Just What Is a Green Job Anyway?

By Emily Badger, Miller-McCune.com. Posted January 31, 2009.

"We've always wanted this," Kreutzer said of the strategy, "and now we're trying to sell it as the solution to what you're most worried about today."

Jobs Both Green and Good

Raquel Pinderhughes, a professor of urban studies at San Francisco State University, defines "green jobs" as the catch-all term for people doing any kind of work, whether mental or manual, that in some way relates to improvements in environmental quality.

She has coined a subset of the group -- "green-collar jobs" (not to be confused with "green jobs" in general, although Obama's campaign has done that, using the two terms interchangeably). Green-collar jobs, Pinderhughes says, refer to the specific manual labor opportunities in a green economy that would be open to low-skilled workers in industries like bicycle repair, recycling collection and waste composting.

"The idea that there are certain entry-level positions people can be trained up for relatively quickly is a very important idea," she said. "As the (green) economy deepens and gets stronger and more vibrant, there will be room in it not only for people who are already successful in the labor market but also for people the pollution-based economy has rejected."

She defines the pollution-based economy as essentially the entire economy as it has existed since the beginning of the industrial revolution. A green economy, she says, could specifically provide a pathway out of poverty for the people who have been considered chronically unemployable.

Existing green-collar jobs in the Bay Area, Pinderhughes' research has found, offer living wages, good working conditions and occupational mobility, which typically don't exist with traditional blue-collar work. While the average food-preparation and serving job in San Francisco pays about $21,000 a year, she says green-collar jobs in the city -- requiring, before basic training, the same level of skills -- average more than $34,600 with benefits.

These jobs, like retrofitting homes, have the key benefit of being unexportable, a frequent claim made of all green jobs (Obama's plan says all 5 million of his proposed jobs are "good jobs that cannot be outsourced").

Kreutzer counters that there is no reason windmills can't be made overseas. If they're made in ready-to-install formats, the U.S. is also essentially outsourcing assembly. What's left are the caulking jobs, the green-collar installation that by definition must be done where the buildings to be retrofit exist.

"If we focused on creating jobs that 'can't be exported,' that means we're focusing on creating jobs that do things, the product of which can't be exported," Kreutzer said. "We're going to focus our economy, our labor and our training and investment on making things that we cannot sell to the rest of the world."

A United Nations Environment Programme report on green jobs went a step further than Pinderhughes (in a direction she applauds) by defining green jobs as also "decent jobs," with good working conditions that include the right to organize.

The report identifies complexity not only in "shades of green" but also in the intersection of environmentally friendly work with worker-friendly conditions. The recycling industry in China, for example, has particularly poor and dangerous working conditions.

As the report concludes (and this is a warning author Michael Renner says applies to America just as it does China): "A job that is exploitative, harmful, or fails to pay a living wage (or worse, condemns workers to a life of poverty) can hardly be called green."

Renner, a senior researcher at the Worldwatch Institute, concedes that talk of labor unions in conjunction with green jobs may further turn off those already skeptical of the idea. If anything, the recent push to make the American auto industry more efficient and green has been oddly intertwined with labor concessions.

"Unfortunately that is of course a concern," Renner said. "We've seen quite a strong anti-union sentiment in parts of this country, but ultimately the question I would have is, What is the economy really for if it's not to provide for the well-being of people?"

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