US steelworkers form unlikely alliance as renewables reinvigorate rustbelt

Michigan, Indiana, Ohio and Pennsylvania look to electric cars, solar and wind power after death of coal and steel industries

Suzanne Goldenberg in Pennsylvania
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 26 May 2009 15.18 BST

It may seem like a stretch to call Jack Bernat, who spends his off-duty hours collecting and lovingly restoring muscle cars of the 1980s, an environmentalist.
But then trace back a working life spent chasing after the vanishing jobs in Pennsylvania's steel industry. In his 35 years in the workforce, Bernat endured lay-offs and shut-downs, scrambled for part-time and temporary work, and took jobs far from home.
Now the former steelworker is hoping he has at last found a job with a future, putting the finishing touches to the giant fibreglass blades for wind turbines produced by the Spanish firm, Gamesa.
"My biggest concern is not to have happening to this generation what happened to mine — where you end up 10 years here, 10 years there, and then you are like me 54 years old, and five different careers and no seniority anywhere," said Bernat, who heads the chapter of the United Steelworkers of America union at the wind turbine plant. "I want to see the longevity of this thing."
Those hopes provide a powerful impetus for an alliance between the environmental and labour movements that could prove critical to the course of Barack Obama's hopes to transform America's energy economy.
The convergence of interests between greens and labour has grown stronger as Congress takes up climate change legislation. The house of representatives passed a key cap-and-trade bill through committee last week , despite Republican opposition.
Last month, the steel and communications workers unions teamed up with environmental campaigners at the Sierra Club to campaign jointly for climate change and a workers' rights bill. The Sierra Club urged its members to support a bill before Congress that would remove obstacles to forming a union. Foster's group, meanwhile, has spent $500,000 on ads in support of the climate change bill.
Repower America, a pressure group backed by Al Gore, has also begun reaching out to workers this month, hosting meetings at union halls across the midwest.
Labour leaders say the new concern for the environment is just sound economic sense. In Pennsylvania, where state authorities worked hard to bring in renewable energy companies, the arrival of plants like Gamesa are beginning to transform the landscape. A state once defined by 19th century red brick industrial buildings and an orange glow from steel works has given way to wind turbines in cornfields and on mountain tops.
Unions do not want their members left behind by the next wave of changes, ushered in by Obama.
"The decisions that Congress is making on climate change are going to set the direction of the world economy for the next 20 years," said David Foster, a former midwest regional director of the steelworkers' union who now heads the Blue-Green Alliance of labour and environmental groups. "This is the only kind of focused economic activity that is large enough and sustained enough to be the fulcrum of the entire economy."
Obama put the promise of "green jobs" at the heart of his economic recovery plan, and a $4bn investment in work to increase the energy efficiency of buildings is announced today. About half of that money should be dispersed by next month, Van Jones, the White House adviser on green jobs, told the Guardian. Each week sees the president or one of his officials touring a wind turbine factory or a hybrid vehicle plant in a bit of political theatre meant to make the public more comfortable with industries that seem strange to many Americans.
The familiarisation tour is critical to Obama's efforts to advance an agenda that links economic recovery to energy and environmental reforms that would cut America's use of fossil fuels, and get the world to sign on to a climate change treaty.
Companies like Gamesa argue that that's a natural alliance. "It's the end of false choices that you choose between a job and the environment," said Michael Peck, a Gamesa spokesman who has also been the architect of alliances between environmentalists and organised labour. "What the nation is beginning to understand is that you can have both. You can have a clean environment and a well paying job."
Some workers agree. Troy Gallawoy, a former steelworker who headed Gamesa's union before Bernat, said he was as never proud to work in the mills as he is at the Gamesa plant. "It's not only a good job, it's a feel-good job knowing you are doing something for the environment," he said. "I'm not one of those tree huggers but the environment has always been very important to me."
But even supporters of Obama's agenda admit it is hard to get American workers to set aside the stereotype that environmental concerns are a preserve of the rich.
"No 55-year-old wants to be told they have to go back for an exotic five-year training programme. They have been an electrician and carpenter all their life and they want to find out they can put those skills back to work," said Foster.
The White House claims its green jobs plan is doing exactly that, creating jobs for carpenters, electricians and plumbers.
Van Jones claims that, over the long-term, the renewable energy industry could reinvigorate the old rust belt states such as Michigan, Indiana, Ohio and Pennsylvania, which have seen the slow death of the coal, steel, and manufacturing industries. Those states have large pools of trained engineers and skilled manufacturing workers, expertise that Jones believes could easily translate into jobs building solar panels, batteries for electric cars and wind turbines.
"We can start to fill in the hole that has been left in our manufacturing base," said Jones. "The great thing about green jobs is that a lot of them are blue collar jobs that have been upgraded and upskilled to protect the environment."
In this part of central Pennsylvania, it's a huge hole to fill. In Johnstown, the nearest big town to the Gamesa plant, there were once nearly 20,000 steel jobs, in a town whose population today is barely 23,000. The Gamesa plant currently employs about 300. Orders are down because of the economic downturn, and there have been lay-offs at a sister facility near Philadelphia.
The new green jobs, even if they are union jobs like at Gamesa, are never going to match the payscales from the heyday of steel. In 1977, Bernat was making $12 an hour, and a brand-new pickup truck was $6,100. Now, he says, he makes $13.48 an hour and a new model pick-up truck would be about $25,000.
But for some of the people who work there, Gamesa's arrival was salvation. More than 3,000 people applied for jobs when Gamesa first came to town, and a significant share were out of work, town officials said.
One of them, manufacturing manager Joe Satkovich, was closing down the garment factory where he used to work when he heard Gamesa was about to begin production in the US.
"They saved my life. I was looking for a job at 52 years of age," he said. "To close that plant was pretty devastating. It was like a divorce. This just turned my life around."
Three years later, Satkovich counts himself someone who has gone from a general lack of concern about the environment to a keen awareness of global warming.
"It's changed my perspective on everything on the environment," he said. He said his father, who spent 30 years as a coal miner, would be an environmentalist too, if he were alive today. "He would be saying the same thing: you do what you have to do. In that time there was coal and steel."
But for all his enthusiasm, Satkovich is not yet convinced that the time has truly arrived for wind power. "Probably notin my lifetime. Maybe in my son's or my son's son's working lifetime," he said. "I hope so."