Foreword: For the second consecutive year, SEIU is participating in the Labor Delegation to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, taking place this week in Posnan, Poland. Union representatives from Mexico, India, the U.K., the U.S., Korea, Sierra Leone and elsewhere are making sure that the concerns of and effects on working people the world over are an essential part of every discussion at the conference. Marrianne McMullen, SEIU's representative to U.S. Labor Delegation, blogs about their work and experiences (below).
Sunday, December 7, 2008
It's 3:30 p.m. in Poznan and we can see the sun already setting through the sheer drapes of the hotel meeting room. More than 90 labor delegates are gathered at this hotel about 12 miles outside of the city. Many more countries are represented now: Nepal, South Africa, Pakistan, Norway, Latvia, Brazil, Holland, Ethiopia.
No formal talks are scheduled for the United Nations Climate Change Conference today, so the labor delegates of the International Trade Union Council are using the day for presentations and discussions.
The meeting is translated into four languages; delegates take turns scrambling for their headsets.
Controversial Coal
Earlier this morning, Kazimierz Grajcarek from Poland's Solidarnosc welcomed the delegation to his home country, and introduced what is always the 800-pound guerilla in the room for labor and environment: coal. Coal miners, those employed in coal-related industries, entire towns and even states for which coal is the economic life blood all feel threatened by the movement for cleaner energy sources.
Moving away from coal as a power source may be crucial to the planet's survival in the long run, but it is potentially devastating to millions of working people's lives in the short run.
Grajcarek from Solidarnosc described a coal-related workforce of nearly a million in Poland, far greater than the U.S.'s highly automated coal industry, wherein about 60,000 coal miners work. Still, even within the U.S. labor delegation, this is a strained topic.
Damon Silvers from the AFL-CIO said at a recent meeting on labor and climate that, "the country and the labor movement owe a debt to mineworkers that is almost unpayable." Indeed.
Mineworkers literally took bullets for the labor movement, and they systematically sacrificed their health and their lives for our nation's industrial development.
Just Transition
But the sincere hope is that with appropriate planning and resources, addressing climate change doesn't have to be devastating to these workers and communities. "Just transition" is the term used to capture the concern for the employment impacts of moving to cleaner energy sources. Making the imperative of just transition clear is one of the labor delegates' tasks as we participate in the U.N. Climate Conference.
Just transition means full dialogue and engagement with the communities affected, increased social protections for them, new job opportunities and strong retraining programs. For this concept to mean anything, however, it has to be demonstrated.
The labor delegation at this conference, both in its meetings and in side conversations, is struggling with how to operationalize just transition. Could part of the U.S. stimulus package be used to support clean-energy related manufacturing in heavily coal-dependent parts of the country? Could we build, for example, a plant to produce energy-efficient light bulbs in West Virginia?
We need a clear commitment to the people who have done this difficult and dirty work--work that we've all benefited from for generations.
Nuclear Power
The labor delegates at this all-day meeting and training session took advantage of the considerable number and quality of scientific presenters to pose other difficult questions.
How about nuclear power? Nuclear emits no greenhouse gases.
Peter Poschen, the senior sustainable development specialist for the International Labor Organization, responded to this question by explaining that while nuclear does not emit CO2, it has three primary problems:
- The near impossibility of long-term safe storage of radioactive waste produced by nuclear plants;
- It is not a renewable resource as there is a limited supply of uranium, and;
- From a labor perspective, nuclear plant production is very capital intensive and actually creates relatively few jobs compared to other emerging energy sectors.
By 6 p.m. the delegation had been exposed to eight hours of information and discussion. We were ready to be done for the day, and more than a bit more ready to participate in the U.N. talks in the days to come.
