Los Angeles Times, October 6, 2011, Thursday

Los Angeles Times

October 6, 2011, Thursday

Los Angeles Times (full article)

No to the Keystone XL pipeline
The jobs crisis is not an excuse for bad policy.

By Sean Sweeney and Bill McKibben

Cornell University's Global Labor Institute took a more realistic look at the numbers in a report published last week. Building a pipeline 1,700 miles across the center of the continent obviously will take workers; the best estimate of the State Department is that it will produce 2,500 to 4,650 on-site construction jobs, almost all of them non-local and temporary. Many of these jobs would pay decent wages, and in the current slump, 2,500 to 4,650 jobs is nothing to sneer at. But it's a far cry from 250,000 jobs.

Sean Sweeney is director of the Cornell Global Labor Institute. Bill McKibben is a scholar in residence at Middlebury College and an organizer with tarsandsaction.org