Deconstructing Green Jobs, Foregrounding Decent Work

Issue No : 81  May - August 2012

By Joselito M. Natividad

Much has been written about Green Jobs and Green Economy, both positive and negative. It also been one of the focal points in debates around the Rio+20 conference in Brazil in  June 2012, with all its grand narratives on saving Mother Nature and reversing climate change. But what has not been given much attention in these discourses is a substantive appreciation of the labor agenda as reflected in the concept of Decent Work.

While views on what constitutes Green Jobs vary, the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) defines it as “positions in agriculture, manufacturing, R&D, administrative, and service activities aimed at alleviating the myriad environmental threats faced by humanity. Specifically, but not exclusively, this includes jobs that help to protect and restore ecosystems and biodiversity, reduce energy consumption, decarbonize the economy, and minimize or altogether avoid the generation of all forms of waste and pollution.”[1]

On the other hand, the International Labour Organisation (ILO) defines Decent Work as “opportunities for women and men to obtain decent and productive work in conditions of freedom, equity, security and human dignity. [It] sums up the aspirations of people in their working lives – their aspirations for opportunity and income; rights, voice and recognition; for family stability and personal development; for fairness and gender equality. Ultimately these various dimensions of decent work underpin peace in communities and society. Decent work is central to efforts to reduce poverty, and is a means for achieving equitable, inclusive and sustainable development.”[2]

Green Jobs (and Green Economy) advocates may be accused of one “cardinal sin” in promoting their agenda vis-à-vis workers’ rights: approaching labor concerns from the perspective of environmental conservation and mitigation of global warming. It is also a sin committed by the US Obama administration in trying to address the country’s grave unemployment problem, and which may yet cost him his re-election bid.

What is so wrong about this approach is that it totally ignores the underlying causes of labor rights violations, and the more fundamental economic issues that are inevitably linked with the workings of global capitalism and its current operating paradigm, neoliberalism. More so, it seeks to paper over these problems in the worst possible way, by proposing a solution that will in fact aggravate these problems and lead to the further institutionalization of core labor standards violations on a global scale.

Just how viable is Green Jobs creation?

This question has often been asked by both labor advocates and big capital, for the same reason but with totally different interests in mind. The crux of the matter is just how much global capitalism is willing to tone down its profiteering ways and moderate its greed in the interest of the environment and labor. From the horse’s mouth, the answer surprises no one.

A labor-oriented, rights-based approach to the question would show that Green Jobs programmes are not really contributing to Decent Work, and that the former is not analogous to the latter. At first glance, however, data presented by the UNEP Green Jobs Initiative would seemingly bear out optimistic prognostications on the ability of Green Jobs to create, well, jobs.

“Investment in renewable energy is booming, surging from $10 billion in 1998 to at least $66 billion in 2007, equivalent to 18 per cent of all energy investment. It is expected to reach $343 billion in 2020 and to almost double again by 2030 to $630 billion. It may be noted that in the past even optimistic predictions concerning the development of renewables have consistently been exceeded. Projected investments would translate into at least 20 million additional jobs in the sector, making it a much larger source of employment than today’s fossil energy industry (mining, petroleum extraction, refining and fossil power generation), which, in spite of rising production, has been shedding jobs through technological advances.” (UNEP/ILO/ITUC, 2008) 

A study conducted by the Golman School of Public Policy of UC Berkley also came out with findings that would seem to support buoyant forecasts for Green Jobs. According to this study, the renewable energy sector generates more jobs than the fossil fuel-based energy sector per unit of energy delivered, and that the employment rate in fossil fuel-related industries has been declining steadily for reasons that are not necessarily related to environmental regulation. “The renewables industry consistently generates more jobs per MWa in construction, manufacturing and installation, and in O&M and fuel processing, than the fossil fuel industries.” (Kammen, Kapadia and Fripp, 2004)

However, the same study also recognizes that the shift away from fossil-fuels will lead to some job losses, as green jobs may require an entirely new set of skills. It recommends compensation or retraining for workers that will be dislocated by any restructuring of the energy industry, and further asserts that “winners will outnumber the losers”.

Again, the long-term imperatives of environmental conservationism are cited for making the labor sector pay for the failings of the global capitalist system: “The fact that there will be some losers does not take away from the case for making a shift in the energy economy towards clean technologies. Perpetuating a region’s dependence on volatile and polluting industries with low and steadily declining employment rates is bound to negatively affect that region’s development in the long run.”

What is not evident in these rosy portraits of Green Jobs’ future is that a large percentage of paid work that are considered to be “green” easily fall outside the ambit of Decent Work. Recycling industries, which as a matter principle are viewed as green,  are especially notorious for utilizing cheap, informal labor to squeeze out high rates of return from what are generally considered to be hazardous occupations, such as in developing countries like the Philippines, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. The UNEP itself is aware of this dilemma: “Many current recycling jobs, for instance, recover raw material and thus help to alleviate pressure on natural resources, but apply a process which is often dirty, dangerous and difficult, causing significant damage to the environment and to human health. Employment in this industry tends to be precarious and incomes are low. If green jobs are to be a bridge to a truly sustainable future, this needs to change.” (UNEP, 2008)

In developed countries like the US and the Eurozone, the colossal miscarriages in Green Jobs/Green Economy experiments tend to belief often enthusiastic (and theoretical) presentations on their projected benefits. 

Gabriel Calzada, an economics professor at the Universidad Rey San Carlos in Spain, came out in 2010 with a report on the Spanish experience with green energy and jobs promotion. Calzada says that Spain's torrential spending — no other nation has so aggressively supported production of electricity from renewable sources — on wind farms and other forms of alternative energy has indeed created jobs. But Calzada's report concludes that they often are temporary and have received $752,000 to $800,000 each in subsidies — wind-industry jobs cost even more, $1.4 million each[3]. Spain now has one of the highest unemployment rates in the Eurozone, at 25.1% in the third quarter of this year, and its highest since 1976. [4]

That the Obama administration merely brushed off Calzada’s report is evident in its jobs-creation policies. In February 2009, a month after his inauguration, US President Barack Obama issued a call for the country to “ultimately make clean, renewable energy the profitable kind of energy” as response to the multiple crises.[5]  Rhetoric on “green-collar jobs” were also aired by at least three presidential candidates in the 2008 US elections, including Obama himself, who promised to allocate $150 billion to create 5 million green jobs in 10 years.

After Obama won in 2008, a total of $247 billion in stimulus funding were poured into the green project – $167 billion in grants and loan guarantees for clean-energy to the Department of  Energy , and initial $80 billion for the creation of green-collar jobs.  By 2011, a report came out that an estimated 225,000 clean energy jobs were either created or preserved in 2010 due to more than $80 billion in stimulus by the Obama administration, which means that the US government spent $355,555 in taxpayers’ money just to create or maintain each green job.[6]

Furthermore, a study released in July 2011 by the Brookings Institution found clean-technology jobs accounted for just 2 percent of employment nationwide and only slightly more — 2.2 percent — in Silicon Valley. Rather than adding jobs, the study found, the sector actually lost 492 positions from 2003 to 2010 in the South Bay, where the unemployment rate in June was 10.5 percent.[7]

Just how appealing is “Green Jobs” to big business?

Even with the ILO and its Decent Work concept in tow to lend legitimacy to its aims, the Green Jobs paradigm could not easily shake off critical perception that it is more about subsidizing big capital investments in the energy sector rather than addressing unemployment in countries where it is promoted. But again, this begs the question of whether big capital, especially faltering ones, would buy into the idea of pouring scarce funds towards retooling their businesses for the benefit of the Planet and the unemployed.   

The Obama administration’s treatment of Green Jobs/Green Economy as panaceas for the US’s unemployment woes has attracted fire from dyed-in-the-wool neoliberal apologists. “Green job advocates often argue for these programs as if the creation of the job itself is the main benefit of the program. This is a serious error. The creation of a job is only valuable if the service the job provides is greater than the cost of performing the job. Jobs, green or otherwise, are not benefits but costs,” said The Beacon Hill Institute, the research arm of the Department of Economics of Suffolk University in Boston and a known Republican think-tank.[8]

Such intractable arguments are the stuff that makes up a capitalist mindset, and is only cited here to illustrate how naïve Green Jobs advocates are to attribute such profound altruism to big business. Apparently, the view of The Beacon Hill on green jobs reflect not only those of neoliberal economics, but also of the whole global capitalist system.

For the dream of well-meaning Green Jobs/Green Economy to come true, what is required is nothing less than the overhauling of a system that is driven by the profit motive, and one moreover that is premised on the principle of “maximum profit at the least cost and at the shortest possible time”. Proposing a radical shift from this principle to one that puts premium on jobs creation for its own sake (or even for the sake of the environment) is giving big capital and their governments way is practically saying they have a social conscience, and that an individual capitalist conducts business with the welfare of his workers, the laboring classes and Planet Earth in mind. As the labor sector’s experience with Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) shows, big capital only sheds crocodile-tears and is single-mindedly obsessed with the squeezing out of super-profits from every dollar invested.  

Labor Responses to Green Jobs

The idea that formal and infomal sector workers’ organizations can make a difference in promoting Green Jobs has also taken hold of global union, in particular the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) and its affiliates. Labor conferences and studies focused on the potential of “Green and Decent Jobs” have been conducted, some of which were co-sponsored with the ILO. Trainings have also been held under the aegis of the ILO that are aimed at re-skilling workers to assume jobs that are green, as well as build capacity to promote the “greening” of existing jobs.

The buoyant optimism of such big unions on this paradigm may be summed in the words of Sharan Burrow, current General Secretary of ITUC: “We can create 48 million green and decent jobs over five years in just 12 countries. Imagine what we can do in 24 countries, imagine in 50 countries, how many hundreds of millions of jobs that would create.”[9]  

Some action-oriented resolutions have also been set by other trade union centers in developing countries, such as the Indian unions under the International Metalworkers’ Federation (IMF), which claims to be 1-million strong. In a workshop on climate change last March in New Delhi, the IMF in India made the decision to create a new alliance that will “seek to partner with industry and government to build the skills necessary to underpin a green economy”, among other industrial goals.

Declared Rob Johnston, Executive Director of IMF at the alliance’s launching: "The creation of this Alliance means that the Indian Trade Unions are shaping the policy debate. This initiative sets out a vision of a modern dynamic India, the question is if Government and Industry share it."[10]

The readiness of these trade union centers to accept the concepts of Green and Decent Jobs in the context of a Green economy is understandable, given that they have had a long history of working with ILO and other intergovernmental insitutions under the UN system. But their unqualified endorsement of the green paradigm itself is not matched by a similar enthusiasm for assessing the “decency” of jobs that might possibly be created. It also ironic that unlike the UNEP Green Jobs Initiative, global unions like ITUC and IMF do not give a cautionary note to the labor sector on Green Job’s dark legacy of obscuring informalization and a host of other labor rights violations.

Of even more fundamental concern is the veiled message being given by these institutionalized trade unions – that the primary task of the sector at large is to retool its skills for the eventuality of Green Jobs gaining ground in major industries and on a global scale. If followed, this response will reduce trade unionism to being a slavish handmaiden of neoliberal globalization and its ever-changing configurations, rather than being its staunchest critic and oppositor.

Decent Work and Beyond

The green labor paradigm as it has been formulated by the UN system artificially conflates the two distinct global problems of unemployment and climate change, and arrives at a solution that will benefit only big business in the short term while obscuring labor’s long-term demands. As it is, packaging Green Jobs with Decent Work does not even begin to look at labor sector’s more fundamental problems such as low falling wages and work flexibilization, however much its promoters use every trick in the book to make the concept more comforting to the masses of unemployed.

Promoting Green Jobs is a poor excuse for not facing up to the reality of neoliberal globalization’s bankruptcy, and telling the labor sector to sit out the crisis and wait for big capital to save them from the mess that it has created. Labor rights advocates should not be deceived by its fine-sounding mantras and lose their focus on the root causes of the capitalist crisis and the real solutions at hand to address it in the long-term.

It is also the height of idealism and naivete for Green Jobs advocates to presume that neoliberal globalization can be made to serve as the socio-economic shell for the kind of systemic shift in “production and consumption” that they seek. Historically speaking, a different type of resource ownership is suited to this aspiration, one that is not profit-driven and is centered on public interest, especially on the welfare of working people.

Workers’ Movement, not Green Jobs

It would be the height of folly for the labor sector to swallow the Green Jobs mantra in any significant way, and to believe in the deception that there will be a massive, altruistic shift by big business towards genuinely sustainable development in the near or even distant future. One need only to look at the result of the Rio+20 summit this year to see that big capital and governments that support them do not care an iota about the fate of the Planet nor of Decent Work, any more than Nike is a supporter of trade unionism in its supply-chain.

What the labor sector needs to do first and foremost is expose the concepts of Green Jobs and Green Economy as cover-up tools for neoliberal globalization, designed to conceal its culpability in bringing about runaway unemployment and global warming, as well as the worst economic crisis so far in the history of capitalism. It is a green paint-job on the rusty hulk of global capitalism which must be stripped away by the workers’ movement to show its moribundity, and in the process of educating the whole labor sector on the urgency of asserting real alternatives to world capitalism’s multiple crises.

Rather than blindly subscribing to UN-promoted cure-alls for all the world’s ills, the labor sector should rely on its self-organized strength and build a worker’s movement that is able to lead people’s advocacies for thoroughgoing social change. It must raise its overall capacity to bring about a society that is premised on people’s ownership of crucial productive resources, and promotes coherent policies for a fundamental shift to sustainable development. By then, Decent Work will no longer be a mere slogan that is conveniently appended to neoliberal panaceas, but a concrete and all-pervasive social reality.***

Endnotes:

1  UNEP/ILO/ITUC, “Green Jobs: Towards Sustainable Work in a Low Carbon World,” p 5, United Nations Office. Nairobi, 2008. (accessed in http://www.unep.org/labour_environment/PDFs/Greenjobs/UNEP-Green-Jobs-Towards-Sustainable-Summary.pdf)

2  See http://www.ilo.org/global/about-the-ilo/decent-work-agenda/lang--en/index.htm

3  Accessed in http://www.slideshare.net/Anochi/090327-employmentpublicaidrenewable

4  See http://wallstreetsectorselector.com/2012/11/stalling-in-spain/

5  See http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/07/the-elusive-green-economy/307554/

6  See http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0611/56759.html

7  See http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/19/us/19bcgreen.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

8  See http://www.beaconhill.org/BHIStudies/GreenJobs09/BHIGreen_Collar_Job_Critique090625.pdf

9  ITUC, 2012. “Growing Green and Decent Jobs”, 2. Brussels: ITUC. (accessed in http://www.ituc-csi.org/IMG/pdf/ituc_green_jobs_summary_en_final.pdf)

10  See http://www.imfmetal.org/index.cfm?c=29216&l=2

References

United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP). 2008

Green Jobs: Towards Sustainable Work in a Low Carbon World. Accessed on 15 October 2011 inhttp://www.unep.org/labour_environment/PDFs/Greenjobs/UNEP-Green-Jobs-Towards-Sustainable-Summary.pdf

International Labour Organisation (ILO). 1996-2012

Decent Work Agenda: Decent Jobs For All. Accessed on 18 October 2012 inhttp://www.ilo.org/global/about-the-ilo/decent-work-agenda/lang--en/index.htm

Alvarez-Calzada, Gabriel. Universidad Rey Juan Carlos. 2010

Study of the Effects on Employment of Public Aid to Renewable Resources. Accessed on 20 October 2012 in http://www.slideshare.net/Anochi/090327-employmentpublicaidrenewable

Burke, John. Wall Street Sector Selector.2012

Stalling in Spain: Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy of Spain has not yet requested help from the European Central Bank. Accessed on 20 October 2012 in http://wallstreetsectorselector.com/2012/11/stalling-in-spain/

Green, Joshua. The Atlantic. 2009

The Elusive Green Economy. Accessed on 21 October 2012 inhttp://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/07/the-elusive-green-economy/307554/

Samuelsohn, Darren. Politico.  2011

Green Jobs Success Eludes Obama. Accessed on 25 October 2012 inhttp://www.politico.com/news/stories/0611/56759.html

Glantz, Aaron. The New York Times. 2011

Number of Green Jobs Fails to Live Up to Promises. Accessed on 25 October 2012 inhttp://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/19/us/19bcgreen.html?pagewanted=all&_r=2&

Tuerck, D., B. Powell and P. Bachman. The Beacon Hill Institute (BHI). 2009 

“Green Collar” Job Creation: A Critical Analysis. Accessed on 27 October 2012 inhttp://www.beaconhill.org/BHIStudies/GreenJobs09/BHIGreen_Collar_Job_Critique090625.pdf

International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC). 2012

Growing Green and Decent Jobs. Accessed on 28 October 2012 in http://www.ituc-csi.org/IMG/pdf/ituc_green_jobs_summary_en_final.pdf

Johnston, Rob. International Metalworkers’ Federation (IMF). 2012

Innovative Approach to Green Jobs Taken by India’s Unions. Accessed on 29 October 2012 inhttp://www.imfmetal.org/index.cfm?c=29216&l=2