http://socialistaction.org/just-transition-on-the-road-through-paris/
Just transition on the road through Paris
Published December 12, 2015. | By Socialist Action.
Jan. 2016 Just transition
By BILL ONASCH
The world market for cars and trucks is booming. So are profits in most
of the industry. Unionized auto workers in the U.S. have been properly
focused the past few months on contract negotiations with General
Motors, Ford, and Fiat Chrysler that determine their wages, benefits,
and working conditions for the next four years. (An article elsewhere in
this paper reports on their status as this edition went to press.)
But, in the long run, this most important sector of manufacturing is—or
at least should be—doomed. The growing proliferation of personal
vehicles for transportation—overwhelmingly fueled by gasoline, ethanol
or diesel—is incompatible with urgently needed efforts to stop the rise
in global warming that is altering our climate and threatening the very
biosphere essential to human civilization.
Road transportation is second only to electricity generation in carbon
emissions that are the principal cause of climate change—27 percent of
the global total, still over 20 percent even in the United States,
despite many EPA regulations.
Yesterday’s fad of “green” agrofuels did little to clean the air, while
driving up the price of corn. Hybrids too have produced almost
negligible benefits. “Clean diesel” results so recently hailed as the
Next Big Thing were achieved by cheating on tests. The restricted range
of the best plug-in electrics limits their utility to mostly short local
trips—and their climate-friendly potential is only fully realized when
their charger taps electricity generated by non-fossil sources.
The bottom line is that car dependency has to be left behind on the Road
Through Paris.
Just transition
Socialist Action supports the principle of Just Transition, long
advanced by sectors of organized labor. Whenever jobs are eliminated to
advance social goals, society is obligated to assist affected workers.
When the now dormant Labor Party was founded at a 1996 convention of
1400 labor activists, they included in a well rounded program of reforms:
“The Labor Party calls for the creation of a new worker-oriented
environmental movement—a Just Transition Movement—that puts forth a fair
and just transition program to protect both jobs and the environment.
All workers with jobs endangered by steps taken to protect the
environment are to be made whole and to receive full income and benefits
as they make the difficult transition to alternative work. The cost of
this Just Transition Income Support program will be paid for by taxes on
corporate polluters.”
As it is even clearer today that millions of present jobs must be
eliminated as we restructure an ecologically sustainable economy, Just
Transition must move to center stage.
Some whole industries will need to be shut down as soon as possible.
That certainly is the case with the extraction and processing of fossil
and nuclear fuels. Coal miners, for example, will need to be prepared
for new skills—and possibly relocated—as this dirtiest of all fossil
fuels is replaced by clean, renewable energy sources.
As we leave climate-wrecking fuels in the ground, we must not leave any
worker behind in a wrecked community. Nor will we have to. The
restructured, democratically planned economy we envision will be the
biggest creator of new jobs in human history.
Just conversion
There’s no use for coalmines if coal can’t be burned. But some
industries complicit in climate change can be converted to sustainable
use. There are at least 900,000 jobs directly tied to the auto industry
just in the USA. We should fight to save every one of them. But that
doesn’t mean saving the corporations—or even the product line. There are
some big historical lessons that can guide us—along with even some more
recent efforts in the United Auto Workers.
In January 2007, I was invited to speak at a unique gathering—a Labor &
Sustainability Conference in St. Paul. It was hosted by UAW Local 879,
representing workers at Ford Twin Cities Assembly—slated for closing in
2008, with its Ranger pickup-truck work offshored to Thailand
The state-of-the-art St. Paul plant, which had gone through numerous
retoolings and renovations since its 1924 opening, had a rare asset. All
of its electricity was zero-emission hydroelectric—directly supplied by
its very own dam on the nearby Mississippi River. The union was
proposing that instead of demolishing the plant, Ford should turn it
over to the workers as a publicly owned facility to build cleaner buses
needed by the regional transit authority. This sensible, practical
option won wide public support.
The conference was endorsed by a number of unions, academics, and
elected officials. While not formally sponsored by any mainstream
environmental groups—or even the Blue-Green Alliance—it attracted a good
mix of dozens of labor and environmental activists for two days of
panels and workshops, always followed by discussion, of the Ford
workers’ proposal as well as other sustainability issues.
In my remarks, I reminded them that such conversion had once been
successfully carried out. In April 1942, all auto production in the
United States came to an abrupt halt, and no more cars were built for
nearly four years. Truly Big Government had taken charge of virtually
the entire economy to produce for war. No autoworker lost their job due
to conversion of their plants to building planes, tanks, and jeeps. In
fact, their numbers and hours of work reached unprecedented heights.
It was a triumph of industrial mobilization. But its production was
geared to inflict massive death and destruction—certainly not something
we want to promote today.
Instead, I posed the rhetorical question, “But can’t such plants, along
with their workers, be converted to serve a new green economy? As a
matter of fact, one proposal for using the plant across the street being
abandoned by Ford is to build clean mass transit vehicles—and we need a
lot of those if we are serious about Global Warming.”
Unfortunately, Ford, and the local capitalist political Establishment,
who were understandably hostile to the worker initiative, were able to
quash the conversion despite its popular support. Success along these
lines will first require a restructuring of the labor movement as
well—on the community and political levels as well as the shop floor.
Meeting the new challenges of climate change will succeed only if we
revive the old class-struggle traditions of the only force with both the
interest and power to take on the climate-wrecking ruling class—the
working class.
Getting workers on board
Some progress is being registered. Prominent climate movement leaders
such as Naomi Klein, author of the best-seller “Capitalism vs. the
Climate, This Changes Everything,” are now promoting Just Transition.
This demand is the centerpiece of the program of the growing Labor
Network for Sustainability (http://www.labor4sustainability.org/).
And even some mainstream unions—such as the Service Employees
International Union, Amalgamated Transit Union, and National Nurses
United—have started mobilizing their members for climate actions.
As Socialist Action joins the worker contingents traveling the Road
Through Paris, this newspaper will provide news and analysis of the
fight for Class and Climate Justice—a struggle we can’t afford to lose.
Photo: Trade unionists march in Quezon City, Philippines, in November
2015. From www.sentro.org.
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Posted in Actions & Protest, Environment, Labor. | Tagged 350.org,
climate, global warming, just transition, labor party, Paris.
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