The solar sector, now adding jobs to the American economy at 10 times the national average, has given labor some much-needed love. Now it’s labor’s turn to love solar back by leaving obsolete energy jobs that are overheating the planet and signing up with the sunshine industry.
That transformation is slowly underway, but heating up as well. “The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, especially in California, has had a lot of success in getting solar work, especially IBW-569,” AFL-CIO spokesperson Jeff Hauser told me.
The good news keeps coming. First Solar’s solar farm in Mendota, California, a small town sometimes wrestling with a 50 percent unemployment rate, is about to create hundreds of jobs. SolarCity’s forthcoming mammoth factory in New York could create thousands more. Across the U.S. alone, over 143,000 solar jobs are about to exponentially multiply. Across the entire world, unplugging fossil fuel jobs and supercharging renewable jobs would shave percentage points off the global unemployment rate.
The math is simple: Every million bucks spent on the dirty fuels industry creates barely 5 jobs, but nearly 17 jobs if it’s spent on the renewable energy industry.
This financial no-brainer is why corporations like Cisco, 3M and more are now offering their own employees deep discounts on solar panels for their homes. They know full well that doing so will pay it forward, to both labor and the environment.
To speed up the process, labor now has a heavy job to do. It has to wean itself off of the dying energy industries that have traditionally provided decades of employment, and fight for solar like its life depended on it.
That means thinking twice about sending thousands of union members from the United Mine Workers of America and more to protest the Environmental Protection Agency’s power plant regulations in front of federal buildings. Especially when major universities like Johns Hopkins have to shut down their medical school programs for callously misdiagnosing black lung disease among coal miners, as a favor to the workers’ much healthier, much richer bosses. And that means walking away from conventional energy jobs at TransCanada and other doomed pipeline companies, to instead find less lethal jobs and easier training in Canada’s rising solar sector.
There’s no time like now for the labor movement to work cleaner and smarter. It just has to move faster.
This article appeared at Solar Energy