August 26, 2010
By Amy B. Dean, The Nation

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In October 2009, the Green Justice Coalition scored an important victory by getting environmental justice language inserted into Massachusetts's new, $1.4 billion energy efficiency plan, one of the first comprehensive plans in the nation. The plan takes steps to significantly reduce emissions of greenhouse gases. But compared to similar initiatives in other states, the provisions pushed by activists in Massachusetts will ensure that the plan has a far more direct impact on residents' lives. There will be a financing plan to make energy-saving home improvements more affordable. Many of the 23,300 jobs to be generated by the plan will go to contractors who pay decent wages and meet "high road" employment standards. Finally, four pilot programs across the state will test a radically new outreach model by going door to door and mobilizing low- and moderate-income families in building greener neighborhoods.

These innovations already have national significance. The Obama administration's American Recovery and Reinvestment Act includes more than $30 billion for green construction—and this one-time stimulus is just a fraction of the money that state and federal agencies will spend to increase energy efficiency and reduce carbon consumption in the coming years. For social movements, such investments are only the beginning; their real mission will be to seize the opportunities made available in order to build campaigns with a series of escalating demands. In Boston, activists are committed to using the state program to score a triple win: delivering a blow to global warming, creating jobs needed to fuel economic recovery and addressing the exclusion of racially and economically marginalized communities from green development. The Green Justice Coalition has built momentum around each of these goals.

As the coalition began mobilizing, researchers worked to decipher the obscure inner workings of bodies like the state Energy Efficiency Advisory Council (EEAC). They were surprised to discover that although everyone in the state who paid an electricity bill contributed monthly to a program that gave incentives to homeowners to increase energy efficiency, only the wealthiest households were benefiting from the subsidies. Few residents of less-affluent communities could afford the thousands of dollars needed to green their homes in order to qualify for the initiative.

"Lower-income families are paying the most into the system because our homes are the oldest and draftiest," says Kellie Page, a leader of the Alliance to Develop Power in Springfield, Massachusetts. "But we don't have the hundreds or thousands of dollars it takes to benefit from it. Plus, the program isn't well advertised in our communities. It's higher-income communities that end up getting their homes weatherized and their bills reduced."

The activists set out to demand that the state's new energy efficiency plan include a financing mechanism that would allow for broader access. Coalition members became a vocal presence at EEAC sessions. "The meetings had been dense, long, difficult to follow and already in progress," says Khalida Smalls, organizing director of Alternatives for Community and Environment in Roxbury, Massachusetts. "So they really got a jolt when we organized over 100 members of our organizations to come and sit in and testify. They'd never seen anything like that happen."

On the labor front, the Boston campaigners realized that for all the talk about how green jobs would transform the economy, few people were asking what such jobs would look like. The coalition's research showed that wages in home weatherization were far below prevailing standards for the building trades. At the bottom of the spectrum, workers made just $11.26 per hour. Moreover, many low-end employers avoided payment for workers' compensation, health insurance or Social Security by improperly classifying their workers as independent contractors.

To address this, the Green Justice Coalition pushed for living wages of at least $18 per hour, plus benefits, for weatherization jobs. The group also promoted "first source" hiring to give residents of communities where projects were taking place priority for employment opportunities. In the end, the coalition won provisions in the state plan that launch pilot programs through which hundreds of homes needing weatherization will be bundled into one contract. Contractors who meet high-road standards will then be able to compete for these larger contracts.

Weatherization of individual homes is typically done by nonunion contractors, who often employ immigrant day laborers. Even under the state plan, the work will not be assigned to workers in the traditional building trades. However, those hired under the plan's pilot programs will become union members. In this way, the Green Justice Coalition has provided a means for the labor movement to reach out to immigrant workers and nontraditional employees who would ordinarily be ignored or derided because they fall outside the mainstream of the construction industry.

The Green Justice Coalition did not spring up as a short-term effort to capitalize on the push for energy efficiency. Rather, it was the product of long-term planning by Community Labor United (CLU). Founded in 2004 by the Greater Boston Labor Council, allied unions and community groups like the Chinese Progressive Association and City Life/Vida Urbana, CLU helps the labor movement go beyond bargaining over wages and benefits paid by specific employers to involvement in broader issues like promoting good schools and affordable housing for all working people.

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The Boston-area drive illustrates three components shared by campaigns of this emerging model for regional power building: deep coalitions, policy research and political action. The first forms an essential base—unions create deeper alliances with community partners than are typically produced by single-issue initiatives. CLU demonstrated a commitment to this idea when it founded the Green Justice Coalition in December 2008. Rather than first addressing its union base, it put the perspectives of community allies at the core of the campaign.

CLU co-director Lisa Clauson explains, "We really looked at the issue from an environmental justice perspective. The community organizations in the coalition created a well-defined focus on racial and economic justice. That came first. Then we were able to pull in environmental groups with the climate element. And because there was a jobs component, we were able to bring in the unions as well."

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Today, even as the Boston activists seek to build on their successes and ensure that the state energy efficiency plan is implemented with environmental justice goals at the fore, they are envisioning future campaigns, from waste management to water quality. The labor movement's involvement in far-reaching community partnerships won't eliminate the need to organize specific workplaces and negotiate good contracts. But building regional power and reaching out to a wide range of allies will allow unions to re-envision the interests of their members. As Clauson says, "You see that the constructs separating people—you're either a worker, or you're a community member, or you're an environmentalist—these are artificial."

Khalida Smalls adds, "Our members are all of these. If we can reach the level of integration that these people are experiencing every day in their own lives, we've found a very powerful organizing model."

This article appeared in the September 13, 2010 edition of The Nation. Read the full article.