California has lofty climate goals. The state committed to a target of transitioning to 100 percent renewable energy by 2045 in 2018, and the Los Angeles City Council decided last week to restrict new oil and gas drilling and phase out existing wells in the area, which includes one of the country’s biggest urban oilfields.
However, stopping all of those wells would result in the layoff of thousands of oil and gas employees, and the state is starting to face a national reality: Clean energy employment, on average, does not pay as well as fossil fuel occupations, vox.com writes.
According to an earlier this week E&E News story, the California State Assembly is concerned that the clean energy transition could have “potentially negative effects for employees and communities,” owing to lower wages and benefits.
A research published in 2021 by the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts Amherst details the wage disparity: In California, the average salary for a renewable energy worker is about $86,000. Around $130,000 for a worker in the fossil fuel industry. According to experts, the explanation is simple: unions.
“Fossil fuel employees are unionized.” According to Carol Zabin, head of the UC Berkeley Labor Center’s Green Economy initiative, most clean energy employees are not.
Historically, such unions have ensured fossil fuel employees job stability, better salaries, health care coverage, and pensions – rights obtained after years of bargaining and negotiating.
“In the current environment, in 2022, blue-collar jobs are really low-wage occupations, unless they’re public sector or union employment,” Zabin added.
Because they are so young, clean energy firms often do not have unionized workforces — and they have a history of rejecting the concept of their employees unionizing. Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, an electric car maker and sustainable energy corporation, violated US labor rules in 2019 with anti-union comments.
When installers at Bright Power, a real estate energy and water management firm, tried to unionize the same year, the corporation fired them all and replaced them with subcontractors.
Unlike in most European nations, where unions organize employees by sector rather than by firm, green energy entrepreneurs are free to recruit anybody they want at whatever salary they want – as occurred in Oregon two years ago. Most local employees with the skills needed to construct wind turbines were already members of unions and anticipated union wages, therefore a number of wind farm developers brought in non-unionized workers from outside the state to build their turbines instead, allowing them to pay cheaper non-union rates.