NetNews Usenet Archive 1993 #3/NN_1993_3.iso/spool/misc/activism/progress/10228

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From: New Liberation News Service <[e-mail]>
Subject: Jobs & the Environment Publication
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/* Written 10:26 am  Jan 21, 1993 by [e-mail] in igc:labr.environme */
/* ---------- "Jobs & the Environment Publication" ---------- */
UNDERSTANDING THE CONFLICT BETWEEN JOBS AND THE ENVIRONMENT

A PRELIMINARY DISCUSSION OF THE SUPERFUND FOR WORKERS CONCEPT
An Economic Agenda for Workers


     "Our first concern is to protect the jobs, incomes and working
conditions of our members."

     "On the other hand, people who work in hazardous industries,
as many union members do, want safe jobs and a healthy environment.
We must do everything we can to provide a workplace and environment
free from recognized hazards."

     How can we accommodate both these goals?

Introduction

The only way out of the jobs versus environment dilemma is to make
provision for the workers who lose their jobs in the wake of the
country's drastically needed environmental clean-up, or who are
displaced or otherwise injured by economic restructuring, or
military cutbacks and shifts of manufacturing facilities overseas.

What it will take is an ambitious, imaginative program of support
and reeducation -- going far beyond the inadequate and deceptive
"job retraining" programs  that really mean a downward spiral to
low-paying service jobs or subsistence-level unemployment income.


The G.I. Bill after World War II, an innovative and successful
program, is the precedent upon which the Superfund for Workers is
based.  The G.I. Bill helped more than 13 million ex-servicemen and
women between 1945 and 1972 make the transition from military
service to skilled employment in the private sector.  This program
had a formidable price tag, but the country overwhelmingly approved
it as an investment in the future.  Education became the key to
national economic recovery.  Education remains just as powerful a
force today and is the basis of a concept supported by OCAW called
"The Superfund for Workers."

The Essence of the Dilemma

OCAW members are concerned with the environment -- our record over
the years demonstrates this very fundamental fact.  However, our
members also are concerned about their jobs.  It is small comfort
to know that the environment is improving, but our jobs no longer
exist.

There is, obviously, a major contradiction to be overcome.  We want
jobs and a clean environment.  Environmental organizations
representing many millions of Americans demand a clean-up of toxics
and a halt to the continuing toxification of the environment.
However, they lack a clear idea of how to accomplish that desirable
goal without a loss in jobs or a mass movement into jobs that pay
only the minimum wage.

Workers' Options

How should we as workers react to the threat that jobs will be lost
if steps are taken to stop environmental degradation?

One option is to oppose any and all regulatory measures affecting
our industries that could potentially cost jobs.  Unfortunately,
such a defensive position does not come with job guarantees.  All
the environmental regulations now on the books could be repealed,
and millions of working people--including many of our members--
would still wake up one day to find themselves without a job.
According to the U.S. Department of Labor, approximately 1 million
workers with three or more years seniority lost their jobs every
year during the 1980s, 1 in 10 of which were employed by
petrochemical companies. Very few of these jobs (less than 2,000
overall) were lost because of environmental regulations--at least
according to the statistics compiled by the Environmental
Protection Agency at the request of Congress through the early
1980s.

Does this mean that we should not worry about job loss from
environmental regulation?  Not at all.  Corporations can close down
their facilities whenever and wherever they want to.  They can do
so for good reasons, bad reasons, and no reasons at all.  When they
threaten to take our jobs away if the government imposes additional
regulations on them, we have to take that threat seriously.

We need to provide workers with real options in such circumstances.
We need to provide them with a guarantee that they and their
families will not have to pay for clean air and clean water with
their jobs, their living standards, their future.

Until recently the environmental movement has failed to take such
issues seriously.  They brushed aside the question of job fear with
studies to prove that protecting the environment would create more
jobs than it destroyed.

This position is just not adequate.  As workers we must be
concerned with our livelihood.  The reality is that if we lose our
jobs, we will face extreme economic hardship.

We need to hear a more realistic program from those who care about
the environment--a program that provides working people with job
and income guarantees.  As one of our members put it once, working
people should be treated at least as good as the dirt the EPA and
other agencies have earmarked for clean-up and restoration.  We
have a program to protect ourselves against companies dumping
hazardous waste.  We also need one to protect ourselves against
companies dumping workers -- a Superfund for Workers.


*Dirt is Treated Better than Workers

In 1987 the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) forced Velsicol
to suspend domestic sales of two very toxic pesticides, chlordane
and heptachlor.  Shortly thereafter, Velsicol closed its Marshall,
Illinois manufacturing plant and laid off all the hourly workers.
The OCAW local was disbanded.  Some workers were given early
retirement.  But many were too young to quality for retirement and
were unable to find comparable employment, if any job at all.

The EPA listed the Marshall facility as a Superfund site after it
closed, and ordered more than $10 million to be spent cleaning up
the piles of contaminated dirt.  But the workers were tossed onto
the economic scrap heap, blacklisted because of their toxic
exposures on the job, and impoverished by the lack of comparable
employment opportunities.

Why do we treat dirt better than we treat workers?  We have a
federal Superfund for restoring abandoned piles of toxic dirt, but
no Superfund for abandoned workers left behind on the economic
scrap heap.

The Economic Climate

What has happened?

The end of the post-war economic boom in 1973 resulted in a radical
restructuring of the U.S. economy and the loss of hundreds of
thousands of unionized manufacturing jobs.  Workers became
increasingly reluctant to complain about health and safety
problems.  At the same time, the grassroots environmental movement
-- spurred on by a growing number of tragic incidents and
catastrophic accidents -- became ever more vocal in demanding an
end to unchecked, heedless growth of the hazardous waste stream
and, as much as possible, the complete elimination of toxic
materials from the production cycle.  This put trade unions and the
environmental movement on a collision course.

The 1980s saw an incredible economic restructuring.  Industries
that we considered a bedrock in our economy were greatly reduced
or, in some instances, completely disappeared.  Leveraged buyouts
wreaked havoc in many communities throughout our country and
average wages, adjusted for inflation, fell to the level they were
in the early 1970s. The 1990's see us confronting increased layoffs
and plant closures along with an extremely depressed economy.

Clearly, in this economic climate, workers feel threatened by any
expressions that are perceived to be a peril to their jobs.  How
should working people confront the 1990s, given the new
environmental perceptions that exist in our society?  The answer is
not simple.  We need to think about this question in new ways and
rework a lot of old definitions.

The Differences

Corporations are in a different position than the average working
person.  The companies, especially the transnational ones, don't
suffer from a shutdown.  Their operations just continue somewhere
else.

Workers do not have such flexibility, so it is essential that the
environmental community reflect on this fact.  We are not asking
that environmentalists change their agenda.  We are realistic
enough to know that millions of Americans are demanding a halt to
environmental degradation.  However, we urge consideration of our
economic dilemma and the creation of an agenda that considers the
economic impact upon workers.

This notion of an economic agenda for workers whose jobs may be
threatened must also be a government priority.

1) The Government, Corporations, and Profits

In the national forests in the Rocky Mountains, Alaska, and the
East, timber stands have low value and are costly to bring to
market for a number of reasons.  The pricing formula used for sales
from the national forests (owned by us, the taxpayers), however,
involves  calculation of a minimum bid that guarantees profit to
timber buyers but ignores the government's cost of growing and
selling trees.

Moreover, the Forest Service is allowed to use its timber sale
contracts to finance purchaser-built roads and acquire land
management services that often are uneconomic and environmentally
destructive.  As a result, below-cost timber sales -- where the
U.S. Forest Service does not recover the cost of making timber
ready for sale -- dominate in 76 of the agency's 120 administrative
units.

From 1982 through 1987, the Forest Service national timber program
generated, on average, approximately $0.8 billion in annual gross
receipts.  The agency spent about $1.2 billion each year on road
construction, sales administration, reforestation, and other timber
programs.

This resulted in a cost to the U.S. Government of $400 million
annually.  The Forest Service now plans to extend this program,
which will result in far greater losses to the government.

The government would serve the interests of the environment and the
workers involved by not cutting the timber with its resulting
environmental destruction and instead paying the workers full wages
for not cutting timber and building roads.

2) Guaranteeing Corporate Economic Security

Most large corporations carry what is known as "business
interruption insurance."  An example of how well this works for
corporations occurred shortly after the Phillips Chemical Plant
blew up in Pasadena, Texas, in October of 1989.  The blast, which
leveled the entire polyethylene complex, killed 23 and injured 290.
The physical damage to the plant, estimated at up to $700 million,
was compensated by insurance.

However, a little-understood feature called business interruption
insurance allowed Phillips to collect an estimated $750 million for
income lost during the 32-month rebuilding period.  It is nothing
short of a lavish "unemployment insurance program" for
corporations.

Out-of-pocket costs to Phillips in this $1.5 billion explosion were
but $70 million.  In other words, the total cost to Phillips
amounted to only five percent of the entire loss.  Imagine being
out of work and receiving 95 percent of your wages.

Why should we not consider the concept of worker job loss insurance
that pays 95 percent of your wages?

3) Government Subsidies for Corporations

FIFRA stands for Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide
Act.  The law in its original form provided for compensation to a
company whose product was found to be a hazard to public health.

Any company whose pesticide products were banned received
compensation for lost sales, and the government paid for storing
the banned product.  Of course, workers who lost their jobs because
of the ban got nothing.  In the case of one banned product, it cost
Uncle Sam $45 million for lost sales and $145 million to store the
product.

In spite of the fact that most of these corporations had broad
product lines and would have hardly felt the impact, the subsidies
were paid in full.  Of course, all these reimbursement measures
never considered the worker whose entire livelihood hinged on the
existence of a single plant or product.

In addition to the above, remember that Congress has been willing
to pay farmers billions of dollars not to grow food; it has been
willing to set aside large sums of money to clean up hazardous
waste dump sites, and to relieve polluters of the financial burden
of restoring a spoiled landscape to alternative use by themselves.
These illustrations of compensation schemes provide us with a
framework for new thinking about approaches that we need to develop
to resolve emerging conflicts around environmental questions.

The Precedent for The Superfund for Workers

Americans seem to have forgotten the most successful transition
accomplished by us as a nation during most difficult times.  We
need to revisit this period -- post World War II -- because it is
most instructive.

During World War II, most Americans felt that once the war was
over, there would be a return to the desperate depression
conditions of the '30s.  A Gallup poll taken during the war found
that 24 percent of those polled thought post-war unemployment would
be a devastating 7 to 10 million; 11 percent thought it would be 11
to 19 million, and 8 percent thought it would be 20 million.

Remember, the population of the U.S. at this time was around 135
million people.  Towards the end of the war, 56 percent of the
G.I.'s thought there would not be jobs at the end of the war and we
would have a depression.  Of course 17 million men and women in the
services would not sit still and accept their return home to
massive unemployment.

This reality was the reason for more concentrated activity on post-
war planning, even though we were in the midst of total war.
President Franklin Roosevelt and some of his advisors began to
think and talk about postwar planning for the returning men and
women.  In fact, in one of his fireside chats to the nation
Roosevelt said,  referring to the troops, "They must not be
demobilized into an environment of inflation and unemployment."


In October 1943 the administration presented to Congress a modest
proposal about allowing a small number of returning G.I.s to attend
college and be paid while attending.  There was a great deal of
Congressional resistance and also, surprisingly, from the education
community.  Robert M. Hutchins, the president of the University of
Chicago, said he was afraid that "Colleges and universities will
find themselves converted into hobo jungles...and veterans would
become educational hoboes."

Support for Roosevelt's measure came from an unusual source -- the
American Legion -- which at that time was anti-labor and very
conservative.  Harry W. Colmery, a former commander of the Legion
and past Republican National Commander, supported the notion of a
G.I. Bill of Rights and provided key support.

In 1944 the Serviceman's Readjustment Act was passed; it became
known as the G.I. Bill of Rights.

What is interesting to note about the politics surrounding the G.I.
bill is how forcefully the educational section was contested.  Many
efforts were made to weaken this section of the bill.

The G.I. bill provided for 52 weeks of pay at $20 a week (commonly
known as the 52-20 club).  You could take the whole 52 weeks
straight or work for a while, then go back in the club.  Twenty
dollars a week in 1946 could keep you going, because the average
wage wasn't much higher.  Single veterans got $50 a month to go to
school; married vets received $75.

These allowances were soon raised.  Tuition was paid by the
government and although people like the president of the University
of Chicago warned that veterans would become educational hoboes,
the colleges and universities thrived on the attendance of these
veterans.  Between 1945 and 1946, college enrollment in the u.S.
involved 400,000 veterans.  A year later the campus held 1.5
million vets.

While the G.I. bill had many shortcomings, it is still considered
one of the most advanced pieces of social legislation ever enacted
by the Congress.  It was a major catalyst for the economic leap
forward of the post-war U.S.

Millions of veterans used the G.I. bill.  The move from a society
geared for war to a peacetime economy required the period of
transition that this incredible piece of social legislation
provided.  We are now in a similar situation of transition.  What
is lacking is the social vision that allowed for the successful
post-World War II transformation.

*JTPA - Not the Answer

Because JTPA (the Job Training and Partnership Act--the
government's retraining program) is a failure, workers face poverty
when they lose their jobs.  JTPA Title IIA, which serves
economically disadvantaged workers, provides training for new jobs.
Workers who receive this training earn an average wage of $5.69 per
hour (1990) upon graduation--slightly below the poverty level for
a family.  And displaced workers who use JTPA Title III training to
upgrade their skills found work paying an average of $7.73 per hour
(1990)--slightly above the poverty level for a family.  And only
nine percent of those displaced workers eligible for JTPA even
received benefits under this program.

What About The Price Tag?

The anticipated automatic response to a Superfund for Workers is
"we can't afford it."


But it is important to realize that this is a political -- not
economic -- question.  Can we afford the $2.3 trillion Pentagon
budget and the $500 billion savings and loan bailout?  The
estimated cost of $40,000 per year per person for income, tuition,
and health benefits to a million workers would be offset by:  (1)
these workers would continue to pay taxes and contribute to the
economy by spending; (2) the government will realize saved costs in
social services such as food stamps and unemployment benefits; (3)
we will avoid predictable increases in treatment costs for alcohol
and drug abuse, family violence, and other effects common to sudden
unemployment; (4) new jobs will be created in teaching and student
services, new buildings and ungraded facilities; and (5) local
economies that have been affected by plant closings will receive a
much-needed boost.

Allocating the money is simply a matter of will.  The savings and
loan crisis has shown us all that hundreds of billions dollars can
be committed with hardly a second thought to pay off the greed,
larceny and corruption of the "big guys."  Why can't a much smaller
sum be found to provide environmentally-displaced workers with a
guaranteed income and the chance to start life over?

And what about the national debt?  How can we afford a Superfund
for Workers when we are already in hock up to our eyeballs?  The
experience of the GI Bill of Rights at the end of World War II is
again instructive.  In 1945, the national debt was actually larger
than the entire gross national product (GNP).  Today the national
debt totals only about one-quarter of the GNP.

In 1945, the annual deficit was 22.3 percent of all the goods and
services produced in the country.  Today, it is 2.3 percent of
total production.  If we could afford a GI Bill of Rights in 1945,
we certainly can afford a Superfund for Workers in the 1990's.

In Conclusion

This massive restructuring of the world of work must be borne out
of a national movement.

This redefinition of the relationship between work and income
requires a new movement dedicated to resolving the conflict between
jobs and the environment.

Paying people to make the transition from one kind of economy--from
one kind of job--to another economy, another job, is not welfare.
It is not a hand-out.  Was the GI Bill of Rights charity?  No.  The
members of our armed forces had earned the right to a little
consideration.  They deserved a helping hand to make a new start in
life.  And so do those of us who work with toxic materials on a
daily basis, who face the ever present threat of death from
explosions and fires, in order to provide the world with the energy
and the materials it needs.

We must think along similar lines to frame the debate around jobs
and environmental.  A Superfund for Workers would guarantee workers
who lose their jobs due to any environmental regulation or incident
their full wages and benefits until a comparable job can be found.
In other words, as with any unjustified firing, workers would be
made whole in terms of wages and benefits.

The Superfund for Workers should also provide full tuition and
fees--in addition to wages and benefits--to every environmentally-
displaced worker who wants to further his or her education.  As a
matter of public policy, displaced workers should be encouraged to
start their lives all over again if they wish, to go back to school
and earn advanced degrees that will help them find a job in the
expanding, knowledge-intensive sectors of our economy.

As an extension of the basic Superfund concept, we support a public
policy whereby all workers would be encouraged to go to school off
and on throughout their working lives.  We believe the Superfund
for Workers should provide even employed workers with an
opportunity to take a sabbatical from their job and to be paid full
wages and benefits (as long as they make satisfactory progress
toward a degree) while they go to school in the program and at the
institution of their choice.  All working people, whether or not
they are facing the prospect of losing their job, need the chance
a sabbatical program provides to re-establish our family ties, to
reinvigorate ourselves intellectually, to catch up with
technological change, and to improve our skills.

This debate over jobs and the environment should be framed by those
of us who are most victimized by current policy.  The proposal for
a Superfund for Workers enables us to join this debate on our
terms.


SOURCES

Worker Empowerment in a Changing Economy: Jobs, Military
Production, and the Environment, by Lucinda Wykle, Ward Morehouse
and David Dembo.

"Jobs and the Environment: Are There Choices?" Parts 1 through 4 by
Anthony Mazzocchi (OCAW Reporter, 1990).