Industry Views: Green Jobs That Nobody Wants

1 Green Jobs That Nobody Wants, by Robert Murphy
IER, February 4, 2009

On February 3, 2009, Senator Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) and Rep. Jay Inslee (D-WA), in conjunction with union leaders and environmental groups, released their “Good Jobs First” report. Although advocates of a “green recovery” point to estimates that 456,000 green-collar jobs would be created by the stimulus package, the new Stabenow/Inslee report reveals the dirty little secret that many of these new jobs would offer low pay and poor working conditions. For example, the Good Jobs First report discusses a recycling firm in Los Angeles-which is just the type of operation that will “green” stimulus money-where workers make $8.25 an hour and receive no health insurance.

Of course, the Good Jobs First report doesn’t state the obvious conclusion: government efforts to “help” workers and “stimulate” the economy will only make things worse. Faced with the unintended consequences of their original scheme, the proponents of a green recovery want to double down and shovel more tax dollars at the problem and hope something sticks.

Although critics have pointed out the plan’s flaws since its inception, it is at least encouraging that the unions-the alleged beneficiaries of green-collar stimulus money-are beginning to realize that the deal isn’t as rosy as they have been led to believe. No matter how much politicians might like to claim otherwise, they can’t repeal the laws of economics.

“Demand curves slope downward,” economists say, meaning that people buy more of something only when its price is lower. This law applies to consumers who walk the aisles in grocery stores, but it also applies to businesses that make solar panels. To get the biggest bang of jobs “created” for the stimulus buck, those jobs have to be low-wage. The higher the pay and other perks the unions demand, the fewer jobs that employers will be able to afford-even with government subsidies.

This underscores a basic flaw in the whole notion of a green recovery. Of the millions of unemployed Americans today, not many of them have the specific background and skills necessary for the good-paying jobs that are available in the so-called green sectors of the economy. So even if the government provides the handouts, the only way to get these people into green jobs quickly is if they fill positions requiring no extensive training.

The popular pro-green recovery studies, which purport that there are plenty of American workers with the right skills to fill the new, high-wage positions, suffer from a basic flaw in their methodology. As IER pointed out in its critique of such studies, they count up the number of skilled workers in the work force as a whole, rather than counting up the qualified workers in the current pool of unemployed workers. The only way, then, that these alleged hundreds of thousands of high-paying, “green” jobs could be filled-relying on government subsidies, of course-is to siphon most of their workers away from other industries. No net jobs would be created, because the new green slot would be offset by the existing jobs vacated by the skilled worker.

Confusion between gross and net job creation is typical of the green jobs. For example, the 456,000 figure touted by the Center for American Progress does not take into account the jobs that would be destroyed by the government’s methods of paying for the necessary subsidies. The CAP estimate simply assumes that all 456,000 workers filling these new green slots would have come from the ranks of the unemployed and that the higher taxes and Uncle Sam’s increased borrowing will have no job-destroying impact on the rest of the American economy.

It is refreshing to see that even the unions are catching on. But rather than ask for a bigger handout, they should stop looking to the government to help workers. Only when the government stops trying to pick industrial winners and losers can true economic recovery begin. Only when the government stops changing the rules and throwing around hundreds of billions in borrowed money will the unemployed get good jobs in the private sector.



2 Good Jobs and Green Jobs: Which Road to Take? By Jason Lefkowitz
Change to Win, February 3, 2009 at 10:19 AM

A few days ago, I wrote about how green jobs are not automatically good jobs:

The old thinking was that it was impossible to grow the economy and clean
the environment at the same time. The green jobs movement has done important
work in freeing the world from the tyranny of that particular dead idea; thanks
to their efforts, there’s a lot of people thinking hard about how to apply the
stimulus in ways that grow green jobs.

But green jobs are not, in and of themselves, good jobs. They can be
good jobs - jobs that provide workers with decent wages, economic security and a
shot at the American Dream - but they can just as easily go the other way. It
all depends on the choices we make.

Today, in conjunction with Good Jobs First and the Sierra Club, we’re rolling out a new report that demonstrates in detail just how true that is.

“High Road or Low Road? Job Quality in the New Green Economy” (PDF) looks at a range of existing green jobs in sectors across the economy, including manufacturing, construction, and waste management, and finds that while policy choices have made some of these green jobs good jobs, the connection is by no means automatic:

• Low pay is not uncommon in the workplaces we profile: the lowest wage we found was $8.25 an hour at a recycling processing plant, but we also discovered jobs in manufacturing facilities serving the renewable energy sector paying as little as $11 an hour.
• Wage rates at many wind and solar manufacturing facilities are below the national average for workers employed in the manufacture of durable goods. In some locations, average pay rates fall short of income levels needed to support a single adult with one child.
• Some U.S. wind and solar manufacturers have already begun to offshore production of components destined for U.S. markets to low-wage havens such as China and Mexico. Examples of offshoring include the manufacture of blades for wind turbines, defying the common assumption that such blades are too large to ship overseas.
• Very few workers at wind and solar manufacturing workplaces identified in the course of our research are covered by collective bargaining agreements. In at least two instances, this appears to be a direct result of aggressive anti-union campaigns run by employers with the help of union-busting consultants. On the construction side, we found that a leading contractor engaged in energy efficiency work has a similarly hostile approach to unions.
• We could not find specific wages for nonunion construction workers employed in green building, but publicly available data on overall construction wages suggest that they are far lower than those of the union members profiled in the report. Analysis provided by the Economic Policy Institute indicates that among nonunion laborers, carpenters, painters, and roofers, a majority make less than $12.50 an hour and a third make less than the federal poverty wage for a family of four ($10.19 an hour).

This is not to say that green jobs cannot be good jobs — merely that they do not become good jobs simply because they are green. Decisions must be made and policies put in place if we wish for this sector to become the vehicle that enables a new generation of workers to achieve the American Dream. (In its conclusion, the report identifies a range of policy options available to make this a reality.)

Given the economic and environmental challenges facing America and the world, the need for a green economy becomes clearer every day. In the push to get there, though, we must make sure that the workers whose labor powers that green economy aren’t left behind by it while its benefits flow to a few plutocrats at the top. If we do not, we risk repeating the mistakes that led us into the current economic crisis in the first place.