Join us in support of the “End Polluter Welfare Act” that would cut $113 billion in subsidies to the coal, oil and gas lobby over the next ten years.

Go to 350.org to sign the petition

Or click here to join Senator Sanders by becoming a citizen sponsor of the bill

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How many lobbyists does it take to defend billions in subsidies for one of the most profitable industries in the world? 786. That’s the size of the army that oil and gas companies maintain in Washington to strong-arm Congress into bankrolling an industry that is cutting jobs and literally fueling the climate crisis. This army is bigger than Congress itself, which has only 535 members.

Last year, Democrats on the House Natural Resources Committee decided to investigate Big Oil’s jobs claims — and it turns out the industry has gone on a firing spree in recent years. They discovered that despite generating $546 billion in profits between 2005 and 2010, ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, and BP reduced their U.S. workforce by 11,200 employees over that period.

In 2010 alone, the top five oil companies slashed their global workforce by 4,400 employees — the same year executives paid themselves nearly $220 million. But at least those working in the industry as a whole get paid high wages, right? Turns out that 40 percent of U.S oil-industry jobs consist of minimum-wage work at gas stations.

With job numbers like these, it is no wonder the fossil-fuel industry needs to spend millions ensuring they are not branded as “job killers.” As Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) said, “Oil companies that make record profits and then cut American jobs strain their own credibility when they claim to be huge job-creators.”

And it gets worse. In what must rank as one of the greatest boondoggles in history, Big Oil is leveraging its taxpayer subsidies to rake in profits that, in the words of The New York Times, are “being continuously recycled to win the support of pliable legislators [and] underwrite misleading advertising campaigns.”

There is also a bigger, far more insidious way that Big Oil is killing jobs and undermining our economy: The industry remains hell-bent on denying climate change and obstructing climate action.

But the planet appears to be running a campaign of its own to persuade Americans that the oil lobby is leading us ever closer to economic ruin. Over the last year alone, hurricanes, floods, and droughts have had a devastating effect on American jobs. After tornadoes hit the area around Tuscaloosa, Ala., in April of last year, more than 6,000 people applied for disaster-related unemployment benefits. In Vermont, the number of workers filing unemployment claims went from 731 before Hurricane Irene to 1,331 two weeks afterwards. For the U.S. economy as a whole, 2011 was a historic year for expensive weather-related disasters, costing taxpayers $52 billion.

Consider one of the centers of U.S. oil production: Louisiana. Economists have been studying the long-term economic effects of Hurricane Katrina [PDF] in hopes of modeling the risks for the rest of the nation’s coastal regions. They found that Katrina wiped out 129,000 jobs in the New Orleans region — about 19 percent. Three years later, in 2008, 47,000 of the jobs lost in Katrina had returned, but 82,000 had not — and that doesn’t even consider the tens of thousands of new jobs that likely would have been created had there been no Katrina.

Our nation is in desperate need of jobs. Instead of bankrolling an industry that is laying off workers and threatening our economic future, why not take the billions in subsidies going to oil companies and invest instead in a sector that both creates jobs and protects the planet? It will be money well spent: According to the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts–Amherst, investment in a green infrastructure program would create nearly four times as many jobs as an equal investment in oil and gas.

Big Oil has spent millions positioning itself as the ultimate job creator, while branding those of us pushing to end fossil-fuel subsidies as “job killers.” But we are the ones fighting to put people back to work and ensure that we have a sustainable economy for generations to come. The oil and gas industry may have an army of 786 lobbyists, but we tally in the hundreds of thousands. This is the year we are coming to take our money back, create jobs, and protect our planet.

Last December, Occupy Los Angeles proposed a General Strike on May 1 “for migrant rights, jobs for all, a moratorium on foreclosures, and peace – and to recognize housing, education and health care as human rights.” The idea has spread through the Occupy movement.  Occupy Wall Street in New York recently expressed solidarity with the proposal and called for “a day without the 99%, general strike, and more!” with “no work, no school, no housework, no shopping, take the streets!”  Reactions are ranging from enthusiastic support to outraged skepticism.  What form might such an action take, and what if anything might it achieve?

General Strikes and Mass Strikes

One thing is for sure: Such a May Day action is unlikely to be very much like the general strikes that have cropped up occasionally in US labor history in cities like Seattle, Oakland, and Stamford, Ct., or the ones that are a staple of political protest in Europe.  These are typically conducted by unions whose action is called for and coordinated by central labor councils or national labor federations.  But barely twelve percent of American workers are even members of unions, and American unions and their leaders risk management reprisals and even criminal charges for simply endorsing such a strike.

Most Occupy May Day advocates understand that a conventional general strike is not in the cards.  What they are advocating instead is a day in which members of the “99%” take whatever actions they can to withdraw from participation in the normal workings of the economic system — by not working if that is an option, but also by not shopping, not banking, and not engaging in other “normal” everyday activities, and by joining demonstrations, marches, disruptions, occupations, and other mass actions.

This is the pattern that was followed by the Oakland General Strike last November.  Those who wanted to and could – a small minority – didn’t go to work.  There was mass participation in rallies, marches, educational, and artistic events and a free lunch for all.  At the end of the day a march, combined with some walkouts, closed the Port of Oakland.     The mostly peaceful “general strike,” in contrast to later violent Oakland confrontations, won wide participation and support.

To understand what the significance of such an event might be, it helps to look at what Rosa Luxemburg called periods of “mass strike.”  These were not single events, but rather whole periods of intensified class conflict in which working people began to see and act on their common interests through a great variety of activities, including strikes, general strikes, occupations, and militant confrontations.

Such periods of mass strike have occurred repeatedly in US labor history.  For example:

• In 1877, in the midst of deep depression and a near-obliteration of trade unions, workers shut down the country’s dominant industry, the railroads, shut down most factories in dozens of cities, battled police and state militias, and only were suppressed when the US Army and other armed forces killed more than a hundred participants and onlookers.
• In the two years from 1884 to 1886, workers swelled the Knights of Labor ten-fold from 70,000 members to 700,000 members.  In 1886, more than half-a-million workers in scores of cities joined a May 1st strike for the eight-hour day. The movement was broken by a reign of terror that followed a police attack that is usually but perversely referred to as the “Haymarket Riot.”  May Day became a global labor holiday in honor of the “Haymarket Martyrs” who were tried by a judge so prejudiced against them that their execution has often been referred to as “judicial murder.”
• In 1937, hundreds of thousands of workers occupied their factories and other workplaces in “sitdown strikes” and housewives, students, and many other people applied the same tactic to address their own grievances.
• In 1970, in the midst of national upheavals around the Vietnam war, the civil rights movement, and a widespread youth revolt, postal workers, teamsters, and others took part in an unprecedented wave of wildcat strikes, while miners held a month-long political strike in West Virginia to successfully demand justice for victims of black lung disease.

Such periods of mass strike present what Rosa Luxemburg called “A perpetually moving and changing sea of phenomena.” Each is unique in its events and its unfolding.  But they are all marked by an expanding challenge to established authority, a widening solidarity among different groups of working people, and a growing assertion by workers of control over their own activity.

In periods of mass strike working people become increasingly aware of themselves as a group with a common situation, common problems, and common opponents.  They organize themselves in a great variety of ways.  They become aware of their capacity to act collectively.  They become aware of their potential power.  And they opt to act collectively.

However much it may chagrin organizers and radicals, it is not possible to call or instigate a mass strike.  It is something that must gestate in workplaces and communities (now including virtual communities).  But it is possible to nurture and influence the emergence of mass strikes through discussion and above all through exemplary action.  Provoking discussion and showing the possibilities of collective action is what Occupy Wall Street has done so well.  That is what its May Day action can potentially do.

What Occupy May Day Could Achieve

The Occupy May Day event is first of all a great chance for 99% to show itself, see itself, and express itself – to represent itself to itself and to others.  The kinds of plans that are being made by OWS in New York, with a wide variety of ways in which people are being invited to participate, can encourage multiple levels of sympathy, response, connection, and mobilization among the 99%.  The result can be a percolation of the ideas OWS has been promoting through workplaces, communities, and other milieus.

May Day can provide a teachable moment.  It is an opportunity for millions of people to contemplate the power that arises from collectively withdrawing cooperation and consent.  It can propagate the idea of self-organization, for example through general assemblies.  If it truly draws together a wide range of working people, ranging from the most impoverished to professionals, from urban to suburban to rural, and including African Americans, Latinos, whites, and immigrants, it can embody the ability of the 99% to act as a group.  It can demonstrate the idea of solidarity, for example by the movement as a whole supporting the needs of some particular groups.  And because May Day is a global working class holiday which will be celebrated all over the world, it can reveal a rarely seen vision of a global working class of which we are as individuals and as members of diverse groups are part.

Given these possibilities, what would constitute success for May Day?  Here are some examples of desirable outcomes:

• Reveal that there is a 99% movement that is far wider than the subset of its members who can confront the police and sleep in downtown parks.
• Encourage a large number of people who have not done so before to identify with and participate in some way with the “99% movement.”
• Project core issues of the 99% — like the list above from Occupy LA –into the pubic arena.
• Raise issues that are crucial for the future of the 99% — notably the climate crisis and the destruction of the Earth’s environment – that have not yet been recognized as part of the Occupy critique of financial institutions and corporate capitalism.
• Evoke self-organization in workplaces, for example general assemblies among workmates, on the job if possible, in the parking lot or another venue if not.
• Create a self-awareness of the global 99% — possible because May Day is celebrated globally.

Unions and May Day

American unions are bound by laws specifically designed to prevent them from taking part in strikes about issues outside their own workplace, such as sympathetic strikes and political strikes.  In most cases they are also banned from participating in strikes while they have a contract.  Unions that violate these prohibitions are subject to crushing fines and loss of bargaining rights.  Their leaders can be packed off to jail.  While unions have at times struck anyway, they are unlikely to do so for something like the May Day general strike until the level of class conflict has risen so high that workers are willing to face such consequences.

Historically, American unions have also opposed their members’ participation in strikes union officials have not authorized because they wished to exercise a monopoly of authority over their members’ collective action.  In labor movement parlance, such unauthorized actions were condemned as “dual unionism.”  US unions have often disciplined and sometimes supported the firing and blacklisting of workers who struck without official authorization.  As a result, unions have often deterred their members from participating in mass strike actions even when the rank and file wanted to.

The Occupy movement, however, should not be seen as a competitor to existing unions.  It is not about relations between a group of workers and their employer.  It does not engage or wish to engage in collective bargaining.  Although it supports the right of workers to organize themselves, it is not a union. It focuses on broader social issues.  It is a class movement of the 99%, not a labor or trade union movement.

Unions in New York and elsewhere are eager to participate in coalition actions with the Occupy movement – and they are planning to do so on May Day.  But to ask them to instruct their members to strike may be to ask them to commit institutional suicide.

One approach to this dilemma may be for unions to say they will abide by the law and not order their members to strike, but that as human beings and as people living under the US Constitution their members are not slaves and cannot be compelled to work against their will.   Where union members want to participate in May Day by not going to work, unions can say, we did not tell them to strike, but we do not have the right to force anyone to work against their will.  A historical precedent:  When Illinois miners repeatedly went on extended wildcat strikes and Mineworker leader Alexander Howat was commanded to order them back to work, he would simply reply that since he had not ordered the strikers out, he could not order them back.

Organized labor has to change, and activities like Occupy’s May Day can contribute to that change.  But they can do so at this point not by making impossible demands on union leaders but by inspiration, example, solidarity, and providing alternative experiences for union members.

Global Mass Strike

We are today in the midst of an unrecognized global mass strike – witness the mass upheavals reported in the news almost daily from countries around the world.  Wisconsin and Occupy Wall Street represent the first stirrings of American workers to join this global movement.  May Day 2012 will be a global event, and it presents an opportunity to create a new self-awareness of the global 99% and its ability to act collectively.

While the Occupy movement has focused on the issues of economic injustice, it is increasingly addressing another issue that is central to the well being of the 99% — indeed of all people – nationally and globally. In January a resolution passed by consensus at the Occupy Wall Street General Assembly stated, “We are at a dangerous tipping point in history.  The destruction of our planet and climate change are almost at a point of no return.”

While climate denialism is still rife in the US, the rest of the world recognizes the existential threat of catastrophic climate change and the necessity of converting the world’s economy to a climate-safe basis.  The labor movement in the rest of the world is committed to the economic transformation necessary to save the Earth’s climate.  That transformation can be the core of an emerging global program to create a secure economic and environmental future for all by putting the world’s people to work transforming the world’s economy to a low-pollution, climate-friendly, sustainable basis.

May Day has been an international labor holiday for more than a century.  But for millennia it has been a day for the celebration of nature.  This May Day can be an opportunity to draw the two together to represent the common global interest in creating work for all reconstructing the global economy to protect rather than destroy the Earth.

Occupy Wall Street’s original Declaration of the City of New York, in September, listed a litany of issues, from foreclosures and bailouts to outsourcing and cruelty to animals, but it barely mentioned the environment and was silent on global warming and climate change. A resolution passed by consensus at a General Assembly this past January more than rectified the omission. It states, “We are at a dangerous tipping point in history. The destruction of our planet and climate change are almost at a point of no return.” The resolution links climate destruction to the shift in political power that lies at the heart of Occupy: “We must reclaim our democracy to protect our planet.”

The General Assembly resolution calls for a month of action, starting March 24 and leading up to Earth Day on April 22, to draw the Occupy movements across the country and around the world further into the struggle to protect the climate. “Earth Month,” which will target all fossil and nonrenewable fuels, is being spearheaded by a group from OWS called 99forEarth. The resolution also calls for “connecting the dots between the 1% and the destruction of the planet.” At one end of the chain are specific depredations on specific environments: “Our mountains in Appalachia are blasted; our drinking water in the northeast [is] threatened by fracking; our American heartland is charted for an oil pipeline; and our forests in the northwest [are] targeted for further deforestation.” Connect the dots and you find that the corporate destruction of the earth’s climate has been “financed by the 1%” and that a “small group of polluting businesses” have “hijacked our political system for their benefit.”

As the Occupy movement evolves from a wave of encampments to new forms of a densely networked, virtual and face-to-face political community, its concern with climate change and environmental devastation is growing and converging with activism aimed more directly at the economic depredations of the 1 percent. That convergence may be crucial for the future of the Occupy movement, and of the planet. Climate and environment fit naturally into the Occupy story. The Occupy movement is about reclaiming a future for people who have had their life chances rubbished by three decades of global neoliberalism and austerity. But it’s not just about paycheck economics; the destruction of the climate and environment is an integral part of the neoliberal world order. The same corporations, banks and financial institutions that destroyed the economy are destroying the global environment. The struggle to preserve the earth and its atmosphere is, by necessity, a struggle against those forces. 

Conveying this story to the American people is difficult because of the persistence of climate change denial. But it is a story that resonates with what OWS has already revealed. Climate denial and destruction become easier to understand—and more enraging—when grasped not as part of some obscure scientific debate but as weapons for the aggrandizement of energy corporations and financial institutions at the expense of the rest of us.

The climate crisis is a global crisis, which will require global cooperation to solve. Without international agreement, if one country restricts corporate carbon pollution, global corporations will seek to move their production elsewhere. In a global economy, countries are likely to seek economic advantage by allowing higher levels of pollution. Fortunately, both Occupy and the climate protection movement are highly hooked up globally—the protests that linked Occupy and other economic justice movements on October 15 reached an estimated 1,500 cities worldwide, and 350.org has initiated globally coordinated demonstrations in every country except North Korea.

An economy driven to enrich the 1 percent cannot meet the needs of the 99 percent for a secure, sustainable future. We need a strategy to counter the threats to economic security and climate security by putting people to work to create a low-pollution, climate-friendly, sustainable global economy—what is sometimes described as a Global Green New Deal. It will require democratizing our economy so that we can direct our labor and our investment to sustainably meeting the needs of all people. It will require not just different policies, or even different structures, but a global society mobilized for change. A Global Green New Deal will ensure jobs and livelihoods for all, because it will take all the work—and all the creativity—we can muster.

These are tough times to be a construction worker in America. While other sectors of the economy are showing signs of life, the unemployment rate in the construction industry is getting worse, not better - rising from 13% to 16% in January.

It is against this backdrop that the titanic struggle over the Keystone XL pipleline is being waged. On one side are unions such as the Laborers International Union of North America and the United Association of Plumbers & Pipefitters, who support the pipeline because they believe that it will create thousands of high-wage jobs for their members. On the other side are environmentalists and others who believe the pipeline will hasten the climate crisis, threaten our water supplies and increase oil prices.

The fallout from the conflict has been significant. When six labor unions joined the Sierra Club and other environmental groups in support of President Obama’s decision to oppose the permit last month, LIUNA President Terry O’Sullivan accused the coalition as being “job killers,” and withdrew his union from the BlueGreen Alliance.

Inside Washington, this divide over Keystone appears insurmountable — especially since the  “jobs vs. environment” debate has been played out repeatedly for decades. But outside of Washington, the very same unions that support the pipeline are down in the trenches fighting for a transition to a green economy.

LIUNA, for example, has created OptiHome, an alliance of skilled workers and certified contractors working in the energy efficiency sector. The program includes training and job placement, and has been effective at bringing a new generation of workers into the green economy. One of these workers is Tahlia Williams, a 30-year-old single mom had been interested in construction work for a long time but saw it as “man’s work” and was unsure how to break into the industry. But after Tahlia completed LIUNA’s weatherization training program she was quickly hired as an energy efficiency mechanic by the Community Environmental Center – the largest residential weatherization contractor in New York City. According to Tahlia, she is “proud to be working to protect our environment, while at the same time helping fellow residents save money on their energy bills and enjoy a more comfortable home. This is about a better future for my family, for New York homeowners, and for everyone!”

LIUNA’s green jobs agenda has also helped grow the union. They negotiated a card check agreement with Conservation Services Group, a company which conducts nearly a half million home energy assessments annually for utilities and energy efficiency organizations nationwide, reaching more than 2 million homes in the last 25 years. And LIUNA recently chartered a green local designed for workers specializing in weatherization and other green jobs. Green Jobs Local 58’s first round of recruits graduated from LIUNA’s training center this month and are earning $14 an hour with benefits. To fund the program, LIUNA joined forces with local environmentalists to pass the New York Green Jobs Financing Law that provides funding for residential weatherization work.

Another building trades union that is riding the green wave is the United Association of Plumbers & Pipefitters. UA created the nation’s first union “sustainability office” in the country, which is developing three new “green” craft-specific certifications: Green Plumbing/Pipefitting, Green Sprinkler Fitting, and Green Heating, Ventilation, Air Conditioning and Refrigeration (HVACR). UA has also been driving a “Green Systems Training Trailer” around the country to educate members and the general public about the importance of energy efficiency.

So despite their support for the Keystone pipeline, on the ground in cities and towns around the country building trades unions are at the cutting edge of green economic development. These green success stories show that the green jobs path for LIUNA and other construction unions is not a “pie-in-the-sky” promise — these jobs are shovel-ready and offer a secure future for their members. It is also significant that some of these unions have stepped out in front at the international level by joining environmentalists around the globe fighting to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. LIUNA, for example, was one of three unions in the U.S. to support science-based targets and timelines for carbon reduction at the 2009 climate summit in Copenhagen.

But here is the problem: For environmentalists, the Keystone battle has called into question unions’ commitment to addressing climate change, which is the primary rational for green jobs and energy efficiency programs. Some unions are trying to play both sides of the fence: siding with fossil fuel companies and Republicans for new coal plants, pipelines and refineries; while simultaneously teaming up with environmentalists for green jobs programs. Keystone has laid bare this contradiction.

The Keystone campaign has also put a strain on labor’s relationship with Occupy — a movement seen by unions as a powerful new ally. Indeed, LIUNA’s own homepage features a statement that “LIUNA Backs Occupy Wall Street Movement. In November the Building Trades launched the Jobsforthe99.com website and began running ads in newspapers and radio along the pipeline route, using the rhetoric of Occupy and the 99 percent to push for construction of the Keystone XL pipeline. In response, the main governing body of Occupy in New York issued a statement of disavowal: “The leadership of the unions behind this campaign have made a public alliance with the oil industry and Tea Party funders…We must dissociate from this attempt at co-optation by the 1% to preserve our movement as the 99%.”

The last decades have shown that partnering with the right wing and corporations has been a devil’s bargain for workers, whereby companies use unions to push for environmental deregulation and subsidies for carbon-intensive projects, while simultaneously funding “right-to-work” and other anti-union campaigns. This unholy alliance has crippled unions’ ability to organize workers and laid the foundation for a private sector unionization rate of less than seven percent.

Unions and environmentalists agree on most issues - ranging from living wages and health care to corporate greed and green job creation –  and there is consensus that defeating the right wing agenda requires solidarity of the 99%. With this in mind, it’s time for labor and environmentalists to sit down and hammer out plan for putting union members to work rebuilding our country and protecting the planet. None of us can build a sustainable future alone.

This is a chance for labor, environment, sustainability, and other allied groups and activists to work together to plan local actions.

Visit the website for the actions: www.disruptdirtypower.org

DistruptDirtyPower.org is a collaboration between Occupy Wall Street, allied organizations and many others who are deeply concerned with the political and financial corruption that is funding and enabling the destruction of our environment.

99 > Dirty Power connects the dots between big banks on Wall Street, big polluters and the politicians who profit from both.

Oil giants admit that climate change is happening and that humans are causing it. BP calls climate change, “a major global challenge - one that will require the efforts of governments, industry and individuals.” According to ExxonMobil, “Rising greenhouse gas emissions pose significant risks to society and ecosystems…Stabilization poses a significant challenge, especially for CO2, the most significant of the GHGs emitted by human activities.”

Yet they keep digging for oil and coal, unearthing the fossil fuels that have already sent us over safe upper limit of CO2 in our atmosphere. Why? Because they’re making billions doing it.

Big Banks like Bank of America, Chase, Citigroup, HSBC and Wells Fargo are the biggest investors in these companies’ projects. The same banks that foreclosed on millions of Americans’ homes are busy foreclosing on Earth. They gladly underwrite anything that smells like money no matter how terrible the cost to the rest of us, our children and our planet’s future.

We have asked our politicians to write and enforce new energy legislation that will stop the extraction and burning of fossil fuels in order to prevent rapid climate change. But those very same politicians are in the pockets of both the Big Polluters and the Big Banks who lobby against real climate legislation.

By investing in these banks, we are investing directly in dirty power.
Enough is enough. We will not stand by and watch while the oil giants, their too big to fail funders, and their bought and paid for politicians ruin the climate we depend on. It’s time for us to take matters into our own hands.

On March 24 stage two of Move Your Money begins - and this time, Americans will be taking action and closing their accounts at the Big Banks because our future depends on it.

For one month leading up to Earth Day on April 22, we are calling on all Americans to move your money into community banks and credit unions from Big Banks like Bank of America, Chase, Citi, HSBC, Wells Fargo etc. This doesn’t mean transferring personal accounts alone: it means going into your communities and having your schools, community centers, local businesses and local government agencies move their money too. We all need to stop investing in dirty power and to pull the plug on the banks that do.

We are the 99%. We have power, vastly greater power than the companies and banks whose oil and coal and gas profits have blinded them to the reality we all face if we continue burning fossil fuels. There is no other option. We will defend ourselves and our future. We will put our money where our mouths are: by saying No to Big Polluters, No to Big Banks, No to Profiteering Politicians.

WHAT: Disrupt Dirty Power!

WHEN:
March 24: Disrupt Dirty Power Global Direct Action
March 24 - April 22: Move Your Money 2.0 - A month-long campaign to disrupt dirty power as we draw the connections between Big Banks, Big Polluters and the Politicians who Profit from both.

WHERE: Nationally coordinated actions by Occupy groups and ally organizations.

WHAT NOW?: Post your action!

What is Occupy Wall Street?
“Occupy Wall Street is a leaderless resistance movement with people of manycolors, genders and political persuasions. OWS is fighting for economic justice in the face of neoliberal economic practices, the crimes of Wall Street, and a government controlled by monied interests. #OWS is the 99% organizing to end the tyranny of the 1%. OWS uses the revolutionary Arab Spring tactics to achieve our ends and encourages the use of nonviolence to maximize the safety of all participants. The #occupy movement empowers real people to create real change from the bottom up.”

SIGN THE PETITION HERE!

Oil companies and other pipeline advocates argued that the nation must choose between jobs and the environment. But in an era of climate crisis, this is a false choice: there will be no jobs on a dead planet. Building the Keystone pipeline will throw open the spigot to the Tar Sands in Canada, considered the dirtiest oil on the planet, and drive us ever closer to climate catastrophe.

Hurricanes, floods, and droughts are already having a devastating effect on American jobs, and that is nothing compared to what will happen in the future if Tar Sands carbon and the other greenhouse gasses that cause climate change are not rapidly reduced. The way to solve the economic catastrophe facing our working people is to go to work solving our climate catastrophe.

But at the same time, workers need jobs now. That’s why it is urgent that we begin investing in a new sustainable economy that puts people to work mitigating climate change. Rather than polluting pipelines, we need to create ‘climate jobs’ that retrofit buildings, green our eroding water and transportation systems, and build a new alternative infrastructure for the future.

So we are asking LNS members to join the 24-hour blitz to gather 500,000 signatures by noon on Tuesday. LNS and other pipeline opponents are rapidly assembling an online army of Davids to take on Big Oil’s Goliath. Bloggers are lining up to help spread the word. Celebrities are preparing to tweet up a storm. Activists in DC are preparing to deliver box after box of signatures to the Senate on Tuesday morning.

President Obama did the right thing when he stood up to Big Oil and stopped Keystone XL. Now it’s time for the Senate to follow his lead. The sustainability movement might not win this round of the Keystone fight — Big Oil has more money than God, after all. But one thing’s for certain: if any Senator thought that the movement would roll over and stop fighting Keystone XL, they’ve got another thing coming.

List of Partners
Credo Mobile, 350.org, Friends of the Earth, Natural Resources Defense Council, Moveon, League of Conservation Voters, CCAN, Solar Mosaic, Environmental Action, Center for Biological Diversity, Labor Network for Sustainability, Oil Change, Bold Nebraska, Rainforest Action Network, US Climate Action Network, Patagonia, Indigenous Environmental Network, Public Citizen, Green for All, Sierra Club, Rebuild the Dream, Energy Action Coalition

Opponents of the Keystone XL pipeline are taking a well-deserved victory lap. The Obama administration’s decision to reject TransCanada’s pipeline proposal — at least for now — represents an historic win for the environmental movement, and reveals the potency of the emerging alignment between the environmental, anti-corporate, Occupy, and other movements.

Real strides were also made to bridge the divide between environmental groups and unions. While Republicans relentlessly attacked environmentalists as “job killers,” groups like 350.org, Sierra Club, and NRDC reached out to unions early and often, and as a result, six labor unions came out in support of President Obama’s decision to oppose the permit. Not since the “Battle in Seattle” have we seen such diverse and robust coalitions.

But the Keystone campaign also exposed the perennial Achilles’ heel of those who are fighting against climate change: We are often painted by our opponents and perceived by the public as caring more about the environment than about jobs. In a press release titled “U.S. Chamber Calls Politically-Charged Decision to Deny Keystone a Job Killer,” the Chamber of Commerce said President Obama’s denial of the KXL permit was “sacrificing tens of thousands of good-paying American jobs in the short term, and many more than that in the long term.” And its messaging worked, with the media repeating the jobs vs. environment frame again and again. NPR’s headline was typical of many: “Pipeline Decision Pits Jobs Against Environment.”

Where should those proposals come from? As the six labor unions that opposed the KXL pipeline permit pointed out, one source can be the jobs programs that Republican politicians are currently blocking in Congress, like the Restore the American Dream for the 99% Act, which would boost employment by almost 2.3 million jobs in 2012 and almost 3.1 million jobs in 2013; the extension of the Highway Trust Fund, which would create hundreds of thousands of jobs and provide for critical infrastructure repair; and initiatives to fund jobs for teachers, firefighters, and police. It’s time for the environmental movement to put the spotlight on the way climate-denying politicians are crying crocodile tears over a few hundred or thousand jobs while blocking millions of jobs unemployed American workers could be hired to do right now.

If we fail to become the voice for both the planet and workers, our movement risks losing the support of increasing numbers of workers, unions, and their political allies. The fossil-fuel industry and its allies know that working families are likely to prioritize bread-and-butter issues over environmental protection, especially in recessionary times. Right-wing forces are counting on the “job killing” message to drive ordinary Americans into the arms of the climate-denying Republican Party. Together, environmental and labor movements can defeat them by presenting a better jobs program to American workers — one that addresses the climate and economic crises at the same time.

Why in the world were protesters occupying the Wisconsin statehouse wearing “King Tut” headdresses?  And why were orders for pizza coming into Madison, Wisconsin from Cairo, Egypt?

The story begins around 1500 BC, when Egyptian workers at Deir El-Medina hadn’t been paid for three weeks by their notoriously corrupt supervisors.  They stopped work and walked out.  It may be history’s first recorded strike.

Fast-forward thirty-five hundred or so years to the very end of 2006 AD.  Another group of Egyptian workers, angered at the denial of their promised year-end bonus and the corruption of their managers, quit work and shut down their workplaces.  The strike by Mahala El-Kobra textile workers startled the Egyptian people, and apparently the government and the government-owned employer as well.

The strike started with night-shift workers who were enraged at the company’s decision not to pay a bonus that had been promised by Egypt’s Prime Minister Ahem Nazif.  The next day they were joined by the day shift, who occupied the plant and a nearby street.  Government security forces surrounded the area and cut off electricity to the plant.  Eventually 27,000 workers were involved, including 4,000 women, who said they were “standing up for their children.”

After five days, the government retreated and offered to restore the bonuses.  An employee reported that on return to work, “The cashiers were sitting to greet the workers” with their back pay “the minute they walked into work.”

In 2006 I was helping start a tiny NGO called Global Labor Strategies.  We called it a “bridge building” organization; our purpose was to help workers and their allies connect across the borders of an every more globalizing world.  While the strike was virtually unreported in the US media, I discovered information about it on the web and wrote it up for the GLS blog.

A couple of years later there was another strike in Mahalla.  This time a small organization of student and youth activists formed to support the strikers.  They set up a Facebook page and called a demonstration on April 6.  Thereafter they began referring to themselves as the April 6 movement.  After the strike was over they continued their social networking site with lively debates on freedom of speech, government nepotism, and economic stagnation.  By 2010 they had 70,000 Facebook friends.

On December 17, 2010, an impoverished Tunisian fruit seller named Mohamed Bouazizi, after repeated police harassment, doused himself with kerosene and set himself on fire in a city 190 miles south of Tunis to protest the economic and political conditions he and his country were subjected to.  Within a week, seven other Tunisians had done the same.  What seemed like futile acts of despair inspired massive protests.  With hundreds of thousands of protesters refusing to let business as usual go on, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, Tunisia’s ruler for a quarter of a century, was forced to flee and a transitional government made preparations to hold elections under a new, democratic constitution.

Egyptians watched the unfolding events in Tunisia with fascination.  They too faced grinding poverty and a tyrannical government supported from abroad that used violence and torture to repress opposition while looting billions of dollars by means of corruption.  A few small groups, including the April 6 movement, began calling for Egypt to undergo a democratization like that in Tunisia.  They used Facebook and other new social media to get out the word.  They started holding street meetings in Cairo neighborhoods.  To their surprise, large numbers came out in the poor neighborhoods and supported the idea of an “Egyptian Tunisia.”  They began holding daily demonstrations in Cairo’s central Tahrir Square (Arabic for “Liberation Square”) calling for Hosni Mubarak, Egypt’s autocratic president for thirty years, to go.

Over the course of two weeks the demonstrations swelled.  Men and women, Sunni, Shia, and Christian marched side by side.  Initially the established opposition parties and organizations stayed aloof from the protests, but gradually they began to join in.  Meanwhile the hated security police launched repeated attacks on the demonstrators.  The Army began to roll into Liberation Square with its troops and tanks and its airplanes flying overhead.  Then suddenly the police withdrew and the army high command issued a statement that it would not fire on the protesters.

The United States, which had provided Mubarak’s regime with more than sixty billion dollars over the previous thirty years and maintained a close relationship with Mubarak and the Egyptian military, expressed strong support for Mubarak. But as the number of demonstrators multiplied, the US began to distance itself from the regime.  Within a week, US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton was declaring, “Mubarak must go.”

Meanwhile, the protests continued to swell, not only in Cairo but throughout the country.  The army troops fraternized with the demonstrators; a young woman told reporters that demonstrators in Liberation Square were arranging a football match with the soldiers.  As the police disappeared from the streets, people in Cairo neighborhoods began organizing their own neighborhood watches.  Workers throughout the country began to conduct strikes, some seeking to establish unions and win wage increases, others calling for the removal of the regime.

On February 1, 2011 a “Million Man March” indeed produced something like a million protesters in Liberation Square calling on Mubarak to leave.  It was widely reported that he was about to do so.  Instead, he went on television and gave a speech making a few concessions but pledging that he would fill out his term and that he would “die on Egyptian soil.”  Commentators observed that he should be careful what he said.

The protestors felt betrayed; a wave of rage pervaded the entire country. Within six hours, the senior officers of the army announced that Mubarak had “resigned” and that an officer’s council had taken power.  They also announced that they would establish a transitional government that would establish a new democratic constitution and hold democratic elections.  Large demonstrations continued in Liberation Square and throughout the country insisting that they indeed do so.

Early on in the Egyptian demonstrations, I saw a young woman being pressured by a TV journalist to name those she considered leaders.  After repeatedly trying to explain that people were acting on their own, finally in exasperation she pointed around the crowd and said, “Right now it looks like we have half-a-million leaders.”  Her words reminded me of the group of “Wobblies” – members of the Industrial Workers of the World union — nearly a century before:  Asked who their leaders were, they replied, “We’ve got no leaders — we’re all leaders.”

To many people the events in Egypt revealed a courage, a solidarity, an activism, and an intelligence that seemed to violate their very sense of what is possible.  Many commentators on the scene said things like, “These are not the Egyptians I know,” and “This is a new Egypt.”  At Graterford prison outside Philadelphia, where many of the inmates were glued to the television watching scenes of rebellion in Egypt, a life prisoner named Charles Coley came up to a friend of mine in the hall and summed up a response shared by many around the world: “I just didn’t know that people had it in them.”

The Egyptian upheaval electrified the entire Middle East.  Popular upheavals rocked Bahrain, Morocco, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Syria.  Demonstrations in Jordan and Yemen led to the firing and replacement of the entire cabinet.  Demonstrations in Libya turned into civil war followed by NATO and Arab League military intervention.  Comparing them to the upheavals that brought the overthrow of Communist regimes in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and elsewhere in Eastern Europe, commentators began referring to these events as the “Arab Spring.”

But the impact of events in the Middle East didn’t stop at the boundaries of the region.  Students planning anti-government actions in London called for turning Trafalgar Square into a British Tahrir Square; nearly half a million people turned out for the demonstration protesting public spending cuts.#  As faculty, staff, and fifteen thousand demonstrators backed Puerto Rican students protesting the military occupation of their campus and the repression of freedom of speech and assembly, newscasters compared them to the protestors in Tahrir Square; US Congressman Luis V. Gutierrez said it reflected “a lesson the people of Egypt taught the world last week: Brutal laws and secret meetings and armed enforcers don’t extinguish the flame of justice – they are the spark that makes it burn brighter.”#  At a demonstration in Mexico City, Martin Esparza, Secretary General of the Mexican Electrical Workers Union, called for a peaceful civilian insurgency, taking its example from the events in Egypt.#

The ripples even reached the United States.  At the same time as the Egyptian upheaval, a string of right-wing state governors were taking office with the backing of the “Tea Party” and wealthy energy company executives.  In Ohio, Indiana, and many other states they seized on budget crises to pass laws restricting or completely eliminating the right of public employees to be represented by unions.

The epicenter of the struggle was Wisconsin, where newly-elected governor Scott Walker introduced legislation to abolish collective bargaining for teachers, social workers, and most other government employees.  Students and workers began holding demonstrations in the state capitol rotunda in Madison to protest the new anti-labor laws.  First there were hundreds, then thousands.  Eventually more than 100,000 people were occupying the building.  It represented the largest demonstration in Wisconsin at least since the Vietnam war.

According to a news report, “Many protestors appeared to be taking inspiration from the recent democratic uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia, with some even wearing King Tut hats.”#  Orders for pizza for the demonstrators poured in from around the world — including some from Cairo.  And, parodying a famous pop song titled Walk Like an Egyptian, bumper stickers appeared reading “March Like an Egyptian.”

The events in Wisconsin were as unanticipated as those in Egypt.  Yet from 1500 BC to today, history shows that nothing is as predictable as unpredictable popular upheavals.

What does the future hold for the relationship between environmentalism and organized labor? Judging from the highly-publicized controversy over the Keystone XL pipeline, America might appear to be entering a new era of conflict over environmental protection versus jobs. But in a recent speech to the UN Investor Summit on Climate Risk, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka opens the way for expanded labor-environment cooperation around climate protection. Trumka argues that addressing the climate crisis is the way to address the jobs crisis. He calls for a new dialogue between labor and environmental movements based on that frame. Yet he also repeats some of the arguments and allegations that have fuelled labor-environmental conflict in the past. How should labor activists who care about climate and environmental advocates who care about workers respond?

The climate threat
President Trumka begins with a forthright statement of the climate threat. “Scientists tell us we are headed ever more swiftly toward irreversible climate change - with catastrophic consequences for human civilization.” And far from being a threat only in a distant future, “Climate change is happening now.” That demands action: “The carbon emissions from that coal, and from oil and natural gas, and agriculture and so much other human activity - causes global warming, and we have to act to cut those emissions, and act now.”

While the AFL-CIO has gradually accepted the reality of man-made global warming, this represents a far more forceful statement of the severity of the problem and the urgency of action. However, the AFL-CIO still has not endorsed even the minimal targets for carbon reduction proposed by the world’s leading body of climate scientists, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), let alone the reduction of carbon in the atmosphere to 350 parts per million that America’s leading climate scientist, James Hansen, says is necessary to prevent those “catastrophic consequences for human civilization.” Having recognized the reality of the threat, it’s time for the AFL-CIO to endorse the cuts in carbon necessary to forestall them.

Climate jobs
President Trumka poses the question whether the climate threat is something we should disregard in the face of our global economic problems. Again his position is forthright: “Addressing climate risk is not a distraction” from solving our economic problems. Indeed, it is critical to the solution. “Every factory and power plant, every home and office, every rail line and highway, every vehicle, locomotive and plane, every school and hospital, must be modernized, upgraded, renovated or replaced with something cleaner, more efficient, less wasteful.” That means “retooling our world.” And that means there is plenty of work to be done. “If we are going to rebuild, restore, modernize or replace everything we inherited in just 30 years” we need “the skill and effort of all of us.”

Trumka recognizes that this will not happen simply through current market forces. “By themselves, capital markets will not properly incorporate climate risk and reward into pricing investment opportunities.” Investors need “government policies to make sure that critical investments get made - investments in building retrofits, in high speed rail and the smart grid, in carbon capture and sequestration.”

Trumka does not discuss what kind of economic tools may be required. Such a discussion should certainly be part of any proposed labor-environmental dialogue.

While “putting a price on carbon” is necessary, both labor and environmental movements need to recognize that it is not likely to be adequate. Trumka observes that “not since World War II” have Americans “faced an equivalent national challenge.” But that challenge was not met by letting companies that failed to shift to war production to buy “permits” that exempted them from such responsibilities. It was met by a combination of economic planning, public investment, and national resource allocation. The government contracted with corporations to produce for wartime needs or met them itself; nonessential production was curtailed; and resources were allocated to the war effort. The result was the greatest investment in production the world had ever seen and the creation of millions of jobs. That is the kind and scale of effort that will be necessary for “retooling our world.”

Trumka says “we as a nation must return to the work of passing a climate bill.” But to be effective in protecting the climate or creating jobs, such a bill will need to be far different from the climate bills that emerged in Congress in 2009. For one thing, those bills largely exempted the largest carbon polluters from making serious reductions in their emissions. For another, they relied on “cap and trade” incentives to encourage companies to make carbon-reducing investments. They did not provide for the necessary public investment in new infrastructure that is necessary to move to a low-carbon economy. And they did not provide for a just transition for workers and communities impacted by climate policies. Although as Trumka notes climate legislation is currently blocked by the domination of climate deniers in Congress, labor and environmentalists need to start a dialogue now on such a new approach so that a powerful coalition can be drawn together for legislation that offers real solutions to both our climate and our jobs problem.

A just transition: A matter of justice
President Trumka points out that “too often, we have failed to consider who bears the cost of change and ensure that change is managed fairly and respectfully.” He calls for “those who care about climate change” to “engage with the people whose livelihoods are tied up with carbon emissions.” Any other approach is “fundamentally unfair.”

“We must ask ourselves, ‘How well does this pathway serve the least, the hardest to reach, the most likely to be left behind.’ Places like West Virginia and the Ohio Valley must come first, not last.” In short, we need a “Just Transition to a low carbon-emissions economy.”

It is entirely appropriate for organized labor to pose environmentalists the challenge of making a “just transition” to a low-carbon emissions world. But such a transition will inevitably impact some of those whose livelihoods are “tied up with carbon emissions.” Organized labor needs to develop a strategy for protecting the livelihoods of people that is compatible with changing the jobs they do.

A just transition: A political necessity for climate protection
President Trumka says “we are not acting fast enough” in response to the climate crisis, and he asks why that should be when “tens of millions need work, when investors have billions in cash parked making almost nothing and the risks of doing nothing are mounting?”

He says an important part of the answer lies in the fact that many people see climate protection as threatening their jobs and economic wellbeing. In many places “there is fear that the ‘green economy’ will turn into another version of the radical inequality that now haunts our society - another economy that works for the 1% and not for the 99%.” He asks “why, in an economy without an effective safety net, would the good men and women of my hometown [Nemacolin, PA] and a thousand places like it surrender their whole lives and sit by while others try to force them to bear the cost of change.”

Dealing with their concerns is essential for climate protection. “Addressing climate risk” is a path that is only open “if it is a path to an economy that works for the 99% who seek good jobs, economic security and healthy communities - not just in New York, but in Nemacolin, and in countries around the world, from Australia to Poland to South Africa to China, countries that face the same issues and share the same climate with you and me.”

To get there, Trumka calls for “those who care about climate change” to “engage with the people whose livelihoods are tied up with carbon emissions.” Investors, companies, workers, environmental activists, governments - need to be part of this dialogue. “Any other approach to addressing climate risk is not just fundamentally unfair, it simply won’t work in our democracy.”

Coal
President Trumka is the son and grandson of coal miners, and was the president of the United Mine Workers Union before becoming president of the AFL-CIO. So it is not surprising that he puts the issues of coal front and center. His main theme is right on target: The basic principle that those who work in coal producing and using industries should not pay the cost of a socially necessary transition. But there are a number of factual and analytical issues that need to be looked at with a critical eye.

Trumka says that Mayor Bloomberg advocates that we stop burning coal “this afternoon” and “cut the power in the U.S. grid by 50 percent.” He adds, if we did, “He’d be reading handwritten memos by candlelight this evening.” Bloomberg did indeed give the Sierra Club a $50 million grant to campaign to move “beyond coal.” What the Sierra Club is calling for, however, is not an instant shutdown of all coal-fired power plants but a planned closing of at most a third of the nation’s oldest coal-fired power plants by 2020.

A thoughtfully planned transition from coal to other forms of power has been the basis for labor-environmental cooperation in phasing out coal-fired power plants in places like Centralia, Washington and Madison, Wisconsin in ways that cut emissions while protecting workers. Labor-environmental-community dialogue is required to develop such plans for a worker-friendly transition beyond coal. But the only concrete proposal Trumka advocates for coal is to assure that companies that commit to retrofits to reduce mercury and sulfur emissions will have time enough to complete them.

A just transition for coal miners
Part of the environmental-labor dialogue needs to be a far broader approach to the wellbeing of coal-related workers and communities.

Trumka speaks eloquently about the role of coal in his hometown of Nemacolin, Pennsylvania, where his father and grandfather were coal miners. He says that when folks in Nemacolin hear the slogan “End Coal,” it sounds like “a threat to destroy the value of our homes, to shut our schools and churches, to drive us away from the place our parents and grandparents are buried, to take away the work that for more than a hundred years has made us who we are.”

However, the traditional mining that Trumka describes is steadily becoming a thing of the past. In Appalachia the accessible coal seams have almost all been used up. Instead, in Appalachia coal is increasingly produced by techniques like mountaintop removal that devastate the environment but create few jobs. Meanwhile, most of the industry has shifted to the West. Wyoming produces nearly three times as much coal as West Virginia, yet Wyoming employed fewer than 6,000 coal miners. The United Mine Workers Union, which once had half a million miners on its rolls, has only 86,000 members, many of whom are retirees or are not even miners. There are fewer than 50,000 underground miners left in the US. It is the coal companies pursuing profits, not environmental protection, that is destroying the way of life in Nemacolin. In fact, the coal companies are already “ending coal” as the Trumka family knew it. After operating nearly 70 years, the coalmine in Nemacolin shut down production in 1986.

This is not to argue that coal miners and their communities should have to bear the burden of climate protection - that, as Trumka points out, would simply be unjust. But the way to provide them a decent future is not to perpetuate the use of coal-fired power plants. Instead, it is to develop a serious plan for a just transition. Labor should join hands with environmentalists and local communities to demand:

• Massive public and private investment in renewable energy and energy conservation in declining coal regions like Appalachia.
• A redevelopment strategy like that used for military bases that have been closed under the Base Closing Commission.
• A “GI Bill”-style retraining program, including full college education or its equivalent, for those who have lost employment due to climate protection policies.
• Retirement with good pensions and full medical benefits for all for whom such retraining is not an appropriate solution.

These are demands on which organized labor and “beyond coal” advocates can join hands. They should be part of the national policy of both. Equally important, in every community where there is a possibility that coal plants will be shut down, there should be a labor-environment-community alliance to promote just transition policies.

The future of the dialogue
President Trumka closed by proposing that “all of us sit down together on the basis that we live on one planet, and that we share a common humanity that requires respect for each others’ families and communities. In particular we need dialogue between environmentalists and workers and communities about the future of coal. About what the global labor movement calls a Just Transition to a low carbon emissions economy.” He added, “The AFL-CIO is ready to host that dialogue.”

The Keystone XL pipeline divided the labor movement itself and divided it from its crucial environmental allies. To rebuild that alliance will take just the kind of dialogue that Trumka has called for. Furthermore, Trumka’s speech articulated a superb frame for such a dialogue. But realizing the objectives of that frame will require both labor and environmentalists to rethink some established positions and develop more effective solutions - and to do so in dialogue with each other.

There is a “grand bargain” to be made here. Let organized labor put its full weight behind the targets, timelines, and action plans necessary to prevent “irreversible climate change” with its “catastrophic consequences for human civilization.” Let the climate protection movement put its full weight behind the targets, timelines, and action plans necessary to end today’s devastating mass unemployment by putting every available worker to work realizing those action plans. Let us mobilize our human and material resources the way we did to fight World War II and to rebuild Europe with the Marshall Plan. The result will transform the politics of climate - and the life prospects of the 99%.

Let the dialogue begin!