Thinking Outside The Service Economy Box
ByFrom the Citizen-Times January 14:
$800,000 in stimulus funds go to Asheville Buncombe Community Christian Ministries to help train 600 workers for green jobs
Asheville Buncombe Community Christian Ministries will get $800,000 in federal stimulus funds to help train up to 600 workers for jobs weatherizing homes, installing solar panels and helping produce biodiesel fuel.
The jobs could pay $9 to $14 an hour. Sounds great. Now, show me the jobs and show me the money.
Everyone wants to transform the economy with “green” jobs. But so far the term is mostly a trendy, feel-good catchphrase. Few people can tell you what a green job is, how to count them, or what makes one job green and not another.
The Christian Science Monitor asks, “Are all workers at an automaker green if a few of them make hybrid cars? Does the janitor’s position at a wind-turbine factory count as a green job? What about the urban planner who designs a mass transit system one year and a strip mall the next?” The problem is, the Des Moines Register notes, “There is no national definition of green jobs.” For Ashevillians, a green job means installing weather stripping or solar panels, as the AC-T lede suggests. So, that’s it?
Those might prove decent-paying, sustainable jobs and they might not. Six hundred might exist in our region and they might not.
Let’s suppose you are unemployed. Your factory has closed and you desperately need a job. What kind of skills do you need to get a green job? What will you be doing all day at your green job? Where can you go — today — to apply for a green job? Most importantly, how much will that green job pay? Can you build (or rebuild) a career on it? Can you buy a house with it? Send your kids to college? Save for retirement? Or will your green job be just another of several odd jobs you and your spouse piece together hoping to keep the bill collectors at bay for another month?
Ask those questions of green jobs enthusiasts and they may get dazed looks on their faces because they don’t know and can’t tell you. But they like the sound. Green jobs. Kewl.
Well, here’s one green job people can train and apply for today. Tech schools around the country are gearing up to train students in wind turbine maintenance. Mesalands Community College is in Tucumcari, NM. Other tech schools in Texas, Michigan and South Dakota have programs. Average salary: $36,000/yr. Not terrific, but better than $14/hr. But not around here. Try Wales.
The acid test of sustainability will be whether those green jobs actually serve the needs of the people doing them and the businesses behind them as well as they serve the planet. WNC has lost thousands of jobs over the last 10-15 years. It will take more than installing weather stripping and solar panels to revive the regional economy in a way sustainable for our communities. For the Asheville MSA it will take thinking outside the service economy box.
From General Electric’s web site, here are some workers making a living right now from “green technology†in Greenville, SC, not maintaining wind turbines, but manufacturing them. Green, yes. Organic, not so much. If we expect to rebuild our local economy, the emphasis should be on technology and value-added products. Green may be where people’s heads are at, but technology is where the money is at.
The Greenville site also manufactures GE Energy's 1.5-megawatt wind turbine head, which captures clean, renewable power for wind energy sites throughout the United States.
Although there are about 1.5 million square feet of vacant manufacturing space in Buncombe County and another million in Henderson (plus the surrounding acreage), WNC development officials and politicians don’t have to aim for something as monumental as GE’s 400+ acres and 3,000 employees.
Here’s something more modest. From their web site, here is the Armacell factory in Mebane, NC, along I-40/85 between Greensboro and Durham.
Armacell makes “Armaflex,†that self-adhesive, gray foam pipe insulation you buy at Home Depot or Lowes to put on the water lines in your house to keep your hot water hot and your heat pump’s refrigerant lines cold. A factory like that could easily occupy vacant manufacturing space in Cane Creek Industrial Park and employ up to a couple hundred. Why just install insulation when you could be manufacturing it? Couldn’t you classify those as green jobs?
That is but one example. If we expect to build/revive an economy that will serve not just the planet, but Western North Carolina’s communities and people, we need some out-of-the-box thinking. We need to think bigger than simply installing solar panels and weather stripping made someplace else. We need to manufacture things locally again, as we once did. There’s no reason those products and production jobs can’t also be green.
A sustainable economy must produce not just jobs, but careers. Green jobs must be good for more than the environment. They must be good for people too –- in our case, for the displaced workers of Western North Carolina and their children who wish to remain here after graduation. Green jobs are not sustainable if they do not also sustain the people doing them, and their families.
14 Comments
January 17th, 2010 at 10:14 am
Jordan Schrader takes on DisAdvantage West in the Sunday AC-T print edition. The “watchdog” story about agency travel to film festivals makes them sound like extravagant spending of taxpayer dollars. The agency spent $33,000 over the last three years. The AC-T reports on three people “racking up” a $2,462 hotel bill for five days in Austin. C’mon. Are they kidding?
Do the math. $164 a night for a hotel in Austin is a scandal? Billing in-room movies to the taxpayer, okay — inappropriate. But you won’t even get a 10′ x 10′ booth a lot of trade shows for $2400. Then again, taxpayers don’t foot the bill for most of those.
If there’s a whiff of scandal here, it’s this: Show of hands. How many have made money from making films here?
I want to know when DisAdvantage West will stretch its legs enough to drive to Charlotte for the Automated Manufacturing Expo to try and lure experienced and would-be manufacturing “creative professionals” back to the region to set up shop. “Our number one priority in North Carolina has to be jobs, jobs, jobs and more jobs …” Bev Perdue said in an e-mail blast this week.
We’re (still) waiting.
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January 17th, 2010 at 9:00 pm
A Spanish study on Spain’s “green jobs” subsidy (the model for the Obama plan) revealed some serious negative consequences as extrapolated to the U.S.: The U.S. would lose 2.2 jobs for every “green” job created (9 lost for every 4 created) in U.S.D. equivalent (in Spain) of $821,072 PER JOB ($1,437,607 in wind power job), only one in ten were PERMANENT jobs in operation/maintainance of renewable energy sources. Spanish consumers would have to pay 31% higher electric bills to cover the debt of such programs or pay higher taxes. Add this to a Penn State University study, replacing two thirds of coal generated energy with renewables if possible would eliminate 3 million to as many as 4 million jobs, despite the claims of job creation. The Spanish regulatory regime would guarantee 6.8 to 10.9 times average market price creating massive speculative investment in large scale photovoltaic enterprises despite PV energy costing 7 times more than conventionally produced energy.New regulation effective Sept.08 to reduce speculative excess caused by government intervention reduced solar industry expansion 30% costing 15,000 jobs in just a few months after implementation according to the photovoltaic industry association (Spain) equal to the total number of jobs created by wind power initiatives and demonstrating the fragile nature of government created industrial bubbles.
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January 17th, 2010 at 9:15 pm
Thanks for posting that, Jim. I hadn’t read it. Nice job with the embedded link too.
I had several questions about this report, so I googled the director. There are evidently a number of reasons that drawing a direct comparison b/w Spain and the U.S. is comparing green apples to green oranges.
An Analysis of Myths Regarding the Green Jobs Programs of Spain and the US. Excerpt:
You can Google it yourself and find lots of similar articles!
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January 17th, 2010 at 9:45 pm
I had already seen a report critical of that Spanish study, but cannot find the original citation. Here’s a link to a rebuttal sent to the House Energy and Commerce Committee and the Secretary of Labor from a couple of former key Spanish government officials:
http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2009/05/pdf/green_jobs_letter.pdf
(Try a Save As on the file. I couldn’t get it to load in my browser by clicking through.)
I wonder what they count as a green job in Spain?
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January 17th, 2010 at 11:45 pm
From the “rebuttal”; “He argues that solar energy has destroyed 15,000 jobs in the last year, but
neglects to cite official figures showing an increase in this job sector of about 500% in the
preceding three years.” Alvarez cites the Spanish Photvoltaic Industries Association number of 15,000 jobs lost due to reduction of government subsidy as opposed to the previous speculative bubble expansion due to higher government subsidy as mentioned above before reading the “rebuttal”. “Professor Calzada also compares subsidized with non-subsidized sectors and conventional
sources of energies with renewable energies ” How else would you compare?, would “green” energy sources costing many times the cost of conventional production be economically viable without government mandates and subsidies thus producing jobs? “But worst of all, Professor Calzada’s report
ignores – or hides – the positive figures in net employment creation of other renewable
energy sectors, such as windmills, where Spain has truly become a world leader” As before where did I get the wind industry job creation numbers? from the report! apparently this attempt at damage control assumes the reader has not (and won’t) read the report rebutted. While I am leery of Alvarez’s association with Republican lawmakers and Heritage, his assessment of Spain’s energy policy and associated costs, if not translating directly to the U.S. policy certainly reflects hidden costs directly attributable to renewable energy usage standards adopted.
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January 18th, 2010 at 9:55 am
Perhaps I can make a contribution to this discussion. Tom, I don’t agree with you on many of your points about the Green Economy and its potential for WNC. I’d like to share information from my own work, which may reframe the discussion.
The Green Economy is anticipated to be an important source of economic expansion, bigger than the role of technology in the most recent economic expansion. Consider this: every single sector of the global economy is going to be forced to become more sustainable. This includes, but is not limited to, managing energy usage and resource and waste streams. Adapting to the innumerable impacts of climate change, mitigating environmental degradation and creating productive bioregions are among some of the challenges, and potential sources of innovation, for regions.
Green Economy/Green Jobs Definitions
In order to develop the regional green economy, there must be some sort of consensus developed about what is the green economy. Of course, no such definition exists. Having read every paper on the green economy- probably close to all of them- I’ve discovered the definition used for a particular study is dependent upon the intent of the paper. The lack of consensus is due to:
The Green Economy may be a “keystone species†because its impact on a region is disproportionate to its size. RTS continues: “Green clusters are hard to classify and locate. Green companies cluster around their function,which can include environmental conservation and renewable energy, environmental services, or green products, with a special brand that provides a primary value to goods, similar to aesthetics, authenticity, and emotional appeal. Few of these clusters currently have industry classifications that would indicate a green focus. They require special knowledge about place-based economies and local companies.”
From my work, I’ve recognized several points a region must consider when developing their working definition:
This amalgamation of definitions provides the broadest description I’ve seen, taken from the most thoughtful and deliberate consideration of the economic opportunities in sustainability I’ve read:
This one points to the social equity component- I would add “non-exploitive” to this definition:
Social equity is an important consideration. Entire socio-demographic groups were left behind in the last economic expansion, and these groups have been disproportionately burdened by environmental degradation and all of those negative externalities of the industrial age. I would be reluctant to disparage the “weatherization†jobs, Tom. Energy conservation is a base strategy against climate change. Weatherizing our aging buildings, especially for low income residents (who spend a disproportionate amount of income on energy) provides real opportunities for savings and job growth.
Ironically, after I developed this working definition for WNC, The Whitehouse Middle Class Task force released their own definition, which turned out to be the same as mine (and they had 45 economists reading and synthesizing these reports!)
Yes, there are opportunities for green washing. However, sustainability is a process. Other places are much further ahead in defining the green economy and the jobs involved. After a thorough assessment of their assets, these places are creating actionable plans and are allocating resources. WNC is very far behind in this process. We have incredible assets, and could garner significant economic impact.
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January 18th, 2010 at 10:02 am
Just saw this on Twitter. Watch where the money is going:
Energy Efficiency Hottest Sector for Green Mergers & Acquisitions http://bit.ly/7CxKMV
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January 18th, 2010 at 10:29 am
Knnpls hs cndm fctry, tht s by fr th grnst jb thr s.
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January 18th, 2010 at 8:58 pm
Excellent and informative, Sandy. I’m quite interested in how green jobs play out in WNC.
I wrote the piece above with my hard hat on (figuratively, anyway), so please read it from the out-of-work factory worker’s perspective (although I am myself employed right now). I work mostly in a cubical farm, but often in a factory or on a construction site building one. What’s the first thing most people want to know about a potential new job? (It’s not, how will this job help the planet and save the environment.) “Ghostbusters” put it rather succinctly:
My point was not to disparage green jobs or the promise that a “third industrial revolution” may have for remaking the economy, but to jog local readers out of the set view that WNC’s economy is now and will henceforth be low-paid and service based. (The ABCCM article was just a jumping off place.) Thus, the post title and my questioning of why people typically see green jobs merely as involving installing weatherstripping, etc. There is, as you point out, much more potential — if we’ll just reach for it. People need stable jobs that pay enough to raise a family and keep the home out of foreclosure. For most of the people I work beside, saving the planet is a luxury.
Our local manufacturing economy has been devastated in the last fifteen years. I’m on a bit of a lonely crusade to promote reviving our decaying manufacturing base here. That’s my frame. From my perspective, any green revolution is an opportunity WNC shouldn’t miss for rebuilding it. Those white wind turbine nascelles shown above? Somebody manufactures them for GE. Wind turbine blades? Carbon fiber. (I helped build the U.S. plant where it’s made. They’re expanding it right now.) Solar panels? Waterproof membranes for “green” roofs? Not green – manufactured. And weatherstripping. There are sure to be hundreds, if not thousands, of products developed in the green transformation — not all of them “green” in themselves, but many of them will be technology-based. They don’t come out of thin air. I believe we should encourage creating some of them here. Manufacturing green products beats merely installing them. Bottom line: the pay is better and the work more stable (if any work is).
I also look at this from a political perspective. Practically speaking, how do you build that missing consensus for green jobs, a green economy or whatever? Without framing it, first and foremost, in terms of what’s in it for Everyman, unbridled enthusiasm for anything “green” sends a metamessage to voters: green jobs enthusiasts care more about helping the planet and enhancing “the area’s overall creative and innovative milieu†than they care about helping blue collar workers keep their homes and raise their kids. I wrote something about that dynamic here.
We’re on the same side. Our difference here (if any) is one of emphasis. It’s subtle, but critical. Is the primary goal of a green revolution, a) transitioning to an age of “environmental conservation and renewable energy, environmental services, or green products,” with enhanced quality of life for Everyman a byproduct, or is it b) a better regional economy and quality of life for Everyman, with green technology and green jobs the most likely means of achieving it? The final results may be indistinguishable, but politically, the probability of achieving them will be higher with approach b. Trust me, if workers’ interests aren’t first and foremost in your mind, they will know it before you do.
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January 18th, 2010 at 9:22 pm
Tom,
I do make money from film, commercials, print (catalogs, ad compaigns) that use Asheville as a back drop. I get referrals from Advantage West’s WNC Film Commission and use them as a resource when working with clients. Just raising my hand.
Ellen Pfirrmann
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January 19th, 2010 at 12:03 am
Sandy’s link provided much opportunity for researching government funded speculative bubbles particularly sourced through Department of Energy guaranteed funding. Funny how it reminds me of a certain Spanish report’s findings regarding government funding initiatives. This is from 2009 Greentech M&A Roundup:
The carbon capture project mentioned is by American Electric Power owner of coal fired and nuclear power generators,numerous regional power companies and named by EPA as partly responsible for a superfund site, now getting ahead of proposed cap and trade (the next bubble?) regulative burdens with Green initiatives while spending 11 million dollars (including $100,000 to Newt Gingrich’s PAC) in 2008 lobbying against it.
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January 19th, 2010 at 6:02 am
Tom: I understand your position, but I don’t believe the two points you’ve delineated are mutually exclusive. I’m not the “wrap me in a green snuggie and sing Kumbayah” type, but am pragmatic. I see great opportunity, as do so many VC’s and entrepreneurs. Our regional economy could benefit from developing this cluster.
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January 19th, 2010 at 6:30 am
Jim,
That’s interesting. I saw a carbon sequestration project recently that was planned (and land allocated) but not implemented. Listed as “Future.” It looked to me like the company was hedging its bets, waiting to see which way the regulatory cards fell.
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January 21st, 2010 at 11:35 pm
Green jobs for prisoners not unemployed.
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