green jobs

  • Auto Workers at the Auto Show: End Two-Tier!

    As the Detroit International Auto Show opens January 9 and PR glitz is sprinkled everywhere, auto workers will be demonstrating against two-tier wages and the U.S.-Korea Free Trade Agreement. They’ll say what auto workers and the whole economy need is a strong union, and retooled plants that can put the unemployed back to work building mass transit and renewable energy technology.

  • Reformer Elected to Head ATU Transit Union

    Update! Thursday, Sept. 30

    Larry Hanley was elected president today of the 190,000-member Amalgamated Transit Union, which organizes bus drivers in cities across the U.S. and Canada, by delegates to the ATU Convention. Hanley helped found the Keep America Moving coalition to build support for mass transit. Labor Notes' Mark Brenner interviewed him this month about how he would run the ATU differently and organize transit workers together with community members.

  • Making Climate Protection Worker-Friendly
    Joe Uehlein
    Jun 16 2010 - 8:08am

    “There are no jobs on a dead planet,” said one union leader to those arguing unions should care only about jobs, not the Earth. But is it fair to put the cost of halting ecological devastation on the fossil-fuel economy's workers?

  • GM’s “Northern Strategy”: Go Non-Union

    The “reinvention” of the “New GM” has begun with the opening of a lithium-ion battery plant in Brownstown, Michigan, near Detroit. The event was remarkable not only because the Brownstown plant signals GM’s return to the production of an electric vehicle but also because, for the first time in about 30 years, GM has opened a non-union plant in the U.S.

  • ‘There Are No Tea-baggers in Soup Lines’

    Auto workers outshone the tea-party types as dueling demonstrations took place in the snow outside the Detroit Auto Show today. Small numbers of auto workers gathered to say government should use its role in the auto bailout to direct the factories toward job-creating green products such as high-speed trains and wind turbines—and should enact Medicare for All.

  • One Million Climate Jobs Now

    As a member of Autoworkers’ Caravan, I was happy to see "One Million Climate Jobs Now," a pamphlet from union members in Britain. It shows very plainly and simply how to create the new jobs that are needed if we are going to avoid disastrous climate change—that is, global warming.

  • Who Gets the Green Jobs, and Are They Any Good?
    Tiffany Ten Eyck
    Jul 15 2009 - 11:38am

    Just because a job’s green doesn’t mean it’s good. With everything going green—if it really is—what does that mean for our workplaces? A union-backed report by Good Jobs First cautioned that job creation in the new “green economy” often means more low-wage, low-benefit work with companies hostile to unions.