Can unions bargain their way to climate wins?

Yes, but only if you subscribe.

Hello, and welcome to Work Climate! I’m David, and apparently I’m still interested in writing these posts while back in school with a million things going on. To that end, this will be even less professional than usual, a haphazard collection of what I want to learn more about at the intersection of organized labor and the climate movement. If you know more about any of this, please LMK! I’m at creminsdavid@gmail.com/you probably know me.

Okay, so for a minute I thought I was cute in referring to this as a “hot” labor summer, until it turned out that obvious dual entendre has occurred to everyone, including the good folks at The Polycrisis newsletter, a recent favorite of mine (thanks, Mo). This week for Polycrisis, Kate Mackenzie and Tim Sahay surveyed climate struggles unions have had a say in recently. Most prominently in recent news, Shawn Fain and the reinvigorated United Auto Workers scored a huge — and unexpected — win by forcing General Motors to include workers at electric vehicle (EV) battery plants in the contract they are currently bargaining for while on strike. This is great for those employees, and a powerful indicator that “good, high-paying, union jobs” (as old Joe is so fond of repeating) can be a part of our rapid transition to a green economy.

More positive news on that front: Recent reporting from Heatmap — another excellent source for all sorts of climate news — pushes back against the Republican narrative that EV manufacturing will require fewer workers. (This point came up in a class I’m in yesterday, so let’s call this doing my reading).

Still, I don’t want to paint too rosy a picture; there are real “blue x green” tensions throughout the country, especially as some of the strongest unions represent workers in polluting industries. Can there be a just transition without screwing those workers over, if indeed it turns out that jobs in renewable energy installation and maintenance are fewer and less well compensated? (Then again, climate legislation from the Biden administration already is creating loads of new jobs). In addition, there’s at least some evidence that unions can present roadblocks to the efficacious rollout of new power and transmission capacities. From Politico, on California happenings:

Clashes over whether wildfire workers should be paid more and whether solar panel installers should also be allowed to install batteries are pitting labor unions against wildfire prevention advocates and a segment of the renewable energy industry . . .

Another spat is pitting the state’s main electrical workers’ union against solar contractors, who are resisting a proposal to tighten standards for who can install battery storage systems alongside solar panels — a key part of the state’s push to decarbonize its grid while maintaining enough round-the-clock supplies to prevent blackouts.

There’s a broader debate here about how the left should grapple with tendencies in unions that don’t always align with progressive politics. I know the solution to this dilemma, of course, but it would take too much time to lay out here. For now, I’ll say that I think it’s a productive tension to live within, and that there are still more than enough positive labor developments to latch onto from an environmental perspective — let’s consider what UPS drivers were able to accomplish last month, after a brief detour.

Protecting workers, protecting the world?

This summer was hot. As Bill McKibben wrote recently in his Substack (only marginally more popular than my own), not only was every month this summer record-shattering, but even into the fall weird things are happening; September was the most anomalous month of the year so far, having basically become July. It’s gotten to the point where millions of people will need to be familiar with tips on how to remain safe in extreme heat – I like this guide from Grist (my final alt-media recommendation for today, I promise).

This makes the Writers Guild of America’s strike all the more impressive, as thousands of screenwriters spent hundreds of hours in the Los Angeles sun until they won a much improved contract. But what about when workers have no choice but to bear the brunt of brutal heat as a regular part of their job?

That is the reality faced by delivery drivers for UPS, 340,000 of whom are represented by Sean O’Brien and the Teamsters union (along with many drivers for Amazon and other delivery services). Dozens of drivers fall ill from heat stress every year, many of whom have to be hospitalized, and, sadly, at least two UPS worker have died from heat on the job in recent years — a 24 year-old in Pasadena, California in June 2022, and a 23 year-old in El Paso, Texas in August 2021. A very simple solution to this problem is to install air conditioning in trucks, especially in the cargo loads, where temperatures can soar well into the 100s. But, until the Teamsters went on strike in June, UPS refused to do so. Now, once UPS drivers’ new contract goes into effect next year, nearly 100,000 brown vans will be fitted with AC and heat shields. Yay!

This victory is far from the only of its kind — some day, I want to write about how Cesar Chavez’s historic agriculture union, United Farm Workers, fought for better enforcement of California’s outdoor heat safety standards. But still, the limits of striking for climate wins, vis-a-vis a broader sense of climate justice, should be acknowledged. Unions exist primarily to protect their members’ direct interests, which may include how hot it is inside a truck, but not whether that truck is burning diesel fuel. Will a reinvigorated labor movement be a critical part of the broader climate movement, then?

I know at least one group who think so: Ecosocialists. The basic theory, as I understand it, is that there will be a virtuous cycle of self-reinforcing labor and climate victories, as the working class grows more militant and fed up with both income inequality and climate catastrophe. Thus, as I saw when getting involved with various lefty enviro groups in Houston a few years ago, a growing number of activists view fighting for better labor protections as intertwined with — or even a prerequisite for — truly tackling climate change, which, of course, is spurred by capitalist greed, as surely as union busting is.

The results of my Covid year trying to organize in Texas were somewhat embarrassing pictures like this and a lot of learning about Gulf South politics.

I’m honestly not sure what to make of this claim. I, like most people in the U.S. — especially young people — am obviously very pro-union, and happy to be in a union now as a graduate student, and to be joining a workplace with a union next year. But I’m not convinced that dense unionization is either necessary or sufficient for further progress on reducing emissions, at least not in the same way it seems to be important for helping ameliorate the impacts of the climate crisis on workers. Let me know in the comments how wrong I am :) Thanks for reading, and I’ll scramble out another post soon!