Reimagining Work in a Green Economy
By Lily Z
The Atlanta DSA Medium is a collection of individual member op-eds, educational blogs, and other thoughts from the Left. Opinions expressed on our Medium are those of the author only.
If you take a look around your neighborhood, your city, the state of Georgia, you’ll likely see infrastructure in need of repair, ecosystems in need of restoration, and people in need of housing and care. There is much work to be done, yet these urgent needs are undervalued or completely unreflected in our current labor market. And if the injustices in our labor market weren’t already obvious enough, the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed which work is truly essential, and the ways essential workers are treated as expendable. For example, incarcerated workers fight fires in California for a dollar an hour, undocumented farm workers pick crops under smoke-filled skies, and workers in warehouses and factories fight for basic protections. Here in Georgia, workers in agriculture and poultry processing are particularly at risk.
The Green New Deal (GND) is a chance to reimagine our current, dysfunctional approach to labor. If we are serious about building a viable and sustainable future, we desperately need teachers, caregivers, social workers, community organizers, farmers, food workers, retrofitters, conservationists, builders, and others to repair our broken infrastructure and communities. And if we take seriously the root causes of our current crisis, these jobs need to be unionized, well-paid, and accessible to members of frontline communities. Organizers with the Movement Generation, for example, invite us to treat labor as a renewable resource, something that can sit in dynamic balance with the living world when brought in alignment with our communities’ values and priorities. In place of an extraction economy, which requires us to separate our values from our labor, we need to build a regenerative economy, which treats working people with dignity. This requires that we change the work we already do, plan for work that we need to be doing, and shape our economy with a sense of justice.
Change the work we already do
Decades of privatization and attacks on unions have reduced the power of workers across all sectors. According to the Economic Policy Institute, CEO compensation has risen by 940% while worker compensation has only risen by 12%. As of September 2020, the wealth of American billionaires like Jeff Bezos has increased by a third during the COVID-19 pandemic, while Amazon workers were forced to strike simply to demand paid sick leave. Reimagining work through The Green New Deal — among the many problems it could address — is also an opportunity to support the creation of unions in existing sectors that don’t tend to have them, so workers can negotiate for the pay, benefits, and ownership that they deserve. It is also a chance to compensate low-carbon workers like teachers, caregivers, social workers, and artists with the pay they deserve.
Plan for the work we need to be doing
It’s time to collectively review our priorities. We need to prevent further climate change, make our planet livable, and plan for more frequent climate disasters. This means putting an immense amount of labor into retrofitting, sustainable energy, rewilding, and habitat restoration, as well as new logistics, food, and care systems. These jobs need to be in the public sector, well paid, and unionized if not worker-owned.
Economic justice
Most importantly, we need to end the exploitative and extractive approach that contributed to climate change in the first place. Through the Green New Deal we must offer a jobs guarantee and livable minimum wage. Frontline communities, who have too long borne the brunt of climate change and environmental degradation through environmental racism, must receive direct investment, and indigenous groups should be compensated for the work they’ve already been doing to protect and sustain their land. The shift to a sustainable energy system will also require a Just Transition, so workers in the fossil fuel industry can make the change with support and their same salaries. New technologies should be used in ways that make workers’ lives easier, rather than simply displacing them.
Life beyond work
It is within our power to demand more dignified lives, decentered from the cycle of work and consumption. With the technology and efficiency we already have, we could actually meet community needs while working less — and shorter workweeks would lower carbon emissions. With parental leave and well-paid childcare, a living wage and a jobs guarantee, we can build a world with time for work, leisure, and community, and one where we can be proud of collective labor.
