So, what exactly are green jobs? The answer to that question largely depends on an individual’s skills, training and experience: construction workers, computer programmers, and public relations professionals could all find themselves labeled as green collar in the right circumstances. For Dave Foster, a former official with the United Steelworkers, the phrase has a specific definition: ”A green job is nothing more than a blue-collar job with a green purpose.”
Today’s Post-Dispatch provides us with yet another example of how organized labor and mainstream environmental groups are joining forces to promote a green economy. Writer Steve Giegerich took note of steelworkers and Sierra Club members marching together recently to protest the loss of jobs at Granite City, Illinois’ U.S. Steel plant. As you can see in both the video above, and the article, blue collar workers around the country increasingly “get it”: green industry provides one of the most promising means of rebuilding a manufacturing economy in the United States.
As we witness a reconfiguring the progressive movement, with some of the strongest contingencies in that movement joining forces to push forward a progressive clean energy agenda, we need leaders and critical thinkers that can help us in the cause—and as evidenced by his new book, Van Jones will undoubtedly be one of those.
For decades, the perceived incompatibility of labor and environmental interests helped form a deep chasm within the Democratic Party. But a new phenomenon has emerged, moving these two natural allies towards one another. Focusing on the possibility of green collar jobs and a new energy economy, pro-labor and pro-environment coalitions are building a coherent vision that joins the goals of environmental protection and job growth.
Green collar jobs are rapidly becoming fashionable. The new trend represents a shift to the mainstream of the good old environmentalist approach to life. But what exactly makes a job green? The experts are far from agreed.
Green collar jobs have a magic lure to them. Not only because the people involved in the sector are supposedly making a conscious effort to salvage what’s left of the earth’s natural resources, but also because they’re hoping to drag the ailing economy out of its current quagmire.
The environmentalist visionary Van Jones, who heads up the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights in Oakland, is drawing massive crowds across the country to his speeches about the green sector. He has helped initiate a green jobs program in Oakland and it is in part due to his work that the Presidential candidates have included green collar jobs in their programs.
Green collar jobs are rapidly becoming fashionable. The new trend represents a shift to the mainstream of the good old environmentalist approach to life. But what exactly makes a job green? The experts are far from agreed.
