Green Jobs Aren't Necessarily Good Jobs

Green jobs may not offer up my green, according to this report:

1) Low pay is not uncommon in the workplaces we profile: the lowest wage we found was $8.25 an hour at a recycling processing plant, but we also discovered jobs in manufacturing facilities serving the renewable energy sector paying as little as $11 an hour.

2) Wage rates at many wind and solar manufacturing facilities are below the national average for workers employed in the manufacture of durable goods. In some locations, average pay rates fall short of income levels needed to support a single adult with one child.

3) Some U.S. wind and solar manufacturers have already begun to offshore production of components destined for U.S. markets to low-wage havens such as China and Mexico. Examples of offshoring include the manufacture of blades for wind turbines, defying the common assumption that such blades are too large to ship overseas.

4) Very few workers at wind and solar manufacturing workplaces identified in the course of our research are covered by collective bargaining agreements. In at least two instances, this appears to be a direct result of aggressive anti-union campaigns run by employers with the help of union-busting consultants. On the construction side, we found that a leading contractor engaged in energy efficiency work has a similarly hostile approach to unions.

5) We could not find specific wages for nonunion construction workers employed in green building, but publicly available data on overall construction wages suggest that they are far lower than those of the union members profiled in the report. Analysis provided by the Economic Policy Institute indicates that among nonunion laborers, carpenters, painters, and roofers, a majority make less than $12.50 an hour and a third make less than the federal poverty wage for a family of four ($10.19 an hour).

Me: These jobs are, for the most part, not the kind of gigs many middle class folks would have much interest in doing: bike repair, hazardous material cleanup, landscaping, tree cutting, attic insulation, large-scale green waste composting. Then again, these jobs really aren't geared toward the middle class to begin with. A 2007 report by the city of Berkeley—of course!—described the potential pool of applicants for green collar jobs this way:

Youth and adults who do not have a high school degree, have been out of the labor market for a long time, were formerly incarcerated, have limited education and/or labor market skills.

So basically we're are talking about matching low-skill folks with low-wage jobs. For the really high-paying green jobs, you have to look at the firms being created by entrepreneurs and financed by venture capital, with or without federal tax subsidies.