The Green Transition: Is driving a delivery bike a green job?
Weekly analysis of the shift towards a new economy.
Dear Readers,
Happy Friday. Jonny Ball here, associate editor of Spotlight, the New Statesman’s policy section. As ever, you can find coverage on our new-look homepage here, and older editions of the Green Transition on our Substack page.
If you enjoyed last week’s special dispatch from Nairobi then boy have we got an edition for you – from an even more interesting, exotic location: yes, it’s drizzly Liverpool, for the annual conference of the Trades Union Congress (TUC), held earlier this week. You can read a full report of the TUC goings-on on the New Statesman website here.
Today’s GT includes exclusive comments Sharon Graham, leader of Unite, one of Britain’s largest trade unions. Graham drew some criticism when she questioned Labour’s policy of a blanket ban on new oil and gas licenses earlier in the year, so we’ll be talking net zero, Bidenomics, and all things “just transition”-related with her below.
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Have a great weekend!
TUC Dispatch: The Red-Green alliance?
Before the last German federal election a new phrase entered the political lexicon: the traffic light coalition. That phrase signalled (geddit?) a governing alliance between “red” social democrats, “yellow” liberals, and “green”, er, greens. All three sit together in Germany’s Bundestag parliament today.
Forget the “yellow” liberals for a moment, and it seems like a natural partnership for the contemporary left: the political leaders of the broad environmentalist movement managing the transition to net zero as the partners of the more traditional, worker-oriented centre-left.
But all is not what it seems. There’s more than a little simmering tension between the two poles of modern progressive politics. Some of that was on display at the Trades Union Congress (TUC) conference in Liverpool earlier this week, where the Green Transition spoke to leaders of the UK’s workers’ movement about the journey to a net zero economy.
On Sunday evening, Congress Hall – “the workers’ parliament”, a Morning Star editorial informs me – was addressed by the first female president of the US’s TUC equivalent – Liz Shuler of the American Federation of Labour and Congress of Industrial Organisations (AFL-CIO for short). Her transatlantic enthusiasm and call-and-response delivery jarred slightly with the sleepy hall.
“In the US we have a bunch of new investments coming down from our federal government”, she told the room. “We've been waiting for this investment for a very long time – it’s the Inflation Reduction Act”.
President Biden’s flagship programme of green stimulus spending has an explicitly pro-labor [sic] flavor [also sic, for our US audience]. At a speech in Milwaukee last month, Biden said that “the middle class built America, but unions built the middle class”. He says he wants to create stable, well-paid jobs in new, net zero industries.
“But it's up to us to organise those jobs and make them good union jobs”, Shuler told TUC delegates, striking a more cautious tone. “The clean energy industry and renewable industry in the US is non-union and low road. So that is our worry. These jobs need to be good union jobs.”
Similar sentiments were expressed to me by Paul Nowak, general secretary of the TUC, in an interview last month: “Offshore wind has got a much worse health and safety record than offshore oil and gas,” he said. “Some of the work is really low paid… barely above minimum wage. So I absolutely get union concerns.”
For good measure, he added that “we’re not going to get rid of oil and gas completely. Certainly not in the next couple of years. And oil and gas also have a role to play in the chemicals industry – beyond energy, in other sectors, it’s absolutely key.”
Nowak got on stage to a Public Enemy soundtrack at the Congress on Monday, to declare that “without strong unions, the shift to net zero will see good jobs destroyed”. This kind of thinking is a million miles from the street-based, maximalist activism of Just Stop Oil or Extinction Rebellion – the kind of politics that frequent GT readers will remember Gary Smith, head of the GMB union, calling “bourgeois environmentalism”.
Labour, for its part in this debate, has committed to ending new oil and gas licences (while maintaining the current ones), and has promised a programme of Bidenomics, somehow to be delivered on a shoestring budget (Biden’s spending outlays could rise into the trillions of dollars). But the details are thin.
If anyone was to have a clearer picture of what (an eventual) £28bn annual spend on a Green Prosperity Plan might look like, you’d think it would be the leader of Unite, a union representing 1.4 million workers, and the biggest institutional donor to the Labour Party.
“[I’ve seen] absolutely nothing”, says Sharon Graham, Unite’s general secretary – “zilch”.
“Everybody knows”, she continues, “the oil and gas members know that at some point we're moving towards net zero. But at this point they can't tell us what the [alternative] jobs are. [Labour] say there are 480,000 green jobs” – there are differing figures, but the party’s climate mission policy document in fact promises over a million.
“Is driving a delivery bike a green job?” she continues. “You ask them to say what they are, and it’s ‘we can't tell you, but they’re gonna be there, don't worry about it’... They’re saying they’re going to shut off oil and gas licenses, but nobody knows what's going to replace them.” She reiterates the lack of detail on retraining and on where exactly the investment will go.
One union delegate, speaking onstage for one of the scheduled motions, perhaps summed up the predicament best: “Policy documents, bankers and industry leaders have adopted the language of the ‘just transition’”, she said. “But they interpret it in their own interests. The people who don’t talk about it are the workers whose jobs will be affected.”
“Again, it's the working class that’s chucked out there to deal with it”, Graham told me.
If the journey to net zero is to succeed – and the unity of the green agenda with a redistributive politics of production is surely the future of the left – then both traditions need to be pulling in the same direction.
In Brief
Pump it up: Jan Rosenow, Director of European Programmes at the Regulatory Assistance Project, a global NGO, penned this great piece on his new research dispelling myths about the efficiency of heat pumps, a key technology for reaching net zero.
“How do you sleep at night?”: Megan Kenyon has written this select committee report in which MPs grill the bosses of the big energy companies. This introduces a new regular Spotlight series called The Parliament Brief, where we watch parliamentary committee sessions so you don't have to. Read more here.
“Decarbonisation is decimating working-class communities”: The Spectator’s Kate Andrews has interviewed Gary Smith, the leader of the GMB union, who is extremely sceptical of the move to net zero, and that’s putting it mildly. It’s a must read for anyone interested in the union-green divide analysed in this week’s GT. Smith pours cold water on Labour’s plans for a carbon-neutral electricity grid by 2030: “I don’t even worry about it. It can-not be done… The National Grid can’t get [undersea] cables. There are four suppliers of cables in the globe, they’re all booked out to 2030.” Surely Starmer checked out the logistics/feasibility before setting the target? Any answers on this are welcome in the comments below.
Thank you for reading, and please send any news or comments to: jonathan.ball@newstatesman.co.uk
See you next week.
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