Green Jobs are not Always Good Jobs
Posted on Monday, February 9th, 2009 and is filed under Career. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
A new report by Good Jobs First reveals that green jobs aren’t always the best jobs to have, in terms of wages and in climate-friendly environments.
“Many proponents of green development assume that the result will be good jobs,” said Good Jobs First Research Director Philip Mattera, principal author of the report. “We tested that assumption and found it is not always valid.”
The report looks at three sectors: manufacturing of components for wind and solar energy generation; green building; and recycling. “In each sector, we found examples of employers that compensate their workers decently and treat them with respect. Yet we also found examples of purportedly green employers paying substandard wages and not treating their workers well,” Mattera added. “These include two wind energy manufacturing plants, where workers initiated union organizing drives in response to issues such as poor safety conditions and then faced union-busting campaigns by management.”
Some U.S. wind-and-solar manufacturing firms are weakening the job security of their workers, the report notes, by opening parallel plants in foreign, low-wage havens such as China and Mexico.
Visit www.goodjobsfirst.org/pdf/gjfgreenjobsrpt.pdf to view the full report.
