No guarantees for Biden clean energy plan
• Companies oppose unionisation of installation and construction workers, which represent the lion’s share of jobs in renewables, labour groups say
Working as a construction supervisor one winter, Steven Marones would wake up at 4am and drive two hours to a Wisconsin cornfield. There, he and the rest of the non-union crew spent their day assembling a sprawling network of steel I-beams for solar panels to be mounted on. Threading bolts while wearing thick gloves often proved impossible, so when the temperature dropped as low as -25°C, his bare hands would stiffen painfully.
While his body battled the elements, Marones’s mind was beset by a worry: that his $25 hourly wage wasn’t enough to pay his bills. “I was stressed with the day-to-day,” says the 30year-old father of four. “I just couldn’t focus on the future.”
Campaigning for the US presidency and now, as his administration steers a $2.3-trillion infrastructure plan through Congress, Joe Biden has touted the potential for the solar and wind industries to create the types of jobs the US economy has been losing for decades.
“A key plank of our Build Back Better recovery plan is building a modern, resilient climate infrastructure and clean energy future that will create millions of good-paying union jobs,” Biden said in a January 27 speech laying out his energy policy, which targets zero emissions from electricity generation by 2035.
That future is at odds with present-day reality, as Marones and others employed in renewable energy can attest. It’s true, the sector has been minting jobs at a healthy clip: wind turbine service technicians are number one on a list of the fastest-growing occupations compiled by the US bureau of labour statistics, and solar installers are in third place. Yet labour groups say companies have either deterred or opposed unionisation among workers employed in installation and construction, which in the US represent the lion’s share of jobs in renewables.
That has held down wages while depriving workers of health and retirement benefits.
BIG LIE
“The new green economy has been heralded as a win-win for workers and the environment, but that’s a big lie to working men and women when wind and solar developers discourage unionisation efforts, which we are seeing on most of the largescale utility projects,” says Terry O’Sullivan, general president of the Laborers’ International Union of North America.
Wind and solar employ 222,000 construction and installation workers in the US, according to a 2020 report compiled by the National Association of State Energy Officials and research firm Energy Futures Initiative. Overall, 4% of solar photovoltaic workers and 6% of wind workers belong to unions, the report says, lower than in nuclear and coal.
It is also less than half the 13.4% rate in the private construction industry, according to US government data. Trade groups dispute those numbers; the Solar Energy Industries Association says 10.3% of the workforce is unionised.
One major deterrent to
labour organising is that developers often rely on recruitment agencies to provide a pipeline of labourers. According to the North America’s Building Trades Unions, less than a quarter of wind and solar projects that got under way since 2020 are using unionised workers.
Solar workers who are not in a union average $16-$19 an hour, while their counterparts on wind projects get about $17$25 an hour, according to the Laborers’ International Union of North America, which represents half a million construction workers. The union says its
members working on solar projects are paid an hourly wage of $28.41, while their counterparts in wind get paid about $27.65 an hour, and all have benefits.
“Green capital is anti-labour,” says Joe Uehlein, president of the Labour Network for Sustainability, a climate and worker advocacy group in Maryland. Solar companies often require installers to sign contracts stating they are independent contractors, making them ineligible to join unions. “They aren’t good actors when it comes to treating their workers.”
American
Clean
Power
(ACP), a lobbying group that includes some of the industry’s biggest players, including Berkshire Hathaway Energy, GE Renewable Energy and NextEra Energy, pushes back against that characterisation.
“The clean energy industry is committed to working with unions to ensure that all workers continue to be rewarded for their labour and provided the wage, health and retirement benefits they deserve,” says John Hensley, ACP’s vice-president for research and analytics.
Sabrina Morris’s mind was often on the weather when she
started installing rooftop solar panels in California, a non-union job that initially paid $15 an hour. A drizzle of rain or a gust of wind could make working conditions perilous, but her employers took little note, she says.
“There are contractors who just want to get the job done quickly and at low cost, putting people at risk,” says Morris, 37, who now co-ordinates safety inspections at another solar energy company in the state.
In California, where a mandate that most newly built single-family homes be outfitted with solar panels took effect in 2020, the state division of the Occupational Safety and Health Agency has inspected 70 solar installation sites in the past five years, prompted by tips from workers about unsafe conditions and accidents.
Marones says he feels more secure since joining a union in November 2020. He now earns about $34 an hour as a thirdyear apprentice on a solar project in Illinois, more than he did working as a supervisor in Wisconsin. He also has a retirement savings plan and full medical coverage for him and his family.
“It’s set me up for the future. I don’t have to struggle financially like I did before,” he says.
‘JUST TRANSITION’
Hours after being sworn in, Biden signed an executive order to have the US re-enter the Paris Climate Agreement. Framers of the landmark 2015 accord urged governments to ensure a “just transition” by adopting policies that promote the creation of “quality jobs”.
American unions share that goal. “When you look at the transition to green jobs, our concern is: what kind of jobs are they going to be?” says Richard Trumka, president of the AFLCIO, the largest union umbrella group in the country. “If working people start to feel that the transition is really an assault on our way of living or on our standard of living, there’s going to be economic and political pushback.”
A priority for Trumka and the rest of organised labour in the US is securing passage of the Protecting the Right to Organise Act. The legislation guarantees private sector employees the right to unionise and would bar employers from retaliating against unionisation efforts. It lowers the bar for contractors to prove they are employees under federal labour law — a provision that may make it harder for renewable energy companies to rely on contingent workers. The act narrowly passed in the House in December, but faces a tougher test in the Senate.
Robert Scott, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, DC, says the changes contemplated in the act, coupled with the surge in demand for labour that Biden’s infrastructure plan would unleash, will benefit workers: “It will give them more leverage and reduce the market power of the employer.”
Organised labour is already making inroads in some parts of the clean energy industry. In November, Orsted, a Danish company that is the biggest operator of offshore wind parks, became the first developer to team up with a national union, the North America’s Building Trades Unions, to train workers transitioning into the industry. The agreement covers Orsted’s pipeline of mid-Atlantic offshore wind projects, which will be staffed under collectively bargained labour agreements.
“We believe that developers and unions must work together to ensure that the offshore wind industry becomes and remains an important source of highquality and well-paying jobs in our communities,” Orsted said.
Trade group ACP is forecasting there may be 280,000 clean energy jobs unionised by 2030, equal to about a quarter of the industry’s projected workforce.