Greenwire, July 23, 2008, Wednesday

Copyright 2008 Environment and Energy Publishing, LLC

Greenwire

July 23, 2008, Wednesday

SECTION: Top Stories Vol. 10 No. 9

HEADLINE: BUSINESS: Unions put more green on the bargaining table

BODY:

Lydia DePillis, Greenwire reporter

It may seem like an odd insertion between bathroom breaks and maternity leave, but environmental contract provisions have started cropping up in labor negotiations as unions start greening traditional blue-collar jobs.

Subsidies for alternative transportation, green cleaning products and recycling are a few of the items included in samples of bargaining language posted on the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Web site. The union set up the site last month to showcase its national efforts and to propose ideas for its locals.

SEIU officials say going green appeals to the traditional union emphasis on quality of life.

"How do we make it one of those core issues? If we can make it a working condition, then we can try to make it a green connection," said Marianne McMullen, assistant to SEIU President Andy Stern.

About a year ago, McMullen says, Stern asked her to "start figuring out SEIU's role in the environmental movement." So she pulled together the union's legal team and asked it to find out what people were doing on the ground. That information was compiled into a pamphlet and circulated at SEIU's quadrennial conference in early June, where the union passed a resolution declaring that it would "involve members in developing and achieving new goals for contract negotiations and union-management partnerships that will improve jobs and address climate change."

Since then, there has been no huge rush to incorporate green provisions into contracts, but awareness is rising as issues like green jobs take center stage in the political and economic arenas. On the ground

Examples of green contract negotiations are scattered across the country. A few stick out.

In New York, the building service union SEIU Local 32BJ has built upon a previous structure -- employee education benefits -- to create classes on green building that are free for its 60,000-person membership.

The main program, an 11-session course taught by the sustainable design consultant Steven Winters Associates, covers a range of issues including rating systems, water usage, energy conservation and financing of green buildings. Other, shorter classes focus on green cleaning materials or building energy auditing. Employers cover part of the cost of the classes, with the rest paid for by the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority.

The idea is that those trained in green building management will see the small ways in which building efficiency can be improved, from light bulbs to insulation. And the union members themselves become more marketable with skills that could help them go on to earn a more formal certification from the U.S. Green Building Council, which supplies workers qualified to operate apartments, offices and condos that charge residents a premium for their cutting-edge green technology.

Some unions, however, have more ideas than management has the power to implement.

Mike Roskey, a research analyst in the California Department of Fish and Game, helped found the Environment Committee for SEIU Local 1000 in California, a public sector union that represents 90,000 employees. After reading reports from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, he said, he began researching ways in which environmental provisions could be worked into contracts.

Roskey's proposals include full reimbursements for costs incurred by a variety of alternative commuting methods, as well as the establishment of joint labor management committees on climate change and waste reduction. The committees would inventory the state employer's solid waste and greenhouse gas emissions, and formulate goals to bring them into line with IPCC targets.

The Local 1000 council approved many of the committee's proposals. But when the time came to actually bargain for those proposals, the union ran into the realities of dealing with a state mired in debt that hasn't even passed a budget yet.

So far, said Local 1000 Director of Contracts Art Grubel, the negotiators -- also pushing hard on issues like pay equity -- have not made much progress with the green provisions. Those kind of items "aren't considered the mandatory subject of bargaining," so the state will sometimes simply not consider them.

"Even a little bit of money, even if it would save the air or save fuel, there's no guaranteeing that people in power will put their money where their mouth is," Grubel said. "There are some proposals coming out of Mike's committee that are fairly far-reaching, and if the state was willing to agree to some of those, it would be a fairly significant step forward."

Other unions besides SEIU, without the insulation of the booming service economy, have focused their efforts on new green jobs more rather than greening their existing workplaces. A spokesman at the International Brotherhood of Teamsters said that while the union's solid waste division was working to get more recycling positions, for example, he was not aware of any green contracts negotiations in progress. Same with the AFL-CIO.

"It doesn't seem like this is something that this is on our radar too much," said Gordon Pavy, the AFL-CIO's head of collective bargaining. "We're much more concerned with basic issues like wages and health care." It came from overseas

Europe, as is often the case in environmental matters, has been out in front on environmental reforms in the workplace.

"They're way ahead of us on these fronts and have been anxiously awaiting U.S. labor's awakening on these issues," McMullen said.

Last December, the Cornell Global Labor Institute led a contingent of U.S. labor leaders to the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Bali, Indonesia. For some, it was their first real exposure to many of the implications surrounding global warming for workers, and a chance to network with European, Canadian and British labor leaders who have been working on environmental issues for years.

Daytime cleaning, in which janitors clean during the day rather than at night when workers have left the building, has started to catch on around the continent. Besides saving energy on lighting, advocates say, it is better for staff morale to have more direct interaction -- desirable for both workers and management.

On that issue, "I don't think it's going to be, employers resist and labor pushes for it," said Cornell Global Labor Institute's director, Sean Sweeney.

Britain's Trades Union Congress has also long had sustainable workplaces as one of its main arenas of advocacy, both with employers and its own members, publishing a report this year on how Britain should make a "just transition" to a green economy at a conference this June.

Europe has something of an advantage over American unions: It is much more centralized, often negotiating in tripartite bodies with labor, management and governments that have already made commitments to curbing their greenhouse gas emissions. That means that decisions made are broad-based and transformational -- but also hard to agree on.

"National priorities don't always get expressed in collective bargaining," Sweeney explained.

LOAD-DATE: July 23, 2008