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Groups Seek Pledge
Want 'Green-Collar' Jobs With Good Pay
By MEREDITH KOLODNER
Labor and environmental advocates want to make sure the 5,000 jobs that will be created by Mayor Bloomberg's plan to make the city's buildings more energy-efficient adhere to high labor standards.  | |
The Chief-Leader/Pat Arnow
BUILD 'EM GREEN: Queens
Councilman James F. Gennaro, who is the chair of the Council's
Committee on Environmental Protection, hosted a press conference
Dec. 5 to announce the completion of a Council-funded report
entitled Growing Green Collar Jobs that makes proposals about how to
create sustainable, well-paying jobs while making city buildings
more energy-efficient.
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They released a report Dec. 5, funded by the City Council, that seeks guarantees from the city that the jobs created by the Mayor's PlaNYC pay a living wage and are accessible to communities struggling with persistent high unemployment.
'How We Build Matters'
"What we build is as important as anything else the city's going to do," said AFL-CIO New York City Central Labor Council Executive Director Ed Ott, "but how we build it, where we build it, under what standards, is all part of going forward. The new technologies cannot be used as an excuse to lower standards."
The report comes on the heels of the City Council's passage of the Climate Protection Act, which attaches legislative mandates to the Mayor's goal to reduce city agencies' carbon emissions by 30 percent by 2017, with an overall 30-percent reduction of emissions citywide by 2030.
It is not yet clear what labor standards will be established for the thousands of jobs created, nor whether they will land in the private- or public-sector realm. Retrofitting city buildings will create positions for engineers, designers, building maintenance and the building and construction trades.
"If the work is being done on city buildings and in the public sector," said Jon Forster, the vice president of the Civil Service Technical Guild, "and if civil service titles are covered, I think they should go to the public-sector workforce."
Seek Career Development
Mr. Foster, who is part of the Mayor's job task force connected to PlaNYC, added that as the work spreads to privately-owned buildings, it should create private-sector jobs, perhaps overseen by city project managers and designers to ensure compliance with city codes.
The report's recommendations include establishing benchmarks in large buildings to track their efficiency, creating green housing maintenance codes, increasing professional development for city employees so that they can oversee the city's greening infrastructure, and creating a green-collar jobs task force.
The authors also propose a workforce development center that could link workers with paid job experiences and place them in jobs that would lead to long-term careers.
Several of the participants at the Dec. 5 press conference, hosted by Queens Councilman and Chairman of the Council Committee on Environmental Protection James F. Gennaro, asserted that the new alliance for "green-collar" jobs was unprecedented.
Tackle Unemployment
"You have got the Mayor's Office, the City Council, activists and advocates, and you've got labor, working together to create a sustainable and just community in New York City," said Elizabeth Yeampierre, the chair of the New York City Environmental Justice Alliance. "That has never happened before."
The report's author, Jack Dafoe of Urban Agenda,
emphasized that the jobs should be accessible to low-income black and Latino
communities where unemployment is highest. "We want to create an economy that is
thriving, green and just," he said.
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