Photo Credit: Paschal Roth Public Affairs
Workers organize to protect themselves from inadequate pay, overwork, insecurity, and threats to their health and safety. And now there is another threat to workers’ wellbeing: climate change. And workers are organizing to fight it.
The threat becomes more visible every day. You can see it in the devastation in Appalachia and the South from hurricanes Helene and Milton. Tens of thousands lost their jobs and found their homes and communities destroyed. And as former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Labor Jordan Barab points out below, while anyone can be at risk from climate-related events, “workers bear an added element of risk because of the jobs they do and their lack of control in their workplaces.” As waters rose during hurricane Helene, workers in at least one plant were actually forbidden to leave their jobs – and three of them died as a result.
Devastation by storms, floods, fires, droughts, heatwaves, and other effects of climate change is not a short-term problem. In New Orleans in the ten months following hurricane Katrina 95,000 individuals lost their jobs. Efforts to gentrify neighborhoods in order to promote a new post-Katrina economy left the city’s lower-income residents without the means to return. In 2020 New Orleans’ population remained 20 percent below its level in 2000. According to hurricane scientist Dr Jeff Masters, the U.S. had a record eight Category 4 or Category 5 Atlantic hurricanes in the past eight years, as many as occurred in the prior 57 years.
Less noted than the devastation caused by climate change are the ways workers are organizing to combat it. In the articles below you will learn about how union members in the Longshore, Machinists, and Postal Workers unions are fighting for a Just Recovery from devastating climate events. How the California State Federation of Labor, California Fire Fighters, California Federation of Teachers, and California Nurses have joined dozens of environmental groups to fight for a ballot measure to fund climate projects. How labor and allied groups are campaigning for a Federal Heat rule to protect workers on the job. How union workers, environmental advocates, and elected officials in New York City have passed a law to put unionized workers to work installing solar panels on city buildings. How community groups, unions, city and state governments, tribes, and other non-federal actors in more than 40 states are creating a Green New Deal from Below designed to contribute to the climate protection, job creation, and social justice goals of the Green New Deal.
Workers’ self-organization to protect our climate and our jobs is what the Labor Network for Sustainability is all about.
Jeremy Brecher