Climate Strikes
Global Warming and Global Labor
[This is the first in a series of LNS posts as representatives of trade unions around the world head off to Copenhagen] While world leaders play the "blame game" for their failure to negotiate a binding climate agreement in Copenhagen, trade unions from around the...
LNS Says Climate Bills Needs Better Worker Protections
The Labor Network for Sustainability (LNS) released a White Paper today arguing that current House and Senate climate bills do not do enough to protect workers, and laying out an alternative strategy for worker protection. The White Paper, Climate Legislation Must...
What the CBO Isn’t Telling Congress: Climate Change Threatens Million of Jobs
While fewer and fewer people are willing to publicly deny the validity of global warming science, those who oppose action to protect the climate have taken up a new strategy: Denying that climate change will have a major impact on the U.S. economy. This denial is...
LNFS Launched Today!
Calling all labor movement climate and sustainability activists: The Labor Network for Sustainability needs you -- And you need it. Are you in the labor movement? Are you concerned about a sustainable future? Climate change? Economic justice? If so, you should...
Labor’s Stake in Climate Change
Climate change will directly affect most American workplaces not in some theoretical future but in the working lives of those now in the industry. And their unions will be affected right along with them. New Orleans was perhaps the most highly unionized city in the...
Will Workers Be Left Behind in a Green Transition?
As Congress gears up to craft much-needed legislation to protect the earth from global warming, many American workers are wondering what it will mean for their jobs. They may be wondering even more if they hear about the House Energy and Commerce Committee's proposal...
Unions Need to Sever All Ties with Anti-Climate Bill Groups
[Cross-posted with HuffingtonPost.com] Under escalating pressure from activists, Nike, the utility giant Pacific Gas & Electric Company, and others have publicly resigned from the US Chamber of Commerce over its opposition to climate protection policies. It's time...
Labor’s changing approach to climate change
Some unions dissented early from AFL-CIO climate policy. In 1990 the Steelworkers, America's largest and most diversified manufacturing union with a strong history of environmentalism created an executive board committee on environmental issues and issued a policy...
World Leaders Fiddle While the World Burns: Time for a New Climate Strategy
Obama's climate czar Carol Browner said last week there will be no U.S. climate protection legislation before the Copenhagen conference and that she doesn't know if a global agreement on binding cuts in greenhouse gas emissions can be made in Copenhagen. She added...
Coal: Making a Just Transition
By Joe Uehlein with Jeremy Brecher, Tim Costello, and Brendan Smith Workers have often felt threatened by measures to protect the environment. Today such fears are likely to be augmented, especially in a time of soaring unemployment, by the large changes necessary to...