What Is a Green-Collar Job?

by Emily Gertz

categories: Activism, Cities, Clean Energy, Climate Security, community, energyefficiency, Fossil Energy, Greenhouse Gas, Imagining the Future, Jobs & Economy, Policy & Legislation, Solutions, Transportation

Published September 07, 2009 @ 04:19PM PT

"Green-collar jobs" have become a daily facet of the national conversation on energy policy, as well as economic revival. At the most fundamental, these are jobs that link rapid decarbonization of the nation's energy economy, with reviving the nation's eviscerated manufacturing base.

Here's how Apollo Alliance chair Phil Angelides defined green-collar jobs to Time Magazine last year:

It has to pay decent wages and benefits that can support a family. It has to be part of a real career path, with upward mobility. And it needs to reduce waste and pollution and benefit the environment.

The green jobs vision is creating some refreshing new advocacy partnerships, like the Blue Green Alliance, a joint effort of environmental groups and labor unions.

And it's not a particularly partisan issue -- or at least it wasn't a few years ago. The expansion of the green-collar jobs sector got its first major federal boost in 2007, with the passage of the Green Jobs Act, as Title X of the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007.

In the legislation, the federal government committed $125 million a year to create an "Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Worker Training Program" -- essentially, to provide grants (via the Labor and Energy departments) to state and federal green jobs training programs. The act's provisions have a particular focus on helping people find "pathways out of poverty" and into economic self-sufficiency.

It's not clear that the program has received the full funding it was promised, however.

Apollo Alliance is the coalition of businesses, business leaders, environmental advocates, labor, and social justice groups that advocates for fast expansion of the clean energy and green jobs economies, including:

• Manufacturing and installing renewable energy equipment
• Modernizing the nation's energy grid for the 21st centry
• Weatherization and energy-efficient, lower-environmental-impact building construction and retrofits
• Expanding mass transit
• Re-vamping the nation's auto manufacturing sector with fuel-efficient, mixed-fuel and fully electric cars

Expansion of green-collar jobs is bound tightly on Capitol Hill to the fuller suite of policies for climate and energy policy reform - which include capping and lowering greenhouse gas pollution, ramping down our use of coal-fired power, and lowering the climate impact of transportation.

The American Renewal and Recovery Act, aka the stimulus bill, has allocated billions for clean energy initiatives that will help prime and fill the pump for green-collar jobs creation, such as over $2 billion in tax credits for manufacturers of clean energy equipment, close to $300 million for the "Clean Cities" program to reduce petroleum use, and dozens if not hundreds of state weatherization programs.

The Department of Energy recently demolished the findings of a report from Spain claiming two jobs would be lost for every one green-collar job created. By many accounts, the potential of green-collar jobs to put thousands to work is enormous, in fact.

"[T]he clean energy industry experienced a 9.1% job growth between 1998 and 2007," wrote Melissa Hincha-Owenby on Mother Nature Network in June, citing a report from the Pew Trusts. "This figure is more than double the 3.7% increase posted in all industries during the same time period."

Pew counted individuals, not industries -- meaning workers actually installing solar panels -- and found that there are now around 770,000 green-collar jobs spread out among 68,200 businesses.

That's already approaching the scale of the long-established fossil energy sector, which employs around 1.27 million; and far outruns sectors with longer track records, like biotech's 200,000 jobs.