By Frank Noakes
"A major new effort to develop jobs which protect the environment", was how the January 18 joint statement by the Australian Council of Trade Unions and the Australian Conservation Foundation described their joint Green Jobs in Industry Plan. The scheme was launched at the Visyboard Paper and Cardboard Recycling Plant in Melbourne by Peter Baldwin, minister for higher education and employment services.
The green jobs program is aimed at addressing what opinion polls show to be the two foremost concerns in the community — jobs and the environment. The ACTU's Bill Kelty and ACF's Tricia Caswell say this alliance is a "powerful" means of addressing these issues. Caswell is a former industrial officer with the Victorian Trades Hall Council.
Jennie George, chairperson of the ACTU's environment committee, told Green Left Weekly that there are two components to the project. "One will be a research component, where we hope to identify areas of job creation in green industries; we're looking at a range of areas including eco-tourism, energy efficiency, areas of closed production recycling, the potential export of our Australian leading edge technology and generally in the green information industry."
The other area, known as the Green Jobs Unit, will seek to place young unemployed and long-term unemployed in "green type jobs", George said.
The initiative reflects some changed thinking on environmental matters within the ACTU, says George. "I think it's the culmination of the discussion and negotiation and a growing appreciation that it's not either or, it's not jobs and growth versus the environment, [an appreciation] that we need to integrate the principles of sustainability into industry and into the economy."
The ACTU executive and the ACF had recently adopted a joint charter which recognises that there will continue to be differences of emphasis and approach, but which seeks to establish a more cooperative working relationship between the union and environment movements, George said.
The jobs program does not attempt to tackle the hard questions of forestry or fossil fuels though, as clearly little agreement exists between the ACTU and environmentalists on these issues.
And although the federal government has expressed its support, it has promised only a measly $100,000, provided through the Office of Labor Market Adjustment. Prime Minister Paul Keating is known to have opposed more research funding in the run-up the federal elections.
The Trade Unionists For Environmental Responsibility spokesperson in WA, Geoff Spencer, said that while an initiative to create jobs that are environmentally friendly is welcome, this scheme seemed long on rhetoric, short on finance and short on concrete proposals. "The proof of this cake will be in the eating. Who is providing the jobs? Not the government, that's for sure."
Spencer, the Democratic Socialist candidate in the state seat of Fremantle, said that business still had a deplorable attitude towards the environment. "If there's a profit to be made out of being 'green', they'll be in it; if there's not they won't. That's integral to the logic, or lack of it, of this economic system.
"Any jobs created will likely be small in number and have only relatively small scale application on the periphery of the economy. On its own it will be too little too late", Spencer told Green Left Weekly.
Some in the trade union movement claim that the ACTU's motives are genuine in this alliance, that it sees jobs to be had in the environment industry, (it is worth over $3 billion and is growing).
National Farmers Federation executive director Rick Farley said, in welcoming the cooperation between the ACTU and ACF, that there is an enormous potential for "green jobs". But he cautioned: "Ultimately, industry will make its own judgments on how to adapt to new markets and to pressure in existing ones.
"It also must be accepted that job growth depends more on improved export performance than shifts in the domestic distribution of labour. No matter how we approach business decisions and the environment, questions of international competitiveness will remain central. 'Green jobs' still will need to satisfy the demands of trade in tough markets."
Spencer notes: "We can't rely on government and industry to protect the environment when it is they that are destroying it. An alliance between the unions and environment movement is a positive step, but it needs to unite around an initiative that challenges the right of those powerful forces in society to cause the destruction of jobs and the environment and to prevent their remedy — not seeking to work with them around the margins. Rome is burning; we've gone beyond the fiddling
stage!"