Part 1 of 2: Retrospective On Our Renovations

Unions, Hippies, and Politicians - Oh My…

February 15th, 2009
Claire McEachern

Photo Credit: 2 Miles

Union Workers and Hippies.

Scratch that.

I mean “Joe six-packs” and granola-eating tree huggers.

Oh, dear!

What I am really trying to say is that the two most visible groups at the Good Jobs, Green Jobs Conference (held in Washington D.C. from February 4th to 6th) were the United Steel Workers and the Sierra Club. That fact has raised many an eyebrow of disbelief and curiosity. These two groups have even helped form an alliance, the Blue-Green Alliance that is, and are leaders in the movement to create a new economy based on energy efficiency, safe environmental practices, and jobs that actually “make stuff”.


For three days, 2,500 engaged participants worked their way through 20 Keynote speakers, 2 Plenary Panels, 50 workshops, the Green Jobs Expo, and a festive opening reception. By the morning of February 6th the excitement, fatigue, and intense belief that we were on the brink of something truly enlightening was evident. We all took a moment and relaxed to the opening music of the DC Labor Chorus, who had us laughing as we sang gospel together about insulation and wind power.

DC Labor Chorus (Photo credit: 2 Miles)

Winona LaDuke, Executive Director of Honor the Earth and Founding Director of White Earth Land Recovery Project, quickly brought the audience back to its roots with her powerful annunciation of the role of indigenous peoples of North America in the journey to the current state of environmental affairs as well as their participation in the recovery of sustainable practices. As she put it, “[No one] can build an economy based on conquest.” Next came Fred Redman, Vice President of the United Steel Workers, whose overriding message was that “we need to go home and take back our planet.”

Following this, were the long awaited and highly anticipated comments from Van Jones, author of the NY Times Bestseller The Green Collar Economy: How One Solution Can Solve Our Two Biggest Problems and founding president of Green For All. Mr. Jones made both serious and humorous connections with the audience during his speech through oratorical awakenings like,  “The scariest channel on TV now is The Weather Channel”, “Humanity is coming back to itself”, and “Are we [as a society of workers] like locusts or honeybees?”  Believe it or not, all of those speakers were just a part of one of the two, hour-and-a-half plenary panels.

Other conference highlights included the big name presenters like James P. Hoffa (current president of the Teamsters and only son of the legendary James R. Hoffa), political bigwigs like Jared Bernstein (Chief Economic Policy Advisor to Vice President Joseph Biden) and Lisa Jackson (Administrator of the U.S Environmental Protection Agency). There were hundreds of local organizations and companies in attendance, all hoping for some direction in how to merge their agendas or find common ground with the national scene. For these groups, perhaps the most informative part of the conference was the workshops.

5 sessions provided numerous options with topics ranging from Green For All: Prison Re-entry and Green Jobs, Investing in the New Energy Economy, Case studies in Colorado and Appalachia, Youth, Culture, and Making Green Jobs Cool, to Job Creation Through Smart Gird/ Transmission Upgrades. Despite the seemingly wide range of topics presented there were a couple of clear messages that were constant and unifying:

1. End the false dichotomy that we can’t have good manufacturing jobs and a clean environment, which has been stifling the alliance of blue collar and environmental communities. The opposite is true: Good Jobs Are Green Jobs and these groups need to work together. 
2. How do we define a “good job”? Workers rights, real living wages, benefits, and absence of environmental health hazards or concerns are all factors of a “good job”. 
3. If America is to accomplish energy independence, growth of the middle class, and establishment of a “green economy”, training and education programs outside of current traditional academic ones will need to be (re)established. 
4. The American Dream based on excess, power, and status will need to change.

The road to functionally addressing all of these themes in the day-to-day lives of U.S. Citizens (and global communities) will be long, but if the 2nd annual Good Jobs, Green Jobs Conference is any indication of the dedication and hope of America’s early adopters of sustainability, I believe that we are in very good hands. As our new President has said, “now is the time to act boldly”.

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