It's Live on the HomePage Now: Forget $15 an Hour - the Minimum Wage Should Be $24 The minimum wage once went up hand in hand with the productivity of the U.S. economy. It should again.
This is bad enough in itself, but even worse is that almost no Americans understand how low we’ve allowed our aspirations to become. Our country’s productivity gains in recent decades should have translated into a minimum wage today of $24 an hour — and by 2025, it should be almost $30. This may sound preposterous. But in fact, U.S. society was once on a path to this destination. We simply chose to step off that path. From both a moral and practical perspective, the minimum wage should go up in step with the productivity of the U.S. economy — that is, our ever-increasing ability to create more wealth with the same amount of work. Morally, as a country grows richer, everyone should share in the increased wealth. Practically, companies that sell things need lots of people with the money to buy them. We know that this can work because it already did. During the 30 years from the establishment of a minimum wage in 1938 to 1968, Congress repeatedly upped the minimum wage so that it did in fact go up hand in hand with U.S. productivity. By the end of that period, it was worth the equivalent of $12 per hour today. Since 1968, American productivity has substantially increased. Dean Baker, senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, points out that if the minimum wage had gone up at the same rate, it would now be over $24. At that level, as Baker says, a couple who both worked full time at minimum-wage jobs would take home $96,000 a year. Baker also calculates that by 2025, rising productivity would bring the minimum wage close to $30 an hour. But instead we’ve gone in the other direction. After the late 1960s, Congress stopped raising the minimum wage in step with productivity. Instead, over the past 50 years, Congress has allowed the minimum wage to plummet in real terms. That is, minimum-wage workers of the past were actually paid more than minimum-wage workers make today — even though today’s workers live in a much richer society. Indeed, since 1950, the hourly minimum wage has almost never been lower than it is now. Of course, 1950 is literally a lifetime ago, and the U.S. is now a completely different country. Our per capita gross domestic product is now four times greater. A UNIVAC computer of the time was 38 feet long, weighed eight tons, and had about 1/1,000,000 of the memory of today’s cheapest iPhone. Yet somehow, everyone working a federal minimum-wage job in 2021 is paid less per hour than the inflation-adjusted $8.25 or so that they would have gotten in 1950. During the past 71 years, the inflation-adjusted minimum wage has only been lower than it is now in 1989 and from 2004 to 2006. The first federal minimum wage was established in 1933 with the passage of the New Deal’s National Industrial Recovery Act. It was soon struck down as unconstitutional by the era’s ultra-right Supreme Court. President Franklin D. Roosevelt then ran for reelection in 1936 promising to keep fighting for a federal minimum wage. By contrast, that year’s Republican platform conspicuously did not call for one, although it did piously allow that it might be okay if individual states created minimum wages for women and children. Roosevelt’s landslide victory intimidated conservative Justice Owen Roberts enough that he reread the Constitution and realized that in fact it does allow the federal government to set a minimum wage. He switched sides in a 1937 minimum-wage case, clearing the way for the passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938. The Fair Labor Standards Act set the minimum wage at 25 cents per hour. Adjusted for inflation, that’s about $4.60 today. Tellingly, this was a compromise with Southern senators: The original version of the bill would have established a minimum wage of 40 cents per hour, the equivalent of about $7.37 now. The minimum wage only made it to 40 cents by 1945. It then was almost doubled when President Harry Truman signed a bill at the start of 1950 increasing it to 75 cents, worth $8.25 today after adjusting for inflation. What happens now is unclear, but certainly the situation doesn’t look good for any significant minimum-wage changes. The Senate parliamentarian ruled that minimum-wage provisions cannot be passed via the budget reconciliation process, which only requires 50 votes, and the Biden administration has refused to use its power to ignore the parliamentarian. And House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., has said that the two versions will not go to conference committee to be reconciled. Instead, the House will simply pass the Senate bill and send it to President Joe Biden for his signature. Democrats can now try to pass a stand-alone increase in regular order over a GOP filibuster, but that would require all of the Democratic senators and 10 Republicans, which is difficult to imagine. They could also change Senate rules to eliminate the filibuster, something that seems equally unlikely. So for the moment, it appears that America’s worst-paid workers have been abandoned yet again by the federal government. But let’s not pretend this isn’t a choice we’re making. Any time we want, we can choose to get back on the path to a different, fairer, better country.
ALSO SEE: Biden Pressing Congress to Restore Voting Rights Act Top House Democrat Jim Clyburn: 'No Way We'd Let Filibuster Deny Voting Rights' In an interview with the Guardian, the House majority whip calls for a way around the legislative roadblock
The comments from Jim Clyburn, the House majority whip, came days after the House of Representatives approved a sweeping voting rights bill that would enact some of the most dramatic expansions of the right to vote since the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Even though Democrats also control the US Senate, the bill is unlikely to pass the chamber because of a procedural rule, the filibuster, that requires 60 votes to advance legislation. In an interview with the Guardian this week, Clyburn called out two moderate Democratic senators, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, who have opposed getting rid of the filibuster. Republicans across the country are advancing sweeping measures to curtail voting rights and letting expansive voting rights legislation die would harm Democrats, Clyburn said. “There’s no way under the sun that in 2021 that we are going to allow the filibuster to be used to deny voting rights. That just ain’t gonna happen. That would be catastrophic,” he said. “If Manchin and Sinema enjoy being in the majority, they had better figure out a way to get around the filibuster when it comes to voting and civil rights.” Clyburn issued that warning ahead of the 56th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, the day in 1965 when law enforcement officers brutally beat voting rights activists in Selma, Alabama. Clyburn and other House Democrats have been hoping the early days of Joe Biden’s administration will be marked by passage of a bill named after the late congressman John Lewis of Georgia, a civil rights hero who was nearly killed on Bloody Sunday. That measure would restore a key provision of the Voting Rights Act, gutted by the supreme court in 2013, that required places with a history of voting discrimination to get election changes cleared by the federal government before they took effect. “Here we are talking about the Voting Rights Act he worked so hard for and that’s named in his honor and they’re going to filibuster it to death? That ain’t gonna happen,” Clyburn said. But the likelihood of that bill becoming law is doubtful under current procedures. Democrats expect Republicans to find a reason to filibuster it after its expected passage through the House of Representatives and consideration in the Senate. Thus Clyburn is calling for some kind of workaround of the filibuster in the current legislative climate, in which the Senate is split 50-50 and use of the legislative obstructing mechanism is all too common. “I’m not going to say that you must get rid of the filibuster. I would say you would do well to develop a Manchin-Sinema rule on getting around the filibuster as it relates to race and civil rights,” Clyburn said. Clyburn said he has not discussed changing the filibuster with Biden, who has expressed support for keeping the filibuster in place. The reality of their slim majority and the regularity of legislation dying through filibuster has caused Democrats to opt to pass the Biden administration’s Covid relief package through a budgetary process called reconciliation, which is not subject to the filibuster-proof 60-vote threshold. Clyburn wants to see the same thing with civil rights. “You can’t filibuster the budget,” Clyburn said. “That’s why we have reconciliation rules. We need to have civil and voting rights reconciliation. That should have had reconciliation permission a long, long time ago.” He noted: “If the headlines were to read that the John R Lewis Voting Rights Act was filibustered to death it would be catastrophic.” Clyburn’s comments underscore the difficulty the federal government has in moving any bill because of arcane legislative roadblocks. Broadly popular proposals like a minimum wage increase or a voting rights bill seem dead on arrival. And that has left veteran Senate Democrats skeptical that even a bill protecting Americans’ rights to vote has a chance. First, the filibuster would have to go, and that seems unlikely at the moment. “The short-term prospects of doing away with the filibuster seem remote just because there aren’t the votes to do that,” said Luke Albee, a former chief of staff to the Democratic senators Mark Warner of Virginia and Pat Leahy of Vermont. “My gut is it will take six months, eight months, a year of total obstructionism on the Republican side for senators who are skeptical now of getting rid of the filibuster to at least have a more open mind about it.” Albee also said it was possible that a Voting Rights Act could face strong Republican opposition, despite Clyburn’s confidence. “There’s no one that hopes it passes more than me but I just worry it’s a toxic environment,” Albee added.
Two More Former Cuomo Aides Accuse NY Governor of Inappropriate Behavior Politi writes:
Another woman, Karen Hinton, a former press aide to Cuomo, told the Washington Post she endured a “very long, too long, too tight, too intimate” embrace from the now-governor in a dimly lit Los Angeles hotel room in December 2000. Hinton had previously worked for Cuomo and at the time of the encounter was consulting for him while he led the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Hinton said she pulled away from the embrace that was “not just a hug” but he insisted. “He pulls me back for another intimate embrace,” she said. “I thought at that moment it could lead to a kiss, it could lead to other things, so I just pull away again, and I leave.” Hinton didn’t describe the encounter as harassment but said she saw it as a power play by Cuomo. Hinton said she only decided to speak up recently after watching the governor brush off other allegations of inappropriate conduct. Cuomo’s office strongly denied Hinton’s allegation. “This did not happen,” Peter Ajemian, Cuomo’s director of communications, said, characterizing Hinton as “a known antagonist” of the governor. A senior Cuomo adviser also dismissed the allegations by Liss, implying she was reading too much into normal encounters. “Reporters and photographers have covered the governor for 14 years watching him kiss men and women and posing for pictures,” Rich Azzopardi said. On Wednesday, Cuomo denied he ever touched women “inappropriately” but apologized for any pain he may have inadvertently caused. “I understand that sensitivities have changed and behavior has changed, and I get it. And I’m going to learn from it,” he said. Ana Liss “said she was proud of her role in the Executive Chamber but was dismayed that the governor never asked her about her work, focusing instead on personal questions or her appearance.” https://t.co/qqJJcaqrne — Charlotte Bennett (@_char_bennett_) March 7, 2021 These latest allegations come after other women have come forward. Lindsey Boylan said Cuomo once kissed her on the lips and made inappropriate comments. Charlotte Bennett has also come forward to say Cuomo asked her inappropriate questions that she saw as an effort to weigh whether she would consider sleeping with him. In reporting Hinton’s comments, the Washington Post also takes a step back and reached out to more than 150 former and current Cuomo staffers dating back to his HUD days. Most didn’t respond. But many of those who did described Cuomo as leading a toxic workplace where verbal attacks on subordinates was common and where he regularly asked young women who worked for him about their dating lives. Although the women said they didn’t see the questions as propositions, they did say it was part of a culture in which young women were regularly degraded. |
ne of the most powerful 
President Joe Biden participates in a roundtable discussion on a coronavirus relief package in the State Dining Room of the White House on Friday. (photo: Patrick Semansky/AP)
Biden Team Plots the Country's First National Covid Testing Strategy
David Lim, Politico
Lim writes:
The widespread testing envisioned by the Biden program is sorely needed to help bring the pandemic to an end.
he Biden administration is preparing to launch the first of several Covid-19 testing hubs to coordinate and oversee a $650 million expansion of testing in K-8 schools and congregate settings like homeless shelters.
The Department of Health and Human Services hopes to open the first hub in April, as part of a public-private partnership that could eventually add up to 25 million tests per month to the nation’s testing totals, two sources briefed on the plans told POLITICO. Administration officials discussed details of the program on Tuesday during a call with industry, government agencies and state and local health departments. They held a second industry call on Thursday.
The effort is the first attempt at formalizing a national testing strategy — something public-health experts have wanted for months. It comes amid a puzzling drop in the total number of tests recorded in the United States, from nearly 2 million a day in mid-January to about 1.5 million a day now. Public health experts attribute the decline to several factors, including widespread winter storms, increased reliance on point-of-care tests with results that are often not reported to health authorities and pandemic fatigue. The number of new cases is also declining, and the number of Americans who have been vaccinated is climbing.
But the widespread testing envisioned by the Biden program is sorely needed to help bring the pandemic to an end, experts said — even with three vaccines now available. A surveillance system that uses testing to track the spread of the virus and its variants can help communities determine how to safely reopen schools and offices, and eventually return to a more normal life.
“You need to be testing broadly even with the vaccine,” said Scott Becker, CEO of the Association of Public Health Laboratories. “We're still going to want to make sure that we have a good handle on this pandemic. We want to watch that tail end.”
During the Tuesday call organized by HHS, administration officials said the public-private partnership aims to conduct 150,000 tests per week by the end of April without interfering with existing testing supply chain and testing infrastructure.
The federal government will begin by creating a list of preferred Covid tests for use in schools and other congregate settings, according to slides presented during one of the HHS calls that were obtained by POLITICO. The administration will seek applications during March from diagnostic manufacturers, commercial labs, academic labs and other health care groups to run four coordinating hubs placed across the U.S. for at least six months. HHS anticipates awarding contracts by March 22.
“The coordinating center is going to have the responsibilities of coordinating with states, counties and local school districts on testing efforts for K-8 students within their region and ensure proper testing at laboratories,” HHS Testing & Diagnostic Working Group lead industry officer Steven Santos said on the Tuesday call.
One industry source predicted that the coordinating hubs’ task will be difficult because schools are not required to participate in the program.
“It's actually the coordinating centers responsibility explicitly to go and set up a testing collection methodology that works for the communities that you're serving,” the source said. “Which is a little insane since you’re serving in theory 25 percent of the country and in any given one of those sectors you’re going to have everything from rural to extremely urban.”
Former Trump testing czar Brett Giroir said the idea for a public-private system to coordinate testing in schools dates back last summer. But the plan didn’t get traction until late November or early December — meaning the Trump administration handed off its concept papers to the incoming Biden team.
“We just couldn’t get it done in time, it’s a big thing: multiple coordinating centers, you can’t just turn that around in a week or two,” Giroir said. “They definitely added the money to it.”
According to an HHS draft document, coordinating hubs will be asked to report county-level data on the number and type of Covid-19 tests administered each month. The hubs will also be tasked with coordinating delivery of test results within two to three days and establish a sustainability plan to ensure testing capacity is maintained after federal support ends.
Marcus Plescia, chief medical officer for the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials, said the push to reinforce the importance of testing as an infection control mechanism is particularly important because states and the public are so focused on vaccine distribution.
Testing works hand-in-hand with vaccination to help beat the virus back, Santos said on the administration’s Thursday call with industry.
"With the vaccine available, there is a real opportunity to get to zero transmission and stay there,” he said. “But to do so we need to increase testing capacity and to continue to identify and stop spread. Maintaining high levels of testing as vaccination rolls out and transmission decreases is critical to controlling this pandemic and to preventing another wave."
Other experts said they expect testing numbers to rebound, even without the new testing program, once the U.S. begins to reopen and more people travel. But the increasing availability of point-of-care tests means many tests may not be reported, said Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association.
That could pose a challenge for public health officials trying to understand the spread of the virus before the country sets up a dedicated surveillance system for Covid-19 that is similar to what it uses to monitor influenza.
“You want your surveillance system set up with some depth, some clear definitions so these ebbs and flows that are outside of that don’t influence your surveillance,” Benjamin said. “I’m worried that we’re not building that other system fast enough.”
Bruce Tromberg, a scientist at the National Institutes of Health who leads the federal government’s Rapid Acceleration of Diagnostics initiative, said his unofficial estimate is that the results of more than 2 million daily point-of-care tests are not being reported to health authorities.
“More and more people are relying on antigen tests and they are just not reported,” Giroir said. “Secondly, when the numbers go down, people are not hyper about being tested. We saw that all the time — when the numbers started going down, people just didn’t go — you couldn’t give away a test.”
An HHS spokesperson said the coordinating hubs are one piece of a broader strategy to ensure the country is testing enough to mitigate spread of the virus. “We look forward to continuing to announce more testing measures in the weeks ahead,” the spokesperson said.
The new federal coordination centers could have long-lasting benefits, beyond increased testing, that are only realized years down the line, Becker and Giroir said. Much of the lab capacity for the public-private partnership is expected to come from academic labs at universities across the country that will train the next generation of biostatisticians and lab workers.
“You’re never going to lose by investing in equipment and training at the universities,” Giroir said. “How many times have you heard, we don't have the lab technicians, we don't have the workforce. All this could be used for that.”
Becker hopes the result will be a more resilient public health system ready to respond when the next threat arrives.
“We needed to stand up this massive testing infrastructure,” Becker said. “And I think the next time there's some new emerging disease, we're going to be much better prepared, based on the experiences we had here.”
A store in New York City stands closed on April 21, 2020. A year after the pandemic started to spread, millions of Americans are still unemployed. (photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
'Why Us?': A Year After Being Laid Off, Millions Are Still Unemployed
Sam Gringlas, NPR
Gringlas writes:
anitor Gloria Espinoza still vividly remembers the moment she was laid off last year.
A supervisor gathered her and her colleagues at a parking lot of the office where she worked in San Francisco and then broke the news.
"I thought, 'God, why us?'," Espinoza said. "It was like receiving a bucket of cold water."
Months later, Espinoza is still unemployed and part of a worrying economic statistic: While the labor market is showing signs of recovery, millions who lost jobs at the beginning of the pandemic a year ago are still out of the labor force.
According to the monthly jobs report released on Friday, more than 4 million people had been unemployed for six months or more in February, a surge of 3 million over the past year.
Those who are long-term unemployed accounted for 41% of all unemployed people in the United States — levels not seen since the height of the Great Recession.
Adriana Kugler, an economics professor at Georgetown University and former chief economist at the Department of Labor, says the number of long-term unemployed is probably an undercount.
Factor in all the people who have only found part-time work or who have dropped out of the labor force altogether, and the problem could be more profound.
"All in all, that takes us to an unemployment rate that's closer to the double digits," Kugler says. "The magnitude of the problem is huge."
What's worse, among the most impacted by long-term unemployment are women and people of color who were disproportionately hit by layoffs during the pandemic.
Both groups were already getting paid less before the pandemic, and now face the risk of a permanent hit to their lifetime earnings.
A McKinsey study from February predicts it could take two years longer for women and people of color to recover jobs lost during the pandemic.
"The progress we see on closing the gender gap, even take COVID out of the picture, is so slow," says the study's co-author Kweilin Ellingrud. "And then you pause that slow glacial progress, and you make negative progress, it's deeply discouraging."
For now, many of the long-term unemployed are reluctant to give up jobs they've loved and held for years.
Budd Johnson, a transit bus driver at the University of Delaware, lost his job last year as classes went virtual.
Asked what he liked most about his old job, he uses a single word: "Everything."
"The sights are great. The people I work for are great. I love the atmosphere," he says.
Johnson is getting by on his dwindling savings as he waits to get called back, one day.
"I eat two meals a day instead of three," he says. "I do go to the food pantry and get food from them."
Yet the worry is that the longer people remain unemployed, the harder it will be for them to rejoin the workforce.
William Spriggs, chief economist at the AFL-CIO and a Howard University professor, says employers often stigmatize people who haven't worked in months. The longer someone's without a job, the harder it is to find a new one.
"So rather than a typical way you think of a line working — you show up at the movie theater, I'm first in line, I've been here, I'm next — it works the opposite," Spriggs says. "The people who are newly unemployed get the first in line."
There's another worry too.
What if certain jobs don't ever come back? How people work and live have changed dramatically during the pandemic, like the surge in online shopping, for example.
Those shifts could make some job losses more lasting, and Georgetown professor Kugler says the U.S. is unprepared to help those workers who will be impacted.
"I'm incredibly worried that we're not investing in workforce development," she says.
And even if some jobs do come back, they could come back in different forms, like office work, for example.
As many people have adapted to working from home, experts believe they may not return to crowded offices anymore as many companies consider a combination of remote and in-office work.
That could have ripple effects for people like Espinoza, who cleaned offices and got laid off last year.
Espinoza knows there's no guarantee she'll get her job back, but she's hopeful.
"In my mind, there's going to be a need for additional workers, so we can provide that extra-clean space that the workers deserve," she says.
Police use teargas to try to disperse protesters in Mandalay. (photo: Getty)
Unions Call for Total Strike in Myanmar; Suu Kyi Party Official Dies in Custody
Reuters
yanmar’s major trade unions called on members to shut down the economy from Monday to back a campaign against last month’s coup, raising pressure on the junta as its forces fired weapons and occupied hospitals in the main city Yangon after a day of massive protests.
Witnesses reported sounds of gunfire or stun grenades in many districts of the commercial capital after nightfall, as soldiers set up camp in hospitals and university compounds, local media reported. It was not clear whether anyone was hurt.
The Assistance Association for Political Prisoners, a non-profit, said the army was “intentionally terrorizing residents” in Yangon.
The show of force came after some of the largest nationwide protests since the Feb. 1 coup, and an alliance of nine unions said they planned a “full extended shutdown” of the economy.
“To continue economic and business activities as usual...will only benefit the military as they repress the energy of the Myanmar people,” they said in a joint statement. “The time to take action in defence of our democracy is now.”
A spokesman for the military did not answer calls seeking comment and Reuters was unable to reach police for comment. The army has said it is dealing with protests lawfully.
An official from the party of deposed leader Aung San Suu Kyi died overnight in police custody. National League for Democracy (NLD) official Khin Maung Latt had worked as a campaign manager for one of two Muslim MPs elected in 2020.
Ba Myo Thein, a member of parliament’s upper house which was dissolved after the coup, said reports of bruising to Khin Maung Latt’s head and body raised suspicions that he had been abused.
“It seems that he was arrested at night and tortured severely,” he told Reuters. “This is totally unacceptable.”
Police in Pabedan, the Yangon district where Khin Maung Latt was arrested, declined to comment.
STUN GRENADES
Sunday saw some of the biggest protests in recent weeks. Police fired stun grenades and tear gas to break up a sit-in by tens of thousands of people in Mandalay, the Myanmar Now media group said. At least 70 people were arrested.
Police also launched tear gas and stun grenades in the direction of protesters in Yangon and in the town of Lashio in the northern Shan region, videos posted on Facebook showed.
A witness said police opened fire to break up a protest in the historic temple town of Bagan, and several residents said in social media posts that live bullets were used.
Video posted by Myanmar Now showed soldiers beating up men in Yangon, where at least three protests were held despite overnight raids by security forces on campaign leaders and opposition activists.
Sithu Maung, the NLD MP who worked with Khin Maung Latt, said soldiers and police detained his father on Sunday night.
“They broke into the house… and point with guns, I was told,” he said in a Facebook post, adding that his father was also beaten.
The United Nations says security forces have killed more than 50 people to quell daily demonstrations and strikes since the military overthrew and detained Suu Kyi on Feb. 1.
“They are killing people just like killing birds and chickens,” one protest leader said to the crowd in Dawei, a town in Myanmar’s south. “What will we do if we don’t revolt against them? We must revolt.”
State-run Global New Light Of Myanmar newspaper quoted a police statement as saying security forces were dealing with the protests in accordance with law. It said the forces were using tear gas and stun grenades to break up rioting and protests that were blocking public roads.
CONDEMNATION
Well over 1,700 people had been detained under the military junta by Saturday, according to figures from the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners advocacy group.
The killings have drawn anger in the West and been condemned by most democracies in Asia. The United States and some other Western countries have imposed limited sanctions on the junta.
China, Myanmar’s giant neighbour to the northeast, said on Sunday it is prepared to engage with “all parties” to ease the crisis and is not taking sides.
Australia said it suspended a bilateral defence cooperation program with the military following the coup and its development program would engage only with non-government organizations.
Protesters demand the release of Suu Kyi and respect for November’s election - which her party won in a landslide but which the army rejected. The army has said it will hold democratic elections at an unspecified date.
An oil rig worker in the Bakken shale formation outside Watford City, N.D. (photo: Andrew Burton/Getty Images)
Union Jobs vs. Climate Change: How Oil Pipelines Have Emerged as a Flashpoint in the Biden Coalition
Juliet Eilperin and Eli Rosenberg, The Washington Post
The president is trying to square environmentalists’ demands to stop burning fossil fuels with labor leaders’ desire for union jobs linked to oil and gas
uring President Biden’s first formal meeting with the nation’s labor leaders, Mark McManus played the skunk at the garden party: Joking that he “drew the short straw,” the president of the pipe fitters union complained about Biden’s job-killing veto of the Keystone XL pipeline.
Biden countered that the decision should have come as no surprise to McManus’s members in the United Association; he had campaigned on a pledge to cancel the project, a potent symbol in the fight against climate change.
The two-hour meeting in the Oval Office last month was otherwise cordial. But the exchange highlighted the tension between Biden’s pledge to be “the most pro-union president in history” and his promise to environmentalists to aggressively confront global warming, which Biden has called “the existential threat of our time.”
Biden has proposed to serve both constituencies with a multitrillion-dollar “recovery” package that would create good jobs rebuilding the nation’s crumbling infrastructure while kick-starting the transition to a clean-energy economy. But that package is likely to require months of haggling on Capitol Hill. In the meantime, Keystone XL and other pipelines that transport fossil fuels have emerged as a flash point.
Many tribal activists and those from such groups as the youth-led Sunrise Movement — who want the country to stop burning fossil fuels immediately — were heartened when Biden vetoed Keystone XL, a major oil project, on his first day in office and paused new leases for oil and gas drilling on federal lands. They are also urging Biden to halt pipeline construction in the Midwest and on the East Coast.
But some labor leaders want Biden to slow down, noting the pay disparity between jobs in fossil fuels and renewable energy.
Roughly 4 percent of solar industry workers and 6 percent of wind-sector workers are unionized, according to the 2020 U.S. Energy and Employment Report, compared with about twice that in coal- and gas-fired power plants. Wind turbine technicians and solar panel installers are lower paid than many of their counterparts working in coal, oil and gas. Many of the biggest onshore wind farms lack collective bargaining, labor leaders said.
“You get guys that are coming off of fossil jobs in the Dakotas or the wind belt, and are making, you know, eighty, ninety, a hundred thousand a year,” said Brad Markell, executive director of the AFL-CIO Industrial Union Council. To put wind turbines up, “they’re looking at thirty to thirty-five thousand, with either no or substandard benefits.”
“The green sector is like any other new sector. … They want to pay as low as they can,” Markell added. “But that just can’t be the way this green economy thing is going to go down.”
During his meeting with labor leaders, Biden emphasized that he is determined to slash U.S. greenhouse gas emissions and asked how he could leverage investments in electric vehicles to create jobs for their members, said Ironworkers President Eric Dean, one of 10 union leaders who attended the Feb. 17 session.
The group appreciated the president’s thinking, Dean said, but defended pipeline projects as supporting jobs across the nation’s energy sector. They implored Biden not to block two pipelines in the Upper Midwest operated by the Canadian firm Enbridge, a move that would be far more controversial than blocking the Keystone XL.
“We declared we aren’t climate science deniers but [asked] that the administration understand those pipelines provide meaningful, high-paying jobs in those destinations,” Dean said.
Part of the challenge the administration faces is timing: It has been easy for Biden to limit oil and gas development through executive action, while appropriating funds for new projects requires congressional action.
In the meantime, the White House has established an interagency group to focus on ways to build up local economies in communities that have been dependent on coal and power plants. And the Interior Department has released more than $260 million for some of those communities to restore land damaged by mining.
National climate adviser Gina McCarthy has said the administration’s infrastructure plan ultimately will “produce millions of American jobs that are going to be good-paying, that are going to be jobs that have the opportunity for workers to join a union.”
Swinerton Renewable Energy President George Hershman, who chairs the board of the Solar Energy Industries Association, noted that his firm employs union members in states such as California, where most utility-scale projects reach agreements with organized labor to win faster approval.
Hershman acknowledged that the “same policy may not work in every state,” especially for small-scale installation companies. But he said skills in demand in the solar industry are similar to those found among operators of traditional power plants: “There is an ability to transfer that workforce,” he said.
Offshore wind power remains one of the most promising areas on that front. Orsted, the Danish company that is working on offshore wind projects in the Northeast, signed an agreement in November with the North America’s Building Trades Unions to transition union workers into that sector.
Donald Marcus, president of the Masters, Mates and Pilots union, which is part of the AFL-CIO, said his union is expecting to see a couple hundred offshore jobs created by such projects between Maryland and Massachusetts. “You’re talking about crew boats, you’re talking about carrying equipment to these jack-up rigs, you’re talking about barges. And, you know, it could grow into many hundreds of jobs.”
While labor waits for those jobs to materialize, the fate of the Enbridge pipelines have emerged as an urgent concern. The pipelines carry heavy crude oil and gas from Alberta through the Midwest down to Gulf Coast refineries.
One of the projects, Line 3, is a replacement and repair of a pipeline dating to the 1960s. Approved by the Obama administration, it has all of its permits and is well underway. But Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) has ordered the existing underwater segment of another pipeline, Line 5, to be shut down by mid-May, saying it threatens the health of the Great Lakes. The Canadian company is fighting her decision, which could effectively halt the entire pipeline’s operation.
The Line 5 project is also opposed by Michigan’s Bay Mills Indian Community, which signed a treaty in 1836 that ceded 14 million acres to the U.S. government while reserving the right to hunt, fish and gather on that land in perpetuity. Tribal attorney Whitney Gravelle said Enbridge Line 5 threatens those resources.
“Our treaty-protected resources are always at risk for an oil spill or other catastrophic damage,” she said in an interview, adding that the tribe is opposed to locking in new fossil fuel development. “We have a saying — any decision we make today should take into consideration the next seven generations.”
In an interview, Enbridge Senior Vice President Mike Fernandez said the firm has worked to upgrade safety measures and urged Biden to view the projects as different from Keystone XL because “they already exist as energy lifelines to the United States and to Canada.”
“Let’s see what happens,” said Terry O’Sullivan, president of the Laborers’ International Union of North America, who also met with Biden. “Obviously, we support it in a big way. Obviously, he knows that.”
Oil and gas industry groups are trying to make common cause with unions to advance pipelines and other fossil fuel projects. They have been joined by some Republicans, who are skeptical of Biden’s vision of high-paying green jobs.
“If you restrict oil and gas production and you kill the jobs that support it, what do you replace them with?” Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska) said. “They don’t have an answer.”
Sullivan pointed to ConocoPhillips’s Willow Project on Alaska’s North Slope, which is under review by the Biden administration and has been temporarily halted by the Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit. The Alaska Petroleum Joint Crafts Council has asked interior secretary nominee Deb Haaland to allow the project to move forward, saying it “has met all regulatory requirements” and “many are relying on the benefits it brings.”
Congressional Democrats have responded with legislation that would use tax incentives to spur manufacturers to create green, labor-friendly jobs.
“What we’re basically saying here is, let’s direct resources to not just create clean-energy projects, but make sure they’re done in the way that supports these jobs,” Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) said in an interview.
Meanwhile, environmental groups are teaming up with unions. Last week, the Sunrise Movement launched a “Good Jobs for All” campaign with the AFL-CIO. And groups such as the Sierra Club and National Wildlife Federation — which work with the United Steelworkers and other unions through the BlueGreen Alliance — have endorsed the idea of plugging old oil wells that leak methane as part of Biden’s infrastructure package.
“These are win-win investments for communities, for cutting pollution and creating family-sustaining jobs,” said Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club.
NABTU President Sean McGarvey said Biden’s long relationship with labor and some early decisions have given union leaders confidence that the president will not abandon them as he pursues bold action on climate change. “We have a high degree of confidence that he’s the right guy at the right time,” McGarvey said.
The test will be whether the new administration can create clean-energy livelihoods in parts of America that stand to lose the most in the shift away from fossil fuels, said National Wildlife Federation President Collin O’Mara.
“If we’re not creating jobs in the places most affected,” he said, “we would have failed.”
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.