace fatality rate: The number of on-the-job deaths has declined over time for white people, and slightly increased for Black people over the past few years, but fatalities for Latino workers continue to rise sharply.

While workplace safety is an issue that affects everyone, a disproportionate share of those who will be mourned this Workers Memorial Day — observed on April 28 to honor people injured or killed on the job — were Latino. 

There were 1,248 Latino workers killed on the job in 2022, reflecting a 57% increase over the previous decade, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

By staff - Safe Landing, April 16, 2024

Safe Landing recently attended the “Keep Grangemouth Working” event organised by Unite the Union at the Scottish Trade Union Congress (STUC) conference in Dundee, Scotland. Grangemouth refinery is a classic case of an ‘unjust’ transition where poor industrial planning for the shift to low-carbon operations has led to major impacts for the livelihoods of workers and communities in the area. 

There are definitely lessons to be learned for the aviation industry – particularly as a sustainable future for the fuels sector is so intertwined with sustainable aviation!

Grangemouth Refinery: Scotland’s only refinery facing imminent closure

Grangemouth Refinery is one of the six remaining refineries in the UK and the only refinery in Scotland. It produces jet fuel which supplies airports at Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen and Newcastle. It also produces a significant proportion of Scotland’s petrol and diesel. It’s estimated to account for approximately 8% of Scotland’s manufacturing base. 

In November 2023, the refinery owners, Petroineos, announced that the refinery could cease operations as soon as 2025 following an 18 month process to convert the facility to a fuel import/export terminal only. This could mean up to 500 jobs are lost at the site. 

This event was focused on the fight to maintain those jobs. 

This is a real life example of potential job losses from high-carbon infrastructure as the low-carbon transition (e.g. from petrol/diesel to electric vehicles) takes place. This could equally occur at an airport or aviation production facility unless transition plans are developed early, and future-proof investments are made. As Grangemouth produces jet fuel, there’s also an obvious overlap with the necessary transition required in aviation.

By Nicole Conlan, Lily Blumkin, Sila Puhl, and Jordan Doll - World On Fire, April 12, 2024

By Clara Polliard, Ian Hodson, Janet Newsham, and Nuala Lam - Tipping Point, April 11, 2024

By Berit Ehmke and Yanira Wolf - Labor Notes, April 8, 2024

Public transit workers across Germany have broken new ground by coordinating our contracts—nearly all of them nationwide have expired over the last four months—and shutting down bus systems with strikes in 57 cities.

To add to the pressure, we’ve done something new for our union and for Germany: we’ve formed an alliance between local transport workers and climate activists, including the students who have been leading massive school walkouts.

The devastating effects of climate change are already rocking Germany: major heat waves, flooding, and water shortages. A growing movement demanding climate action has made real headway—our energy and industrial sectors have almost halved their climate pollution over the past 30 years. But on transportation, our third-biggest source, we’ve made nearly zero progress.

To beat climate change we need more buses on the road. We’re building a movement to double bus service. After three decades of cuts and privatization, we need a major federal funding boost.

But these jobs have become so tough that most agencies have huge worker shortages. To make the climate impact real, we’ll also need to raise the floor for wages, breaks, and schedules—making this a good enough job that workers will sign on and stick around.

By Francesca Gabbriellini and Giacomo Gabbuti - Jacobin, April 4, 2024

On Saturday, March 25, the streets of Florence were filled with thousands of people from all over Italy, marching in solidarity with workers from the former GKN factory in nearby Campi Bisenzio. The struggle at the plant had begun on July 9, 2021, when the auto parts producer’s 422 workers were abruptly dismissed. Contrary to the plans of the owner — British investment fund Melrose Industries — the workers occupied the plant, and they have been keeping it (and the millions of euros’ worth of machinery it contains) in order ever since. It is now the longest factory occupation in Italian history.

In that time, the workers at the ex-GKN plant have launched a massive solidarity movement, fighting to prevent the plant from being yet another milestone in Italy’s long deindustrialization. As we explained in an article last summer, this dispute is remarkable for many reasons. It comes amidst a political situation where the Left in its various forms has been shut permanently out of Parliament and increasingly marginalized in society, and indeed where post-fascist movements have extended their grip. It also confronts the generally dismal power relations in the world of labor — Italy is the only Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) country where wages have fallen in real terms over the last three decades.

But the period since last summer has also seen many developments: not only because of the broader solidarity for the workers, but also because this dispute is combined with the fight for a just transition. Tellingly of this broader cause, the call for the March 25 march was signed by hundreds of associations — from unions to movement spaces, via students, parties, social centers, civic lists, and personalities, including international figures such as Miguel Benasayag, Adrian Lyttelton, and João Pedro Stedile. It closed with the slogan: “Let’s break the siege, let’s try to make the future.”

The ”siege” against these workers takes the form of the nonpayment of their salaries for some six months — a “de facto dismissal,” which has put them in the absurd condition of having neither social security nor salary, even as they deal with soaring inflation. The “future” here invoked means public intervention so that the liquidation procedure by the new owners is stopped, and the workers are allowed to pursue their own “reindustrialization from below.”

Indeed, for decades, Italian institutions have given up on any attempt at industrial policy — a situation that hasn’t changed with Europe’s post-pandemic recovery plans. The ex-GKN Factory Collective and those in solidarity with it are instead taking their own initiative to move toward a green transition. The aim: to reverse the spiral of relocations, divestments, and starvation wages that Italy has been heading down for at least three decades. To avoid a once great factory ending up as an empty shed, ready to become an eco-monster or the latest site of real estate speculation, the workers are striving to recover it on a cooperative basis, advancing their own plan to produce photovoltaic panels, batteries, and cargo bikes.

The workers’ collective has created broad alliances, with movements ranging from feminists to green causes. This is particularly visible in the climate strikes it has organized together with youth-led movements over the last two years. The ex-GKN struggle thus combines what is also called an “old” form of mobilization — the defense of workers’ jobs and a distinct class-based view of social relations — with a “new” one, i.e., the fight against climate change. For want of public intervention, it has launched a crowdfunding drive also supported by the Italian wing of Fridays for Future, with a view to “popular shareholding” in the future cooperative. But to understand why this support is important, it is worth explaining how we got to this point.

By Alexandra Martinez - Prism, April 4, 2024

Amid mounting concerns over the safety of California’s workforce, a critical vote on a bill to protect workers from extreme indoor temperatures narrowly passed the California Occupational Safety and Health Standards Board (Cal/OSHA), but the bill still requires approval from a skeptical governmental agency, leaving workers vulnerable. The decision has ignited anger among labor groups statewide that argue the state’s inaction is putting lives at risk.

On March 21, in a hearing room packed with people wearing stickers proclaiming, “Heat Kills,” a diverse coalition of laundry workers, farmworkers, janitors, steelworkers, fast food workers, stagehand technicians, construction laborers, and shipyard workers gathered to voice their dismay at the cancellation of the crucial vote on the Indoor Heat Illness Prevention Standard. The state’s Office of Administrative Law will need the Department of Finance’s approval before it can move forward with the regulations, but the office is not immediately certain about the time frame for the next steps.

“Our coalition of unions and worker advocates have been pushing Cal/OSHA to do its job and approve regulations that finally protect workers from extreme indoor heat,” said Lorena Gonzalez, Chief Officer of the California Labor Federation, which represents 1,300 unions and 2.3 million union members. “It’s outrageous that after years of advocacy … we learned that it was pulled from the agenda with no prior notice or explanation.” 

The standard would have protected millions of workers in warehouses and other indoor facilities, but Gov. Gavin Newsom objected to the program’s costs. The Department of Finance intervened over concerns about costs to correctional facilities and other state entities, but Cal/OSHA moved forward and voted unanimously to adopt the standards. The rules are now in limbo.