One of the two biggest pressure points against the government’s carbon price plan is jobs (the other being concerns about cost of living). There’s an irony here: in a labour market which is no longer structured to create and maintain ‘jobs for life’, there’s always significant job churn. In other words, as part of the normal workings of the labour market, many many workers lose their jobs on a regular basis due to contractions in demand in particular industries.
The ‘flexibility’ of the labour market is, of course, something that is extremely unlikely to be revisited (although it’s very disappointing that so little has been done in the terms of the Labor governments to rethink how employment safety and a social right to employment could be created, which is eminently possible even in a flexible labour market). It’s this job insecurity, a consequence of how neo-liberal economies are supposed to work, which establishes the conditions for a ‘carbon tax = job losses’ message to be so powerful.
Yet there’s something a bit strange about seeing every last job as sacred, an attitude best exemplified by the rhetoric of Paul Howes.
Part of the relative failure of the political strategy to sell the carbon price plan (which I discussed on Saturday) is the inability to deepen the message about a low-carbon economy future having the ability to create good jobs. Indeed, in my own mind, I’ve had something of a question mark as to whether there’s evidence to support that contention.
As the Brookings Institution comments:
The “green” or “clean” or low-carbon economy—defined as the sector of the economy that produces goods and services with an environmental benefit—remains at once a compelling aspiration and an enigma.
That’s by way of introduction to an extremely interesting research report which sought to quantify and measure the composition of employment in the ‘clean economy’, and to make comparisons with the US economy as a whole, and with jobs in polluting industries.
In a post at Ethicaljobs.com.au, the report’s findings are summarised:
…jobs in US-based environmental industries have now overtaken fossil fuel-based jobs in sheer numbers, and that they also offer median wages that are 13% higher than other industries.
The research found 2.7 million green jobs in 100 US cities in a large diversity of industries, from organic food and farming jobs, through manufacturing (solar panels, wind turbines etc) through to public transport jobs.
Not only did the report find that jobs in these industries are on average 13% better paid, it also found that “the clean economy offers more [job] opportunities and better pay for low- and middle-skilled workers than the national economy as a whole . . . [since] a disproportionate percentage of jobs in the clean economy are staffed by workers with relatively little formal education in moderately well-paying “green collar” occupations.”
For jobs in clean technology specifically, the research showed that median wages were even higher – 20% higher than in other parts of the economy. Median wages for such clean technology jobs were $46,343, compared with $38,616 for all other occupations across the country.
Over the period studied – 2003-2010 – clean-technology jobs in the US also grew faster than the rest of the US economy – by 8.3% per year, compared with 4.2% a year for other occupations.
The report also found that environmental jobs employed more people across the country than fossil fuel industries – 2.7 million employees compared with just 2.4 million in dirty industries like coal and oil.
I haven’t had the chance, for time reasons this morning, to read the full report so I’d be interested to see whether there is also a direct comparison between clean jobs and jobs in polluting industries on income, as well as one with the median wage across the US labour market. Another caveat might be that a tendency for wages to decline over time has been observed in older ‘new’ industries – IT being the most telling example. But the relative maturity of some of the firms and sectors in the US might allay such a concern.
It does strike me as very interesting indeed that many of these jobs have been created in manufacturing and export-oriented sectors.
The report also, implicitly, highlights the fact that a number of US states have emissions trading schemes in place and a number have achieved significant emissions reductions (even allowing for decreased emissions stemming from the GFC and lower economic activity).
Someone ought to commission similar research in Australia!
