The current economic and energy crises place us at a crossroads. One path leads backward toward the kind of carbon-intensive, high-waste, low-road economic development strategies we have been following for decades. The other leads into a new clean energy future, where acting sustainably requires not only choosing lower-carbon, more environmentally friendly energy and fuel, but also choosing to pursue sustainable economic growth strategies that produce high-quality, family-supporting jobs and long-term prosperity. The Apollo Alliance and its partners believe the choice is clear: the old way did not work, and we must move in a new direction that is better for our workers, better for our communities, and better for our environment.
On Earth Day, 2009, US Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis hosted with Nancy Sutley, Chair of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, a national roundtable discussion on Women and Green Jobs, held in Washington, DC. For the first time, leading women from labor, business, academia, government and the nonprofit sectors from around the country shared how they are shaping our green economic strategy and how we can work together to ensure that women have access to the green economy. Building on this initiative, US Department of Labor’s Women’s Bureau offices, across the country, are working with partner organizations to host state and local Women and Green Jobs roundtables.
At the request of Nancy Chen, Midwest Regional Administrator, Women’s Bureau, US Department of Labor, the Wisconsin Women’s Council, in partnership with Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development, hosted Women, Jobs and Wisconsin’s Green Economy, a public policy roundtable, in Madison, WI. More than 60 people attended the program, representing industry, government, educational partners, workforce development organizations and other stakeholders.
In Wisconsin, as nationally, the social and political momentum of green jobs has garnered interest, legislation and dollars to encourage the development of green work and industries. Many green jobs, however, are in occupational fields that are non-traditional for women (that is, women comprise 25 percent or less of total employment). The purpose of the Roundtable was to bring together leading Wisconsin experts to assess where women – as workers, business owners, and leaders – fit in to this momentum. And, if they don’t, to determine how we will engage them. An important outcome of the program was to gather valuable information to provide input to state policymakers and other stakeholders, as well as to US Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis, who has made including women in American Recovery and Reinvestment Act created jobs a national concern.
What numbers and kinds of jobs result from investment in building energy efficiency (EE)? This report, based on joint work by COWS (University of Wisconsin-Madison) and the Powell Center for Construction and Environment (University of Florida), suggests a way to get at least policylevel answers to this question for state and local programs. Program designers, armed with better knowledge of the building stock, energy costs, specific EE measures likely to be supported, and other local data, will be able to provide much more robust estimates as they move toward program implementation. The hope here is simply to get them started.
To define our scope at the outset, we treat the question above deliberately narrowly — limiting ourselves to jobs in direct installation of EE measures. This excludes indirect “upstream” jobs in the production and sale of the many parts, equipment, and materials used in those measures (hereinafter, “materials”); “downstream” jobs in the disposal or recycling of replaced materials; jobs induced by demand from new income; and any jobs resulting from EE’s increase of property value and building occupant health and productivity. We define job numbers for installers not by actual positions, many of which are part-time, but “job-years” (2080 hours) of work. We distinguish job “kind” only by broad skill levels in the work involved (not getting without getting into the maze of vocational training that more advanced ones require), which we assume to be constant across all EE measure categories, and those categories themselves. So, for example, we say how many people in HVAC will be needed, but not how many steamfitters vs. sheetmetal workers. Finally, we report only EE measures that achieve simple cost-effectiveness (benefits greater than cost) in ≤ 10 years.
Within this scope and set of conventions, this report identifies the sorts of EE measures applicable to different building types and the sorts (and cost) of labor needed to apply those measures. It then puts these two together to estimate answers to the question asked above, on different assumptions of project focus and labor cost. Given wide variation in the EE universe across and within building types, and variation in labor cost across and within regions, the exercise has more than the usual limits of reporting means and modes. But it does identify the sorts of questions that should be asked here (which buildings, what measures, what skills requirements and associated labor costs) and some ballpark answers, providing at least a starting point for more detailed local investigations.
Escalating economic crisis and a bold federal response have intensified the regional promise of green jobs — that a green wave might lift all boats, rebuilding a prosperous industrial heartland on a sustainable bedrock of energy efficiency and renewable energy. Recession, climate change, and energy insecurity may not signal the end of the middle-American dream. A coordinated state response to these challenges could build a vibrant green economy based on clean energy and decent jobs for all.
The task is enormous, and urgent. Wisconsin lost nearly 73,000 jobs in the last twelve months, with more than half of that loss in the last four months. Precipitous job loss across all sectors follows years of anemic overall job growth and dramatic decline of the state’s critical manufacturing sector, which lost over 14 percent of its job base between 2001-2004 and shed an additional 13,000 jobs even before last fall’s economic collapse. 1
But the challenges in Wisconsin’s labor market predate the recession and require long-term solutions. If green jobs are to begin restoring regional prosperity, any stimulus plan to create them must address larger underlying challenges facing the state’s working families.