The practical aspects of jobs and a green economy
Here’s the Secretary-Treasuer’s talk, edited for clarity:
“My name is Patrick Crowley. I'm the Secretary-Treasurer
of the Rhode Island, AFL-CIO. We have 80,000 working men and women who are part
of our unions across Rhode Island. We are 20% of the workforce, and that's one
of the reasons why we say Rhode Island is a labor state.
“A couple of years ago, the labor movement recognized
something very interesting. We were the first state in the nation to build
offshore wind, and it was the men and women of the Rhode
Island Building Trades who put in those six turbines off the
coast of Rhode Island. But we recognized that as this industry was changing,
the labor movement needed to have a significant presence in it.
“I just want to acknowledge something that Justice
Brandeis said back in 1932, and most of you probably have heard
a version of this, but he talked about how states are the ‘laboratories of democracy.’ What he really
said was, ‘a single courageous State may, if its citizens choose, serve as a
laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the
rest of the country.’
“Rhode Island is that single courageous state in a lot of ways, and Act on Climate is an incredibly important piece of legislation. I would put it up with the Inflation Reduction Act, the Chips Act, and the Infrastructure Act, at a state level. It is an example because here's what the Act on Climate does: It mandates not just that we are going to be net zero in Rhode Island by the year 2050, it mandates that the state is going to create the economy to get to net zero. That is a radically different approach to economic planning and industrial policy from what the country has been involved in for the last 50 years. Rhode Island's approach is unique and here's why.
“The Act on Climate does a couple of things. Net zero by
2050 is the easy part. We're one of 14 states, including the federal government
under President Biden, that has set that as a goal, but [in Rhode Island it's
about] how we're getting there. The law mandates that the state needs to be
involved in planning, programming, and actions to get to that target number and
create the economy that's going to produce it. It also mandates that the state,
every five years, has to develop a plan involving every state agency to create
that economy. Not only that, but the people that have been impacted the most by
the ravages of climate change and have been impacted the most as disadvantaged
communities by the current legacy fuel economy, have to have a say and what that
plan looks like. They have to be at the table crafting what this new economy is
going to be and that includes the workers that may be impacted.
‘…a single courageous State may, if its citizens choose,
serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without
risk to the rest of the country.’ - Justice Brandeis
“A guy driving a fuel truck in South Providence at the
Port makes $120,000 a year. Someone installing solar panels in your
neighborhood is making about $17,000 a year. That's not a fair trade - to say,
‘Just go install solar panels’ or ‘Just go back and learn how to do computer
programming’ is not going to work. What the state is doing is creating an
economy that's mindful of how those impacts on working people are going to be
taken care of. Now, that's easy to say, right? It's easy to say we're tinkering
with the economy, we're making this new economy, blah, blah, blah.
“But here's how we're doing it. Think about what happened
after we passed the Act on Climate in 2021. In 2022, we passed the 100% renewable energy standard, which says
that by 2030 the State of Rhode Island has to procure all of its electricity
from renewable energy sources. We'll be the first state in the nation to get to
that standard.
“The second thing that we did as a state was pass an
offshore wind procurement, which said that by 2027, we had to have a
minimum of a thousand megawatts of offshore wind produced in the state.
“The third thing that we did was we passed the labor
standards bill, which said that whenever the state is a market player in this
economy or its subdivisions, which means a state agency, a municipality - and,
I would argue, if it was a school committee, whatever the case may be - if any
political subdivision of the state of Rhode Island is going to be a market
player they have to do three things:
“First they have to make sure that the work is going to
be conducted with pro-labor standards, meaning that there'll be a project labor
agreement or a labor peace agreement, which means that the employer and
organized labor have to arrange how this project's going to get done.
“Second thing is that they have to make sure that
prevailing wages are going to be paid because as I said before, the new economy
in the renewable energy sector is radically underpaying its workers.
“Third, and this is I think one of the most important
parts of it, is that they made sure that apprentices have to be utilized
whenever this work gets done. Why is that important? Because if you look around
the legacy fuel economy and the people that are doing those jobs, especially
here in the northeast, [they are] white and male. The new economy has brown,
Black, and female faces. It's also an older workforce. In the legacy economy,
the average construction worker's age is 55 years old and for the first time in
a hundred years, their sons, and I mean their sons, aren't following them into
their crafts.
“As we diversify our workforce, the a hundred thousand
dollar jobs that the labor movement has fought for 50 years, are going to be
replaced by brown, Black, and female faces making minimum wage jobs. That's
entirely unfair. We've got to create an economy that lifts them and keeps them
making those family-sustaining wages.
“Here's where we need to step back and think about what
we do. Act on Climate mandates that the state creates a new economy. We passed
a law that says that we have to have a hundred percent renewable energy
standard by 2033. We legislated into existence the demand. We legislated into
existence the supply, by having the offshore wind procurement. As prices are
established by the intersection of the supply and demand curves, what we've
done by having the labor standards component is make sure that instead of profits
engineered from exploitation and market manipulation, profits are going to come
from innovation and efficiency, which is what this economy needs if we're going
to decarbonize by 2050.
“When you step back and think about how different that
is, it's a radically different approach. Rhode Island is going to be the state
that gets there first because the way we've engineered this is by making sure
that working people have a vested interest in doing this. It's a labor state,
and we're going to make sure that labor, along with business, is leading the
way to get there.”
