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The study released yesterday, "High Road or Low Road? Job Quality in the New Green Economy," was conducted by the nonprofit resource center Good Jobs First and commissioned by organizations Change to Win, Sierra Club, the Laborers International Union of North America, and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters.
The researchers looked at pay and labor conditions for existing jobs in eco-friendly business sectors, including the manufacturing of components for wind and solar energy projects, green construction and recycling.
Researchers found that while some companies provide enough pay and benefits to adequately, if modestly, support a household of two adults and two children, other companies barely pay enough to keep that same family from sinking below the federal poverty wage line. Still other employers offer wages beneath the poverty wage standard of $10.19 an hour in household income for a family of four.
With a surge in green jobs forecast by numerous studies and likely to be fueled by passage of an economic stimulus package, care needs to be taken in creating those positions, according to the study. "One of the greatest risks is that, in our haste to create a large quantity of new green jobs, we pay too little attention to their quality," researchers said.
"Environmental sustainability will be difficult or impossible to achieve if it does not go in hand with economic sustainability for workers and their families," the researchers wrote. "The fact that an employer is engaged in a business that benefits the environment does not necessarily mean that the employees of that enterprise are going to be treated well.
"Intervention on the part of government ... will be necessary to make sure green jobs are good jobs. Job quality standards are becoming a widely accepted best practice in the economic development field and deserve to be even more widely adopted, including at the federal level."
The study suggested several measures to ensure creation of quality jobs. They include attaching self-sufficiency wage requirements to subsidies, applying wage standards to government contractors, strengthening prevailing wage requirements, adopting best value contracting, expanding use of project labor agreements, adding labor criteria to LEED standards and using clawbacks to enforce job quality standards. Clawbacks typically involve requiring a company that fails to fulfill its commitment to repay a subsidy, tax break or any other related financial assistance its received.
The study was published on the eve of the 2009 Good Jobs, Green Jobs National Conference. The gathering gets under way today in Washington, D.C., and includes lobbying on Capitol Hill. The conference is being coordinated by the Blue Green Alliance, an organization launched by the United Steelworkers and the Sierra Club, which was among the groups that commissioned the jobs study.
In other developments yesterday affecting green jobs, the Wal-Mart Foundation announced it is awarding $5.75 million in grants to the U.S. Conference of Mayors and Veterans Green Jobs program, and SustainLane launched a Green Collar Job Board.
The foundation's $5 million grant, announced today in Bentonville, Arkansas, for the U.S. Conference of Mayors will in turn help the mayors group fund grants this spring to as many as six nonprofit organizations that have a history of working with mayors to train people for green jobs. In early 2010, the mayors group will give three other grants to cities that have made new commitments to providing green workforce training.
The Wal-Mart Foundation's gifts follow an initiative by Wal-Mart Stores Inc. just before the winter holidays. Wal-Mart Stores launched a green jobs council in partnership with many of its leading suppliers of goods and services in December in an effort to help rebuild and retool America's workforce.
In San Francisco, SustainLane launched its new green collar jobs website. It is free to post and view positions to the site.
Also this week, Fast Company refreshed its list of "10 Best Green Jobs for the Next Decade." Those soon-to-be coveted positions are:
• Farmer
• Forester
• Solar Power Installer
• Energy Efficiency Builder
• Wind Turbine Fabricator
• Conservation Biologist
• Green MBA and Entrepreneur
• Recycler
• Sustainability Systems Developer
• Urban Planner
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