Labor raises questions about green energy jobs

Union president Jim Savage doesn't represent the 400 workers who learned yesterday that Sunoco Inc. would permanently shut down the Eagle Point refinery in Westville, Gloucester County.

But he does represent other Sunoco refinery workers - and he thinks they and other "old energy" workers are being left out of all the talk about new and green energy.

"It has created a lot of anxiety," said Savage, who leads United Steelworkers Local 10-1.

And no wonder. Old-energy jobs in mining, refineries, and electricity tend to be union jobs with decent wages and benefits.

But what will green energy jobs be? Will they be middle-class jobs, or will they provide work for low-skilled, low-wage workers tacking up insulation with staple guns?

Some of that tension came out yesterday when Savage spoke up during the question period at a "green jobs" panel discussion. The session, part of a three-day convention of the Philadelphia Central Labor Council of the AFL-CIO, took place in Atlantic City, not 75 miles away from the Westville refinery, shut down since November.

"I don't see [enough] wind turbines being built" to replace these jobs," said Savage, who supports clean energy because "it's the right thing to do for our world."

But, "I think we need to talk a lot more about protecting those who rely on those [old-energy] industries while this transition is taking place."

Yesterday's discussion began politely enough as panelists from the city of Philadelphia, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and other groups talked about stimulus money, training, and solar energy, but as the talk went on, the audience got restive.

"How can you talk about a recycling program when you laid off all the recycling specialists?" Kahim Boles, president of AFSCME District Council 47, Local 2187, shouted at Katherine Gajewski, director of the Mayor's Office of Sustainability in Philadelphia. Boles represents 2,500 white-collar city workers.

"None of the stimulus money can supplant general-fund dollars," Gajewski replied, adding that the city "is looking for quarters under the sofa cushion" to keep running in tough times. (Those workers were assigned elsewhere, she said later.)

Another panelist was Leanne Krueger-Braneky, executive director of the Philadelphia Sustainable Business Network. Later, she said that she understood the tension, particularly since her group was focusing most on training the low-skilled unemployed for green jobs as a pathway to a middle-class life.

"Those folks don't have someone organizing for them," she said.

It was precisely to address the tension between jobs and the environment that Savage's union, the blue-trademarked Steelworkers, formed the Blue-Green Alliance with the Sierra Club in 2006.

Speaking on the panel, alliance official Lauren Horne, herself a former steelworker, stressed that the shift to green energy would be gradual, but inevitable.

"You can accept it or you can be dragged behind, kicking and screaming."