Repower America's Workers

The thousands of hardworking United Steelworkers in the Northwest who lost their jobs didn't know climate change was their adversary.

Before 2000, 40 percent of the aluminum made in the United States was smelted in Washington, Oregon and Montana. At the time, more than 5,000 USW members worked in eight regional smelters. Low-cost power from the Columbia River hydroelectric system made these smelters cost competitive in the global economy.

But several years of increasingly diminished snow falls in the Cascade Mountains meant less water in rivers and smaller reservoirs, reducing the supply of inexpensive hydroelectricity. Combined with Enron's infamous energy market manipulations, higher electricity rates caused the permanent closure of a number of these smelters. Today, only three smelters remain in the Northwest, and over 4,500 USW members lost their jobs because of this change in the regional climate, a consequence of the global warming already taking place.

On Labor Day, the outlook for American workers remains cloudy. A weakened economy and high energy prices are making it harder for middle-class men, women and families to make ends meet.

Americans deserve an affordable and stable economic future, and we can get there by pursuing a comprehensive and long-term approach that creates good jobs here in the United States, increases our energy security, and reduces our reliance on harmful fossil fuels. Repowering America with 100 percent clean electricity over the next decade is the way for us to do that.

Pennsylvania has been leading the way, proving that we can create good, permanent jobs that improve the environment. The state recently passed a law requiring energy from renewable sources, a law the United Steelworkers supported. Gamesa, knowing there was a certain demand for the turbines and blades for wind-generating equipment, opened a plant on the site of a closed steel mill in Fairless Hills, Pennsylvania. Gamesa now employs about 1,000 United Steelworkers in the state who are helping to produce renewable energy. What Pennsylvania has started can be expanded with a new, nationwide target and a timetable commensurate with economic and energy challenges the country now faces.

Such a bold target will support a comprehensive national upgrade in energy efficiency that will reduce the energy bills of homeowners and businesses even as fuel costs are on the rise. We will expand the use of existing clean technologies -- wind, solar, and geothermal -- stimulating construction of dozens of new clean power plants. And we must create a system that delivers power economically from where it is generated to where people live with a unified national grid. Achieving these goals will deliver the jobs that our economy needs - jobs that can't outsourced, jobs that reassert America's commitment to opportunity, innovation, and environmental protection for all. This is what it means to Repower America.

Cathy Zoi is the CEO of the Alliance for Climate Protection, a nonprofit, nonpartisan effort founded by Nobel laureate and former Vice President Al Gore. Leo Gerard is the International President of the United Steelworkers, which represents more than 850,000 workers in the U.S. and Canada.

Comments

[KillTheMessenger]

For all fairness, we should mention that the average level of the American worker's education has not been stagnant over the past thirty years. It has been falling like a rock.

So you really think you can get more pay for less brainy work? Wow... that takes some really desperate imagination.

How about this: more people get their kids a first class education rather than letting them work as merchandise stacker and cyborg extension of the fully automated hamburger flipper at the fast food joint and things will be hunky-dory.

[ImmanuelGoldstein]

Baloney, Kill, this is just another version of the 'retraining' meme that we've been hearing for the last quarter century. The fact is that if you waved a magic wand and gave everyone a PH.d it would have little effect on this issue. We would simply have Ph.d's working in McDonald's and bagging groceries. It turns out that 'brain ' jobs are just as exportable as 'grunt' jobs, in many cases even more so. What is the point of education for jobs that just don't exist?
After all we are seeing wage stagnation for most college graduates too.