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Green Collar Jobs Report Released

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by Ann Benoit · 05/06/08

Raquel Pinderhughes, Ph.D.’s “GREEN COLLAR JOBS : An Analysis of the Capacity of Green Businesses to Provide High Quality Jobs for Men and Women with Barriers to Employment” is a really interesting case study assessing “…the potential of Bay Area green businesses to provide high quality green collar jobs to men and women with barriers to employment.”

Green collar jobs are blue collar jobs in green businesses – that is, manual labor jobs in businesses whose products and services directly improve environmental quality (Pinderhughes, 2006). Green collar jobs are located in large and small for-profit businesses, non-profit organizations, social enterprises, and public sector institutions. What unites these jobs is that all of them are associated with manual labor work that directly improves environmental quality.

Green collar jobs represent an important new category of work force opportunities because they are relatively high quality jobs, with relatively low barriers to entry, in sectors that are poised for dramatic growth. The combination of these three features means that cultivating green collar jobs for people with barriers to employment can be an effective strategy to provide low-income men and women with access to good jobs – jobs that provide workers with meaningful, community serving work, living wages, benefits, and advancement opportunities.

The study focuses on seven major questions around green collar jobs:

1. To what extent are green collar jobs good jobs?
2. To what extent are green collar jobs suitable for people with barriers to employment?
3. To what extent are people with barriers to employment interested in green collar jobs?
4. Are green business owners willing to hire workers with barriers to employment for green collar jobs?
5. To what extent are the green collar job business sectors growing?
6. What strategies are needed to grow the number of green collar jobs?
7. What strategies are needed to ensure that workers with barriers to employment can gain access to green collar jobs?

I was psyched to learn that Berkeley businesses provide so many green collar jobs (probably more so than other areas of the country). What is also cool to see reinforced by this study, is the idea that working to help the environment doesn’t require an advanced degree, and that green collar jobs can be a great means to providing low-income workers with jobs that will better the planet and community.

To read the Executive summary of the research study, click here.
To read the more extensive report, click here.

employment, green collar, green jobs

Nuclear Is No Option

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by Courtney Tenz · 04/01/08

A few months ago, I posted here a compendium of reasons why I live in Germany. Though I’d intended the post as an answer to all those who’ve asked in the past, writing it also helped me to see through the myths I’d taken too seriously (i.e. all Germans are green) and helped me better understand myself in the political landscape here. Because like it or not, politics are a necessity in getting environmentalism to have the greatest impact.

As I reread the post, I realized that many of the things I wrote about had more to do with Germany’s social democracy and less with its green principles – which for an American like me seemed like two sides of the same coin but which for Germans are two very very different political stances. Up until three years ago, however, the two political parties (the Greens and the Social Democrats) were ruling bedfellows, maintaining control of the parliament and pushing through some of the legislation that appealed to me most, including the requirement that all nuclear power plants go off-line by 2020. It was, by most accounts, a Green party measure. But it also benefited the social democrats’ legislative ideas in many ways; most notably, it allowed them to battle long-time unemployment through the creation of thousands of “green collar jobs”.

In the comments to the post, however, someone named Richard said, “I was loving everything you were saying up until you rejoiced at the fact that nuclear power plants were being taken offline. That told me you hadn’t actually done your homework.” In fact I had, and I responded to that, but still, the comment got me wondering: since when did environmentalists start agreeing with nuclear? And then this article, “Atomic Dreams” from The Earth Island Journal fell into my lap:

According to a 2005 ABC News survey, only one-third of Americans approved of “building more nuclear plants at this time.” Nuclear proponents needed a way of convincing people that atomic energy deserved a second shot. Enter climate change. While nuclear power generation isn’t entirely carbon neutral—uranium mining and enrichment require vast amounts of fossil fuel energy—atomic plants are cleaner from a carbon standpoint than natural gas or coal-fired power stations. Posing nuclear energy as a response to global warming seemed a useful way to reintroduce nuclear power to a public that hadn’t been forced to think about it for years.

It’s an interesting read, especially for those interested in learning how a cause du jour can sway public opinion, for better and for worse.

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Green for All

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by Courtney Tenz · 10/18/07

I’ve been reading quite a bit lately about Van Jones and his Oakland-based campaign, Green For All, and I’ve got to say, I’m intrigued.

Premised on the idea that a clean-energy economy can help lift people out of poverty, Jones’ campaign advocates for the creation of what he calls green collar jobs (manual labor positions that benefit the environment, like solar panel installers and home weatherizers) for the impoverished or those left behind by the outsourcing of blue collar jobs. The idea seemed feasible enough that both the House and the Senate passed the Green Jobs Act (H.R. 2847) of 2007, directing $125 million annually for greening the nation’s workforce, including job training for 35,000 people every year. Unfortunately, the President has vowed to veto the bill because of its workforce training component. Hmmm….

Sounds a bit fishy to me that someone who’s recently claimed to be an advocate for alternative energies (despite believing that nuclear is a good “alternative”) would veto a bill like this. Especially if he looks to his Allies a bit further east.

Here in Germany, the environmental movement has meant a boom both to the economy and to the workforce. Two of the largest Photovoltaic panel manufacturers opened factories in the former East, significantly lowering unemployment in the part of the country with the highest unemployment rates. These same solar companies are now billion-Euro industries, even though Germany gets as less sun than most of the United States.

The boom has also created and expanded blue collar jobs in Germany. While I can’t speak to the costs of training (the education system here is very different than the US’s, with most universities only now, after quite a lot of controversy, beginning to institute tuition fees – at a measly 500 Euros/semester), their Federal Institute for Vocational Education and Training knows a lot about green collar jobs and what’s required in a new sustainably developed marketplace. They’ve qualified 5000 people to become building energy experts and trained many more to install solar panels both for electricity generation and water heating. Still, they know there is more to do and they’re creating new programs each day to do it. As their website says, it’s no longer a lack of energy efficient technology that’s creating problems with every household going green: “the ‘bottleneck’ turns out to be in the awareness and confidence of the customer and in the skills of the specialist craft trade workers, rather than in the technical development of energy efficient systems.”

So, Mr. Prez, how are we going to get those specialists in the US if you don’t want to provide the training? Do you really plan to keep importing German-trained workers to take care of this? I guess I shouldn’t complain. I have to love Germany for training my husband in his green job for a fraction of the price he’d have paid in the States. But what about those people unable to come to Europe for training? Thank goodness organizations like those of Van Jones’ exist to pick up your slack.

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