Calls mount for Germany to rethink Russian gas pipeline plan after Navalny poisoning

Issued on: 03/09/2020 - 

A supporter of Alexei Navalny holds up a picture of the Kremlin opponent after he was taken ill with poisoning OLGA MALTSEVA AFP/File

Text by:FRANCE 

A European response that involves the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline is needed against Russia after the poisoning of Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny with a Soviet-style Novichok nerve agent, some politicians and diplomats in Germany said on Thursday.

Chancellor Angela Merkel said she expected Moscow to join efforts to clear up what happened and that Germany would consult its NATO allies about how to respond, raising the prospect of new Western sanctions on Russia.

"There must be a European response," Norbert Roettgen, head of Germany's parliamentary foreign affairs committee, told Deutschlandfunk radio on Thursday, when asked whether work on the NordStream 2 pipeline from Russia to Germany should stop.

"We must pursue hard politics, we must respond with the only language (Russian President Vladimir) Putin understands - that is gas sales," said Roettgen, a member of Merkel's ruling conservatives.

Navalny is lying in intensive care in a hospital in Berlin after his flight was arranged by activists. A German military laboratory produced "unequivocal evidence" that he had been poisoned with Novichok, the government said on Wednesday.


Moscow has denied involvement in the poisoning of Navalny, a longtime critic of Putin's rule, and the Russian foreign ministry said Germany's assertion was not backed by evidence.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said there was no reason to discuss sanctions against Moscow after Merkel said Germany would consult its NATO allies about how to respond to the poisoning.

Wolfgang Ischinger, chairman of the Munich Security Conference and a former ambassador to Washington, backed a joint response from the EU and NATO and said softer gestures, such as the expulsions of diplomats, may not suffice.

"If we want to send a clear message to Moscow with our partners, then economic relations must be on the agenda and that means the NordStream 2 project must not be left out," said Ischinger, adding that a full boycott would not be a good move.

"We can't put up a wall between the West and Russia, that would be a step too far, but there is a middle ground, something between diplomatic gestures and total boycott," said Ischinger.

(FRANCE 24 with REUTERS)

Devils of the deep: How jumbo squids survive freezing cold, oxygen-deprived waters
August 26, 2020 12.25pm EDT


According to the Norse sagas, the kraken terrorized sailors off the coasts of Norway and Greenland. (John Gibson)

Humans are a picky species. We are happiest in a near-constant environment and experience severe and often fatal injuries if our core temperature falls below 25 C or if oxygen content of the air drops below 10 per cent.

Many other species, however, live in almost constant change.

Consider the red devil squid. Also known as the Humboldt or jumbo squid (Dosidicus gigas), it rises every night from the depths of the ocean for a few hours of frenzied feeding at the surface. Before dawn breaks, it leaves these warm waters and sinks back into the frigid abyss of crushing pressure and low oxygen.

As molecular biochemistry researchers, we wanted to know how squids adapted to daily changes in the environmental conditions imposed by their vertical lives.
Bears, tardigrades and krakens

Despite the obvious differences between one animal and the next, all animals share a considerable number of similar genes. According to a 2005 study, for example, the genome of the chimpanzee is about 96 per cent similar to the human genome.

The regulation of those genes allows animals to adjust to daily or seasonal changes, respond to environmental stresses or tolerate other stresses, such as extreme temperatures or pressures. Epigenetics — chemical marks that alter the availability of DNA — and RNA modifications, which can silence protein production, are two of the several ways genes are regulated.

Genetic regulation is behind the seasonal hibernation of bears, allows many species to survive in low- or no-oxygen environments and lets others withstand extreme dehydration. It even allows some creatures to endure the freezing, oxygen-deprived, radiation-filled vacuum of space, which may be happening now to the thousands of miroscopic tardigrades that crash-landed on the moon in 2019.

It turns out that is also how krakens survive in the abyss.
Krakens in the abyss

We began our study at Experiment, a platform for scientific discoveries, and crowd-funded the support we needed to work on the red devil squid in the Gulf of California, between the two Mexican states of Baja California Sur and Sinoloa.

On one tranquil, pitch-black night in the middle of the gulf, we noticed a flurry of movement around our boat. Jackpot.

A shoal of red devil squid were rising hundreds of metres from the ocean’s depths to the warm, oxygenated surface waters to join a large feeding frenzy. They mainly ate small fish but sometimes there was a bit of cannibalism.

Kenneth Storey with red devil squids during the research cruise in the Gulf of California. (Kenneth Storey), Author provided

Before the first rays of morning appeared, they began their quiet descent, where they would have to deal with oxygen deprivation (hypoxia), high pressures and near-freezing temperatures.

We successfully caught several juvenile and adult jumbo squid before they descended and placed them in sea-water tanks on the ship.

These aggressive two-metre-long predators calmly occupy the deep ocean by depressing global gene expression, essentially turning down the volume of most of their genome while activating a select number of genes that promote their survival. This is known as “metabolic rate depression,” and is the basis for the dormancy often associated with hibernation.

The central mechanism emerging as a vital driving force behind metabolic suppression and squid survival is epigenetics, or more specifically, the squid’s ability to alter its epigenetic code rapidly and reversibly.
Epigenetics of killer squid

Breaking down the word epigenetics helps reveal what it is. First, we have the Greek prefix epi, meaning outside of, over or around, and then we have genetics, which refers to the cell’s DNA code. So, epigenetics is the study of heritable and non-heritable changes that occur on top of or around DNA without altering the DNA sequence itself.

Squids rely on epigenetic mechanisms to survive environmental extremes and retreat into a state of suspended animation by slowing down their metabolic rate. They reduce the squid’s oxygen requirements, turn off non-essential biological processes and sidestep damage from cold temperatures.

The epigenetic tools that alter gene expression in both squids and humans include DNA and histone modifications, and microRNAs. Adding chemical groups (such as methyl groups) to DNA or histones (proteins that spool DNA) can alter the availability or function of the DNA, making it more — or less — available to the cellular machinery that converts DNA into proteins.
Epigenetic modifications can be initiated by a number of factors from environmental conditions to diet. They change the way genes are expressed. (National Institutes of Health)

While we have yet to explore the state of DNA modifications on oxygen-deprived squid, our study of squid histones shows that histones are modified to promote DNA condensation (or spooling), making DNA less accessible when the squid is deep in the ocean. This critical mechanism allows the squid to save energy while it is oxygen-deprived, as genes are turned off when they are tightly wrapped around histones.

A third mechanism that keeps squid metabolism flexible are microRNAs. These short pieces of RNA do not code for proteins, but silence genes by physically binding to gene transcripts and blocking them from being translated into protein.

We found microRNAs in the hearts and brains of red devil squid that could slow their metabolism while they were oxygen deprived, helping protect these organs from damage. In the muscles, which give squids the jet propulsion they need for daily vertical migrations and to escape from predators, we found another microRNA, expressed under low-oxygen conditions, that likely suppressed growth and energy use while the squid was in its metabolically depressed state.
A diver gets too close to a Humboldt squid (BBC Earth Unplugged)

These seemingly tiny changes have big effects, allowing the red devil squid to go back and forth from the surface of the ocean to its bottom, killing and eating everything in their path. But they also have implications for medicine, and can help researchers understand — and find innovative solutions for — health conditions like stroke, ischemia (inadequate blood flow and oxygen to organs) and organ transplants.

Nature has already solved a lot of the problems we face. We just need to figure out how.

Authors

Hanane Hadj-Moussa
PhD Candidate in Molecular Biology, Carleton University

Kenneth B Storey
Professor of Biochemistry, Carleton University
Disclosure statement

Hanane Hadj-Moussa receives funding from Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.

Kenneth B Storey receives funding from Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.

What’s behind the new push for unionization by journalists

Digital news organizations like Buzzfeed and Vox are among those where journalists are unionizing. (AP Photo/Richard Vogel, File)

August 31, 2020 10.58am EDT


As Labour Day approaches, consider who’s making the news. From essential workers to gig workers and those working from home, the COVID-19 pandemic has put labour issues on journalists’ agendas.

At the same time, journalists are increasingly viewing themselves as “workers first” and forming unions to address longstanding issues in their industry.

By our count, since 2015, journalists have unionized at more than 80 digital and legacy media outlets, including at BuzzFeed, VICE Canada, Vox, Canadaland and 28 brands owned by the conglomerate Hearst Magazines.
Back to the future?

Journalists’ unions are nothing new. In the 1930s, newspaper journalists unionized to protect editorial independence and collectively negotiate working conditions. By the 2000s, legacy media unions faced big challenges: traditional newsrooms were being gutted by layoffs. And digital successors, with their tech start-up feel, seemed to be culturally off-limits to unions.

So it was surprising when staff at New York-based Gawker announced in the spring of 2015 it was unionizing, kicking off a wave of unionization in digital media. Since then, thousands of new members have joined The NewsGuild, the Writers Guild of America, East and the Communication Workers of America Canada.

Organizing has not let up amid the pandemic. The economic fallout from COVID-19 and the demands for racial justice elevated by protests against anti-Black racism give the media union movement renewed cause.

To understand why and how journalists are unionizing, we interviewed 50 media workers and union staff involved in this organizing push for our book, New Media Unions. Three themes emerged that persist as journalists continue to organize.
Protection and voice

Journalists organized to improve their livelihoods, including low pay and precarious employment. Unionizing enables media workers to negotiate legally binding collective bargaining agreements with employers. Contracts have raised labour standards, introducing salary minimums, increased benefits and a process for converting freelancers to full-time employees, for example.

Less than two months into the pandemic, 36,000 U.S. news workers had lost their jobs, been temporarily laid off or had their pay cut, according to The New York Times. Although news sites’ traffic soared as an anxious public sought information about the health crisis, companies’ ad revenue plunged and many outlets closed.

In hindsight, unionizing was a form of emergency preparedness. Before the pandemic, journalists acted to protect their livelihoods in a volatile industry where closures and cuts were commonplace. Severance packages became a bargaining priority. As union drives continue to launch, the pandemic has not diminished journalists’ resolve to build a safety net.

Journalists are unionizing to protect journalism, too. Contracts strengthen divisions between editorial and marketing departments, for example. And as local outlets are bought up by cost-cutting private equity firms, staff are organizing not just to preserve jobs but also local news, whose role as an essential service has been reaffirmed during the pandemic.

Having a formal mechanism to negotiate with management has given many journalists a say in how their employers respond to the pandemic. The L.A. Times Guild proposed pay cuts rather than layoffs, for example, which the Buzzfeed News Union used as a model to save jobs in their newsroom.
Diversity and equity

Racial and gender divides have also been an impetus to organize. Journalists we interviewed classified their workplaces on a narrow diversity spectrum, from “pretty white” to “mostly white” to “overwhelmingly white.”

Journalists are unionizing to change this composition to better reflect the communities they cover. Strategies including reforming informal recruitment practices — hiring from editors’ existing networks, for example — that perpetuate the industry’s homogeneity.

Research and first-person accounts show that women and especially racialized journalists are undervalued and often unable to sustain media careers. Journalists organized for pay equity and have negotiated contracts with salary scales by job title, which close pay gaps.

Beyond contract language that addresses discrimination and harassment, new media unions have negotiated the creation of union-management committees, formal channels where workers can push companies on equity, including retention and promotion of racialized journalists.

When Black Lives Matter protests intensified this summer, journalists’ struggles for racial justice went public. Journalists at the Los Angeles Times, for example, have pressured management to hire more racialized journalists and used the #BlackatLAT hashtag to document the mistreatment of Black journalists.

And after the The New York Times published an op-ed that called for a military response to Black Lives Matter protests, staffers organized a public response, tweeting: “Running this puts Black @nytimes staff in danger.” It led to the resignation of a senior editor.

Care and solidarity

The new media union movement has prioritized an ethic of care. Journalists care deeply about the work that they do, and statements announcing union drives declare workers’ commitment to producing journalism for their communities.

Drives have also been based on friendship.

Many union drives stemmed from friends in newsroom discussing disparities. (Piqsels)

Many campaigns emerged from friends in newsrooms discussing working conditions. They expanded as journalists in secure positions learned that colleagues were paid less for doing the same work, or were unable to pay rent or access health care. Organizing involves making deep personal connections as journalists have one-on-one discussions about problems at work and what a union could achieve.

As journalists were laid off during the pandemic, this care translated into union members setting up relief funds. The Florida Times-Union Guild, for example, has raised more than $15,000 for colleagues in need.

Organizing can blunt the competitive nature of journalism. Workers at outlets that compete for readers now share organizing and bargaining strategies and support union drives with tweets of solidarity. Unions also amplify journalists’ voices in the discussions of wider policy responses to the media crisis, as illustrated by the NewsGuild’s Save the News campaign.

For several journalists we spoke to, union organizing is a way to care for oneself in a job that can take a toll. As one journalist told us:

“Organizing has been good for my mental health. A lot of the time, we as journalists look at the state of the world and get very depressed. One of the cures for me has been to stand up for our newsroom and for other newsrooms. It has given me renewed hope in the industry.”

Unionizing will not fix all the problems facing journalism. But a union remains journalists’ best collective tool to sustain media workers in times of crisis and beyond.

Authors

Nicole Cohen

Associate Professor, Communication, University of Toronto

Greig de Peuter
Associate Professor of Communication Studies, Wilfrid Laurier University
Disclosure statement

Nicole Cohen receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Greig de Peuter receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Partners

How women are changing the face of Canada’s union leadership

About 150 nursing union members show support for long-term care workers at the Orchard Villa Long-Term Care in Pickering, Ont., in June 2020. The facility was hit hard by COVID-19 infections. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Frank Gunn

August 26, 2020 


As Labour Day approaches, close your eyes and picture the typical union member in Canada. If you conjured an image of a man wearing a hard hat or working in a factory, you missed the mark.

The typical union member in Canada is actually a woman who works in the public sector. She may be a teacher, a nurse, an office clerk at city hall or a mail carrier. All of these jobs are more likely to be unionized than those in the majority-male manufacturing, warehousing or construction sectors. In fact, Statistics Canada’s Labour Force Survey data reveals that, as of 2019, women made up 53.1 per cent of union members. That’s up from 45.8 per cent in 1998 and 29 per cent in 1978.

There’s no question that women benefit from unionization. Being unionized boosts women’s wages more than it does men’s, when both are compared to their non-union counterparts.

Unionized women also experience a much smaller gender pay gap when compared to unionized men. In other words, unions help women overcome the effects of gender discrimination in the workplace. This “union advantage” is even greater for women who are affected by other forms of systemic discrimination.

Despite becoming numerically dominant within unions, women are still under-represented in positions of union leadership. The number of women leading national unions in Canada today can be counted on one hand. And women currently lead only three of the country’s provincial and territorial federations of labour.
Glass ceiling persists

The under-representation of women in positions of leadership is not unique to the labour movement. We see similar imbalances in corporate and political spheres.

Chrystia Freeland recently broke the glass ceiling by becoming the first woman to hold the position of finance minister in Canadian history. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Adrian Wyld

Although unions are doing better than Canada’s corporate sector, organized labour still has a long way to go when it comes to fully shattering the glass ceiling for women.

The glass ceiling is an often-used metaphor that refers to an invisible barrier that prevents women and other equity-seeking groups, regardless of their skills or qualifications, from advancing into leadership positions within organizations. While in theory, nothing prevents a woman from being elected to a top leadership position, the glass ceiling represents the subtle ways that organizations devalue and doubt women’s leadership skills based on gender stereotypes.

Despite these barriers, women have periodically risen to top leadership positions within individual public sector unions or labour federations over the years. But securing positions of leadership within unions has been a long, hard-fought struggle for women workers.

And even while being severely under-represented in positions of leadership, union women have undeniably had an impact. Their activism paved the way for the labour movement to campaign for and secure pay equity, employer-paid daycare, paid maternity leave and rules banning gender-based discrimination in the workplace.

Unions could do much more to fight gender discrimination by having more women in senior leadership positions.
Public sector unions are trail-blazers

Not surprisingly, public sector unions, where women have always been most concentrated, were the first to see women elected to significant leadership roles.
Grace Hartman, right, then the president of the Canadian Union of Public Employees, speaks at a news conference in July 1983. CP PHOTO/Chuck Stoody

The Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) elected Grace Hartman as its national president in 1975. She was the first woman to lead a national union in North America. In 1986, CUPE’s Shirley Carr was the first woman elected to the presidency of the Canadian Labour Congress, Canada’s largest labour umbrella organization.

Public sector unions continue to be trail-blazers. In November 2014, Irene Lazinger of the B.C. Teachers’ Federation was the first woman elected to the presidency of the B.C. Federation of Labour.

In May 2019, Jan Simpson became the first Black woman to lead a national union in Canada when she was elected president of the Canadian Union of Postal Workers. And in November 2019, Patty Coates of the Ontario Secondary School Teachers Federation became the first woman to lead the Ontario Federation of Labour.
Private sector unions lag

In contrast, a woman has yet to be elected to the presidency of any major private sector union in Canada. However, there are signs that a long overdue breakthrough may be in the works.

Some private sector unions have redesigned their leadership structures to help women break the glass ceiling within their own ranks. In 2013, Unifor, Canada’s largest private sector union, adopted an executive structure that guarantees the number of women on the union’s executive board be at least equal the proportion of women in the union overall.

In 2017, the Canadian section of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union achieved equal representation of women and men on its national executive board for the first time after delegates to the union’s convention adopted a resolution mandating the expansion of women’s representation.
Two women vying for top union job

Later this year, two women — Bea Bruske of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union and Linda Silas of the Canadian Federation of Nurses Unions — are expected to compete for the presidency of the Canadian Labour Congress. It will be the first election in the history of the congress where both major contenders are women

Linda Silas, president of the Canadian Federation of Nurses Unions, talks with reporters in St. Andrews, N.B., in July 2018. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Andrew Vaughan

Why does gender representation matter now, more than ever?

So many of the issues we now face because of the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting disruptions in work, home and school are borne by women. Racialized and poor women are even more at risk of COVID-19 exposure because of the service and care work they do and the lack of choices they have to engage in social distancing.

More than ever, we need a gendered and equity lens in leadership to understand how the pandemic is being experienced differently, and how union responses can protect those who are most vulnerable.

Unions must continue to enhance efforts to recruit and sustain a critical mass of women, particularly visible minority and LBGTQ women, into leadership roles in the years to come. These efforts cannot be mere tokenism. Rather, they must reflect a commitment to ensuring that the changing face of Canada’s unionized workers is reflected in the leadership of the union movement.

Authors
  

Stephanie Ross

Associate Professor and Director, School of Labour Studies, McMaster University

Larry Savage
Professor, Labour Studies, Brock University

Tony Abbott: why Boris Johnson would want Australia’s controversial ex-PM as a trade envoy

September 3, 2020 

Tony Abbott: the future face of UK trade. EPA/Joel Carrett

The rumour that Tony Abbott, the controversial former prime minister of Australia, is being lined up as a trade envoy for the UK was a summer news story few saw coming.

Appearing before the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, Abbott confirmed that he has had some discussions with members of the British government. However, while he said he is “more than happy to help”, he insisted that nothing is official “as yet”.

Abbott is notorious in Australia for his “ocker” manner and outlook. He is regularly photographed in a pair of “budgie smugglers” with surfboard under arm at his beloved Queenscliff beach in Manly, Sydney.

He is on record with statements concerning indigenous Australians, the environment and the role of women in society that would make the most hardened miner in a local pub wince at the insensitivity. Not many public figures embraced the label “dinosaur”, but even his supporters recognise that Abbott is an unreconstructed example of Australian chauvinist manhood.

What on Earth, then, could drive the British prime minister, Boris Johnson, and his advisers to reach out to someone whose toxicity matches Donald Trump in many quarters?

Opinions vary. Some insist that with the UK in dire need of expertise in its trade negotiations, it makes perfect sense to employ someone highly familiar with the Asia-Pacific economic terrain. The only problem with this hypothesis is that even according to his close confidants Abbott had very little to do with trade during his term of office, or indeed at any time before or after.

Others smell something more suspicious. Abbott is of course an international figure who has moved in influential circles and has strong connections, not least with the conservative establishment in the US. He moves in high places among the policy wonks, thinktanks and institutes with lavish funds at their disposal to entertain friends and allies. Could this appointment reflect the fact that Abbott is a useful ally in these circles?
Flying the flag

Surely there’s a more obvious explanation. This is that Abbott stands symbolically for a set of values and a political orientation which the Johnson government wishes to endorse and align itself with.

In terms of values, Abbott represents a US style of conservatism based on a belief in “family values”, patriotism and the flag. But within that broad appellation we can also identify a distinctively neoconservative stance in terms of the assertion of “western” values and the superiority of the European inheritance, including but not limited to the value of colonialism and imperialism, and what international relations scholars term “offensive realism”. This is the view that, in a world of competing ideologies, military conflicts are inevitable.

In short, Abbott’s world view is not at all dissimilar to that of Steve Bannon, the controversial architect of the first phase of Trump’s administration. Like Bannon, Abbott is an unapologetic culture warrior. He believes that western societies have lost their way and lost confidence in themselves. He thinks the west needs to refind its mojo and reassert the superiority of its values and way of life, particularly in relation to the Islamic world and China.

Johnson is looking to establish ‘Global Britain’ after Brexit. PA

All this implies a kind of permanent war against the forces of the left – such as antifa, the left-liberal establishment of universities and the media and the apologists for identity politics, multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism. It also means committing to permanent conflict externally, on the hostile terrain that is global politics. It is a hawkish, unfashionable view of the world with metropolitan elites, but one virulently supported in Australia by its leading newspaper, the Australian, and by the Rupert Murdoch-owned Sky News.
Culture war

The question remains then, what possible use are all these associations to Johnson? He has strived to confect an image of harmless amiability with a “big tent” politics. He has sought to be a lot of different things to a lot of different groups in order to secure the hallowed middle ground of British electoral politics.

The answer is surely that “culture war” of a kind articulated quite crudely by Abbott and Trump but also in Europe by the likes of France’s Marine Le Pen, the Netherlands’ Geert Wilders, Italy’s Matteo Salvini and Hungary’s Viktor Orban has shown itself to be popular with voters who don’t normally vote for the right. The theme is a great way to draw in working class and precariously employed people who are looking for stronger “authority” figures to deal with what they perceive to be increasingly lawless societies surrendering themselves to immigrants and the multicultural left.

It also serves to insulate a regime from the vagaries of public policy outcomes, of which COVID-19 is the most recent and obvious example. The pandemic is a classic no-win scenario for most governments. Play too lax and one gets blamed for too many deaths. Play it too hard and one suffers the economic consequences of lockdown. A culture war, on the other hand, presents a win-win for conservative regimes across the world looking to maintain power.

Hiring Abbott will not inoculate the UK government against policy failure, as such. But it sends a strong signal to Tory MPs and the wider public that this government wants to be judged less on the flimflam of policy outcomes, over which it has uncertain control, and more on the defence of a certain outlook and a certain way of life that it hopes will chime with the electorate.

Author

Simon Tormey
Professor of Politics, University of Bristol

Black Liberation and Indigenous Sovereignty Are Interconnected

I’m a guest in the Black Lives Matter movement, and making images is how I show my support.

By Josué Rivas, The Nation and Magnum Foundation
JUNE 29, 2020


Black Lives Matter demonstration in Portland, Oregon. June 12, 2020. (Josué Rivas)


The Nation and Magnum Foundation are partnering on a visual chronicle of untold stories of the coronavirus crisis and the struggle for racial justice—read more from The Invisible Front Line.—The Editors

PORTLAND, ORE.—I haven’t seen this kind of energy since Standing Rock. In the weeks since George Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis, my city has exploded with anger, empathy, and a level of organizing that is long overdue. With Black youth leading the fight, this movement is demanding justice for Floyd, justice for Breonna Taylor, justice for Ahmaud Arbery, justice for all African Americans whose lives have been cruelly cut short by the police and vigilantes.
Scenes from a Black Lives Matter demonstration on June 2. (Josué Rivas)


At first I joined these demonstrations just to show my support. As a photographer, I believe strongly that my work should give rather than take, and I didn’t want to be jumping in to document a movement without understanding what my role could be in it. There were plenty of Black photographers already documenting the protests across the country; how did I fit in as an Indigenous storyteller? So I showed up: I went to the marches and listened, talked to activists, and slowly started making images that I thought could be helpful for the movement.

A woman walks in the snow during a blizzard during the Dakota Access Pipeline protests on the Standing Rock Native American reservation, Cannon Ball, North Dakota, November, 2016. (Josué Rivas)

Usually, my work focuses on stories about Indigenous peoples. The seven months I documented the Standing Rock movement created the foundation for how I now approach any story: Intention is crucial. At Standing Rock, we had hundreds of photographers at some points, most of them parachuting in for a weekend and then heading out. The images they made were superficial, relying on stereotypes and clichés and staying on the surface of the movement. That experience cemented my belief that your intention as a photographer matters to the quality of the images you make: the amount of work you do to educate yourself on the issue you’re documenting, the time you spend making connections with the people you’re photographing, always shows itself in the images. And if you believe, as I do, that photographs don’t simply document our world but can also help bring new possibilities into being, that work is worth it.

Indigenous peoples for Black Lives Matter demonstration, June 5, 2020. Portland. (Josué Rivas)


Black Lives Matter demonstration, June 16. (Josué Rivas)


Images have power, but that power can be for good or for bad. I know the pain racist, stereotypical mascots cause for me, I know the shameful example those set for my son. So while I can’t fathom the particular pain that my Black relatives feel when, year after year, videos of Black people being murdered by police are repeated ad nauseam and lead to only piecemeal reforms, I know that if we’re going to create the change we need for all of our liberation, we’ll need images that serve the movement.

Left: A raised fist at a Black Lives Matter demonstration, June 2. Right: A United States Flag hangs and burns on the “Promised Land” statue in Chapman Square, Portland. The statue was commissioned by the Oregon Trail Coordinating Council to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Oregon Trail in 1993. The Promised Land depicts a “pioneer” family—father, mother, and son—at the end of their journey. The plaza in front of the statue is sandblasted with footprints reminiscent of pre-settlement days: jackrabbit, black bear, porcupine, grouse, coyote, elk, and moccasin prints. The father was holding the burning flag. June 3. (Josué Rivas)


When I began to document the demonstrations in Portland, I saw similarities between Black and Indigenous movements. I’m a guest in their movement. It’s not my story to tell; it’s my story to contribute to as best I can. In the first few days, I made sure to share copies of the photos with Black relatives in the demonstrations. I wasn’t on assignment; I wasn’t making the work for a publication or a brand; I was there to make images for the people. After a few days, some of the folks I had taken photos of agreed to let me enlarge several of the images to paste them in downtown Portland. I asked people on my Instagram stories if they knew of any large walls to paste on, and the response was overwhelming: I found multiple spaces to put up the photos. This is my way of showing solidarity with Black lives and bringing these images and the people in them beyond our screens and into our daily lives.

I pasted some of my images across the city to show support for the Black Lives Matter demonstrations (Josué Rivas)


The way this movement is represented will have a big impact on whether it succeeds. We need to take care with our image making; we need to build trust; we need to get consent whenever possible; we need to understand the goals the movement is fighting for. Ultimately, our sovereignty as Indigenous peoples is interwoven with Black liberation. When their image is honored, we are all honored.

Black Lives Matter demonstration. June 10, 2020. (Josué Rivas)


Josué RivasJosué Rivas (Mexica/Otomi) is a creative director, visual storyteller, and educator working at the intersection of art, journalism, and social justice.


The Nation TWITTERFounded by abolitionists in 1865, The Nation has chronicled the breadth and depth of political and cultural life, from the debut of the telegraph to the rise of Twitter, serving as a critical, independent, and progressive voice in American journalism.


Magnum FoundationMagnum Foundation is a nonprofit organization that expands creativity and diversity in documentary photography, activating new audiences and ideas through the innovative use of images.

Alberta oil shipped through Panama Canal to Atlantic Canada to avert COVID-19 threat to energy supply

An oil tanker passes fishermen as it moves through a channel in Port Aransas, Texas, in May 2020. (AP Photo/Eric Gay)

August 27, 2020 

On July 20, the tanker Cabo de Hornos delivered an estimated 450,000 barrels of crude oil to the Irving Oil refinery’s Canaport storage facilities in Saint John, N.B.

What made Cabo de Hornos’s delivery different was that it was the first time crude oil had arrived in Saint John by ship from Alberta. It came via the Trans Mountain pipeline to the Westbridge Marine Terminal in Burnaby, B.C., and then through the Panama Canal.

By the end of April next year, a second tanker will arrive at Canaport carrying 350,000 to one million barrels of Western Canadian crude oil. In this case, the oil will have come via pipeline from Alberta to a crude oil exporting terminal in Texas or Louisiana.

For most of the Saint John refinery’s 50 years of operation, it has relied on crude oil from sources outside Canada, including Saudi Arabia, the United States, Norway and Nigeria, to meet most of its demand. In 2019, about 80 per cent came from non-Canadian sources, with the remainder from offshore Newfoundland and Labrador by tanker and Western Canada by rail.

Any event — such as a COVID-19 outbreak in any of these oil-supplying countries — that disrupts the flow of crude oil to the refinery threatens the energy security of most people in Atlantic Canada.

Crude oil supply

Relying on non-Canadian suppliers has never been an issue for the refinery. Even during the low points of Canadian-Saudi relations in the summer of 2018 and periods of increased tension in the Middle East, Saudi Arabia has been one of its principal suppliers. (Part of this may be attributable to the fact that about 60 per cent of the refinery’s output is shipped to New England and U.S.-Saudi relations could be affected if Saudi Arabia’s supplies to the Saint John refinery were disrupted.)

However, COVID-19 is a concern for those running the refinery. In April, Irving Oil applied to the Canadian Transportation Agency to use tankers from unspecified, non-Canadian suppliers for these two shipments, as per the requirements of the Coasting Trade Act. In each application it was made clear that the company’s overriding concern was the impact COVID-19 could have on about 80 per cent of its crude oil supply shipped from non-Canadian sources.

This is a legitimate concern.

Cargo ships navigate through Panama Canal waters in Gamboa, Panama, in June 2020. (AP Photo/Arnulfo Franco)

Globally, the health of ships’ crews has become an increasingly critical issue since the start of the pandemic. In many countries, fear of COVID-19 on ships has stopped shipboard crews from disembarking and returning home to their families, and new crews from boarding ships.

This is forcing shipboard crews to continue working well beyond the end of their contractual period of employment. Reports of mental anguish, self-harm and suicide have also been reported.

A COVID-19 outbreak in an oil-producing country or on board a tanker could disrupt the flow of crude oil to the Saint John refinery and, consequentially, disrupt the flow of its refined products to most of Atlantic Canada and New England.
Oil consumption in Atlantic Canada

Atlantic Canadians consume about 20 per cent more gasoline per capita than Canadians as a whole. With limited access to natural gas, about 31 per cent of the energy used for space heating in the region comes from heating oil (compared with 5.1 per cent nationally).

Irving Oil’s decision to find alternate ways to access Western Canadian crude oil from British Columbia via the Panama Canal or the U.S. Gulf Coast will undoubtedly increase the diversity of its supply. However, Irving’s concerns over COVID-19 and its international suppliers and shippers are equally applicable to Western Canada’s oilfields and any ships used to carry the crude oil.

To be fair, Irving has few other choices: crude-by-rail is a possibility, but there is limited capacity in its rail yard; TransCanada killed the Energy East project and even if it could be revived, it would take years to complete.

Read more: Regulations alone didn't sink the Energy East pipeline

While restructuring Atlantic Canada’s energy system to become less reliant on oil is the obvious answer, there are few short-term solutions. For example, although Churchill Falls could meet part of the region’s energy demand for electricity, heating and transportation, it will not be available until 2041, when the electricity sales contract between Newfoundland and Labrador and Québec comes to an end.

Without access to low-cost electric vehicles and easily accessible charging stations, gasoline will remain the principal fuel of choice for transportation in Atlantic Canada. On the other hand, there are alternatives for space heating, notably electricity and wood, each of which already meet about 30 per cent of the region’s residential demand for heating.

In the meantime, Atlantic Canadians can hope for an effective, widely accepted vaccine and prepare for periodic oil supply disruptions 

AUTHOR

Larry Hughes
Professor and Founding Fellow at the MacEachen Institute for Public Policy and Governance, Dalhousie University
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‘Trying to Get Free’
A conversation about the radical politics of looting with Vicky Osterweil.


A broken store window in Chicago, 2020. (Photo by Ashlee Rezin Garcia /Chicago Sun-Times via AP)


The looter, like most American figures, exists in a state of mythical distortion. When looters emerge from social movements, the press depicts them as opportunists and outsiders; when looters destroy property in response to police violence or the silent horrors of capitalism, they are deemed lawless aggressors. Talking heads and commentators cast looters as mindless and apolitical, as if looting were not a risky, calculated act. Vicky Osterweil’s In Defense of Looting corrects those misconceptions, reclaiming looters as conscious actors and heirs of a radical tradition stretching back to chattel slavery.

Expanded from a 2014 New Inquiry essay published during the Ferguson riots, the book robustly defends looting and compounds its definition. Osterweil’s looters are fugitive slaves and beleaguered workers, victims of police violence and armed black militias. Looting is for anyone trying to get free, in other words, and as Osterweil’s defense moves deftly through American history—from the colonial era, through the Civil War and Reconstruction, and all the way to this year of insurrection and plague—liberation becomes material and tactile, always tied to bodies and contexts rather than philosophical ideals.

In this interview, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discuss how the book developed, the many thinkers and texts that helped Osterweil scale up her essay, and the legacy of Ferguson.—Stephen Kearse

STEPHEN KEARSE: The book feels more like a manifesto and a call to arms than your 2014 essay did. During the writing of the book, how did tone and form factor into how you were shaping your argument?

VICKY OSTERWEIL: I’m a writer who, through researching and thinking through things, can in a way discover the form and the mode that the writing will take. I have had to consider not only the incredible violence against predominantly Black communities by the police and the prison system, but also the climate crisis. We desperately need to be making radical changes to the way our society is organized. So I think that truth may play into the urgency or the “manifesto-y” nature of the book.

SK: One of the main goals of your book, one of many, is to show that looting is a conscious political choice, whether looters are radicals or reactionaries. Why is the looter such an important political figure to reclaim?

VO: They are conscious political actors. And I think they are important because the figure of the looter has emerged somewhat spontaneously through the last, well, we can say 50 years of struggle. I trace the looter back to the Civil War and Reconstruction, and I frame the slave revolts and the general strike of the enslaved as W.E.B. Du Bois does. There’s a Sylvia Wynter quote in the introduction, where she says, and I’m paraphrasing, “It’s necessary that we think through things with these classes of people that are rising up against and resisting the system as it exists.”

That’s what inspires this work: people moving to get free or, indeed, just moving politically in the street—they know what they’re doing. So rather than starting from a theory of what revolutions should look like, and then trying to fit movements into that, post facto, I think it’s very important that we look at the way that people are moving now and did in the past and take it seriously.

A big part of the book is my indebtedness to the rebels in Ferguson, who made this all visible and possible for me. These were thoughts that were already percolating around the UK riots in 2011, but the way in which the rebels in Ferguson combined a certain form of holding space, attacking the things that oppressed them, and of looting and then sharing the goods in order to flourish and to have fun as well, was the basis for all my understanding.

SK: When you wrote the essay, Ferguson was on the national stage and in the national discourse. As it has faded from the spotlight, how has your relationship to Ferguson changed?

VO: Well, there’s been some frustration as Ferguson has faded, and you know, it wasn’t just Ferguson. It was also Charlotte, North Carolina. and Minneapolis. There were a number of big, big moments of rebellion and one thing that has happened, I think since the election of Trump, there has been a big explosion of the electoral socialist left. The DSA [Democratic Socialists of America], which when I was in the process of being radicalized in 2010 was a tiny organization that was largely about endorsing Democratic candidates, bloomed into this massive organizing force. And we’ve also had the Bernie Sanders movements of 2016 and 2019.
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Some people in those movements, I have noticed, seem to want to erase the role of Ferguson. You hear them say, “Oh, you know, there isn’t really any rebellion on the left. There was Occupy and then Bernie Sanders.” They draw this line that cuts out not only Black Lives Matter, but also Standing Rock, both of which have been incredibly important. But there are still sectors of the left, people clustered around mostly cultural production, podcasts, and magazines, who are still insisting that race is the wrong thing to look at. And in this moment, a lot of those people have been silent. Because their analysis is not just racist; it’s incorrect.

SK: It’s also often not actionable for people looking at the streets and wanting to mobilize and seize the moment. A lot of these liberal modes don’t really provide any way forward other than voting.


VO: Yes, there have been a tremendous number of Wildcat strikes and a lot of labor action involved in this as well. But I think there are some people who fantasize that a movement has to directly call itself a labor movement to have any revolutionary validity. And I think that doesn’t square with the history of even the successful revolutions. Cedric Robinson, in Black Marxism, talks about the ways the most successful revolutions of the 20th century were largely peasant-led, anti-colonial uprisings, including in Russia. They weren’t industrial-proletariat movements.

There is still a certain kind of classical Marxism, as well as a kind of social democratic liberal electoralism, that imagines that the only route to power is through the shop floor. And in order to say that, and argue that, you have to erase the last decade of struggle, which has seen incredible movements, from Occupy to Black Lives Matter. There were also the prison strikes and riots of 2016, the largest prison movement in American history, as well as the Standing Rock indigenous blockades and the massive militant antifascist organizing. All of these forms of revolutionary struggle have reemerged in the last two months and been innovated on. It’s as Keeanga Yamahtta-Taylor says in From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation: when the Black movement goes into motion, it upsets all of American politics. And I think we’re really seeing that.

SK: I’m interested in the composition and drafting of the book and how you scaled up from the essay to the book, because Ferguson was the catalyst for the essay, but in the book, you write of Ferguson only toward the end. That sequencing really escalates the stakes of Ferguson.

VO: W.E.B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction is incredibly important for talking about this: The way that he cracks open that timeline, the way that he shows that there was a revolutionary moment that has largely been ignored and removed from history and how we’re really living in its shadow, really changed me. So I guess, at that point, it became a practical question: How do I tell the story? How do I get from the general strike of the enslaved to now? How do I get from the figure of the fugitive and Harriet Tubman to the struggle for Mike Brown? And, what things do I need to say on the journey there?

One thing that was very important to me in this book was the part—two chapters—about the formation of the police and white race riots. I really think there is a certain tendency among a very small group of ultra-left or anarchist commentators to do the same thing that nonviolence people do, but in reverse, where if there is looting and rioting it’s considered [inherently] good. And I really wanted to think about the ways in which looting and rioting have functioned in our history, often in the area of reactionary politics and, much less often, liberatory politics. For example, right now in India, race rioting is one of the key tactics of the fascist movement. So I really don’t want to romanticize what is in my opinion a tactic. And that relates to the other main thread of the book. I wanted to resist the idea that nonviolent tactics can be considered in the abstract outside of context and judged morally good or bad. We should be keeping our toolbox as big and varied as possible, and not falling into these moral traps concerning tactics.

SK: In your chapter on the civil rights movement’s under-acknowledged use of armed self-defense, you use the term “not nonviolence” a lot. And that term also appears in the original essay. What is the value of the term for you in regard to carving out an area between violence and nonviolence?

VO: “Violence” and “nonviolence” are a lot like the terms in the “pro-life” versus “pro-choice” debate, which is to say, in the framing of it; the argument that I want to make is already lost. I don’t want to oppose nonviolence to violence; I don’t think it’s a very helpful way to think about the world. If you can describe both the murder of Mike Brown and the breaking of a cop car window in response as “violent,” then that is a meaningless word, or certainly morally meaningless, right? So for me, “not nonviolence,” which is a clunky phrase I picked up from the work of Lorenzo Raymond, who’s an activist historian from New York, points to the idea that this nonviolence is actually an ideological container for a certain kind of action without submitting to the moral blackmail of having to call yourself “violent,” which is a loaded word.

One thing I talk about in the book is the moment when the Brooklyn Congress on Racial Equality, CORE, wanted to have a stall-in on the BQE at the 1964 World’s Fair. They wanted to just stall out a bunch of junk cars on the highway and cause a massive traffic jam that would force the people coming to the World’s Fair, mostly from Manhattan or from the suburbs, to look directly off the highway into the ghettos that had been carved out for the highway. And critics called this action “violent” for weeks. They really tried to take down this action by calling it that. And a traffic jam is a completely normal part of everyday life. So I just want to reject the violence/ nonviolence dichotomy in general. So “not nonviolent” is a term that successfully threads that needle.

SK: As you recount in your book, the police and also proto-police like slave catchers and city guards play crucial roles in protecting property during and outside of riots. How would you describe the looter’s relationship to property outside the riot zone?

VO: That’s an interesting question. In the vast majority of cases the looters’ relationship to property is probably that they don’t have much of it and they have to spend their whole life scraping together what little bit of money they can. Many of them are probably deep in debt: rent, medical, credit card, student debt, some form of debt. They have to work maybe 40 hours a week, maybe more. Or if they don’t have work, they have to either commit crime or live on benefits. In short, they are dispossessed of property, and their daily life is a constant reenactment of that dispossession.

In the case of Black people in America, there’s an even deeper relation of propertylessness. As Cheryl Harris argues in her incredibly important essay “Whiteness as Property,” whiteness is the ur form of property from which all other forms of property come. So you have to have whiteness to really own property. And if you own property then you likely have some proximity to whiteness. So when people attack property and loot, they are precisely attacking that connection between white supremacy, anti-Blackness, and the police, which is the core argument of the book. But in our discourse, property has been the unnamed but implicit part of that equation.

SK: You describe looting as as “femme” and “reproductive,” and throughout the book you highlight women and queer people’s participation in looting and political organization. Why was it important to you to decenter the image of the angry male mob?

VO: The main reason is that it’s true. Riots are largely carnival spaces where people find it easier to reproduce their lives and where people care for one another and are having fun and are expressing grief and rage and exhaustion and all of these feelings. Femme versus masc is hardly a great way to think about the world, but things like social reproduction and emotion are coded as feminine even though they are the way that this struggle happens—through rioting and through looting. A common slander of militant activity in general is that it’s macho, that it’s “bro-y,” that it’s patriarchal. For me, that is a really damaging myth because there’s no way queers and women, and certainly not black queer women and black trans women, are going to get free without being able to have all of these tactics available to them. So it’s both practically slanderous and incorrect, but it’s also untrue.

SK: One thing that really stood out to me in the book is that once we start thinking of fugitive slaves as looters, Harriet Tubman’s legacy is changed in some sense.

VO: I had a whole huge section on her that didn’t end up making it into the final book. She’s incredibly important to me and American history. One thing that I think we’re seeing right now is that the current uprising has been so widespread and so many people have participated, that there has been some shift in the way people who support the movement talk about looting and rioting. There has been an increase in people who are willing to say, “I don’t think it was wrong.” But the way that they seem to revert to defending property is by saying, “Just attack the box store. Don’t attack small businesses. Don’t attack mom and pop businesses.” One thing that’s very liberatory for genuinely understanding the incredible power of the fugitives is that the idea of a small slave owner is ridiculous. The notion that this person would be more deserving of their property than a plantation owner is obscene, right? There were many slave owners in the South who enslaved one or two people, who, if their slave were to go fugitive, they’d be ruined.

I think once you really start to understand property, private property and business, as a continuation of those slave owning systems by different means, in the form of prison labor, through the chain gangs of the Jim Crow era and the pre–Jim Crow era, and in colonies across the globe, you understand that slavery is a constant form of relation in our society. You begin to be free from these ideas that are really frankly Republican talking points about small businesses and about entrepreneurs, and about job creators and all this shit that has become really common discourse in the last 15 years.

SK: It’s interesting you mention that, because you start off the book by taking down these common talking points and showing how they serve this hegemonic understanding of property. That really sets the stage for the rest of the book, because you can’t actually see looting as political if you hold those beliefs.

VO: All those slanders come down to the idea that people who are rioting don’t know what they’re doing. I think when people look at a movement and they say, “Those people don’t know what they’re doing,” they’re telling on themselves. So I wanted to really demonstrate the racist, classist, and just historically misinformed nature of these slanders. All of this stuff really reveals contempt more than it reveals anything true about the people acting.

SK: You have written extensively about video games and movies, but the arts aren’t mentioned that much in the book. Did fictional portrayals of looting inform your argument in any way? You mentioned All Involved by Ryan Gaddis in a footnote.

VO: Yes, I was very upset, that book was so terrible. I was excited. I used Terry Bisson’s Fire on the Mountain as well. As someone who has watched movies pretty widely, I’ve found that there just isn’t much fictional portrayal of revolutionary direct action. Most of the films about riots are either some sort of documentary, many of which, in my opinion aren’t very useful, or riots are like a side note or it’s something happening off to the side. I’ve watched a lot of those movies, and I’ve liked a lot of them, from Eisenstein’s Strike up to the 2018 Suspiria remake, which is arguably about the German Autumn in the ’70s. I love movies. [Watching movies] is my favorite hobby. And I read a lot of novels as well, and play video games. But ultimately I felt like I had enough on my plate just looking at the history.

SK: Are there any works that attempt to capture the essence of looting or speak to politics of rioting and fail? I’m thinking about movies like Selma, Detroit, and Queen & Slim. And even Dark Knight Rises. Those movies have representations of protests, but they tend to present protesters as noble and almost weirdly apolitical.

VO: I did myself a favor. I love Kathryn Bigelow’s early movies, but I didn’t even watch Detroit because I knew I would just have an aneurysm. Maybe that makes me a bad researcher, but I was just being nice to myself. Fun fact about Dark Knight Rises: They were filming it when Occupy was literally in the streets. And they were filming in the financial district. Occupy Wall Street marched through their set.

SK: Every trope you mentioned about looters has appeared this year in the media, in response to the protests against police brutality, and as we discussed earlier, sometimes among protesters. What do you imagine your book says to people who believe they’re against looting, but they’re also anti-police. You mentioned the idea of small-business slave owners earlier. Do you think your book pushes them toward—

VO: Toward accepting the role of looters in the movement? Small-business owners have a vested interest in not seeing the value of looting, so they’d be hard to convert. But I think that in some ways this book really is written for them. It is for people who have sympathy for looters but haven’t really thought about it. It’s also for my comrades and accomplices and people in the street, to feel supported and seen. It is a thank-you to the rebels of Ferguson for everything that they showed us and sacrificed. Many of them have been murdered, probably by the police or vigilantes, in the last five years, since that uprising. It’s been horrible. A lot of really visible activists have been murdered in Ferguson, and it isn’t talked about much. So it’s an act of grief and thanks to them.

Why Every Job in the Renewable Energy Industry Must Be a Union Job
We need millions of union jobs that are good for both workers and the climate.
MINDY ISSER SEPTEMBER 3, 2020


Following a rally in Brooklyn's Cadman Plaza Park, hundreds of union members march across the Brooklyn Bridge in support of IBEW Local 3 on September 18, 2017 in New York City.DREW ANGERER/GETTY IMAGES

The renewable energy industry in the United States is booming. Prior to the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, which has put millions out of work, over 3 million people worked in clean energy—far more than those who worked in the fossil fuel industry. And though the decline of fossil fuel jobs appears unstoppable, the unions that represent those workers are very protective of their members’ jobs. Similarly, they’ve also been resistant to legislation like the Green New Deal, which would create more green jobs while also transitioning away from work in extractive industries. Environmental activists believe that green jobs are the future—for both workers and our world—but unionization rates in the renewable energy industry are extremely low. In order to get unions on board with green jobs, the environmental movement will have to fight for those jobs to be union. And unions will have to loosen their grip on fossil fuels in an effort to embrace renewables.

Fossil fuel jobs can pay well (both oil rig and refinery workers can take home around $100,000 per year), but due to automation and decreased demand, the number of jobs is shrinking. And so are the unions that represent them. At its peak, the United Mine Workers of America boasted 800,000 members, but hundreds of thousands of workers have been laid off in the last few decades. Now UMWA is mostly a retirees’ organization and only organizes a few thousand workers in the manufacturing and health care industries, as well as workers across the Navajo Nation. When a union like UMWA hemorrhages members, many see it as an insular problem that doesn’t concern anybody else—environmentalists may even celebrate the closure of mines and refineries, potentially paying lip service to lost jobs, without doing much to create new ones.

“An injury to one is an injury to all” is not just a slogan in the labor movement because it sounds good, but because it’s true. When union density is low and unions are weak, the jobs that are created are more likely to have low pay, lack benefits, and be unsafe. And because union density in this country is already so low (33.6% in the public sector, 6.2% in the private), every time an employer of union labor outsources or shuts down, it affects not only those newly unemployed workers, but all workers, union and not. When oil refineries and other fossil fuel employers close their doors, union members and other workers lose their jobs. And while that may feel like a win for environmentalists, it’s also a loss for all working people, even those concerned about climate change. Unions are one of the only ways working people have power in this country—without them, there will be very few organizations equipped to fight for the programs and services we deserve, including ones that are tasked with fighting climate change. These kinds of contradictions have caused tension between both movements, and corroded trust between them. And while there have been some inroads made in the last few years—including unions endorsing the Green New Deal—there’s still a long way to go until unions eschew fossil fuels.

Upton Sinclair once said that “it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” When you’re able to feed your family on wages paid for by fossil fuels, it’s hard to see those same fossil fuels as a direct threat to your life. Most of us can understand why fossil fuel workers want to hold onto their jobs. And we can also understand why a majority of Americans want to significantly reduce the use of fossil fuels.

But between these two conflicting needs is a real opportunity: green jobs. The Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts that the two fastest growing jobs through 2028 will both be in the renewable energy sector. While an economic downturn due to Covid-19 could slow job growth, pre-pandemic reports showed that solar installers and wind turbine technicians were set to grow by 63%. None of the 20 jobs projected to grow over 20% in the next eight years are in the fossil fuel industry. But the opening created by the renewable industry for a partnership between the environmental and labor movements is being squandered: Unions aren’t engaging in enough new organizing, and environmentalists aren’t encouraging them. There are, of course, some heartening examples of unions and greens working together, like the Reversing Inequality, Combating Climate Change report out of the Worker Institute at Cornell University, which convened unions and policy experts to develop recommendations for new union jobs which would also fight climate change. But most of the green jobs being created are not union: Only 6% of workers in both wind power generation and solar power concentrating system work are unionized, and 4% of workers in photovoltaics, which create solar cells to convert light to electricity.

There are currently nearly 335,000 solar workers in the country, representing a huge opportunity for the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW), which admits that “a disturbingly small percentage of the electrical workers who install residential solar panels in North America belong to a union.” Workers on solar farms are more likely to be unionized than rooftop solar installers, who can make as little as $12 per hour doing a dangerous job and risking electrocution or a deadly fall.

In These Times spoke with a former solar installer, J., at Solar States, a solar installer and educator in Philadelphia. Installers there start at $16 an hour and are offered paid time off, retirement and health care benefits. Most are Black and brown, and according to J., there’s a mandate for 50% of installers to live in the city limits. Lead installers can go up to $22 to $25, but that’s about the highest they can make on residential jobs. This is why, according to J., solar installers try to get commercial work on large buildings owned by the city, state or businesses, because it pays more and the jobs are longer—and they often work alongside union members.

On a recent installation job on a city-owned building, which triggered the prevailing wage provision, Solar States installers worked next to members of IBEW Local 98, laying the solar panels while the union electricians wired them. J. (who still works in the industry and wants to remain anonymous) told In These Times that “there’s a lot of bad blood with the union, but I tried to tell my co-workers that the only reason we get prevailing wage is because of them.” According to him, the tension stems from interpersonal issues when they work closely together, and the differences in their wages—IBEW can members make $72 an hour. Relatedly, the union is predominately white, and workers at Solar States are mostly people of color, which has also caused tension between the two groups.

According to residential solar installers, Local 98 also hasn’t expressed any interest in bringing these workers into their union. (Local 98 didn’t return a request for comment.) J. told In These Times, “They don’t care about new organizing. They want to make sure that all the white men that have been in IBEW forever continue to command a high wage. They have never once tried to reach out to us, and we work side by side!” This may be because there is no cohesive mandate from the international union. In fact, different IBEW locals in California have had conflicting opinions on green jobs: Local 18 has slammed the Green New Deal, while Local 428 has embraced job opportunities in the renewable sector. And while unions struggle internally over these issues, many environmentalists remain indifferent or uninterested in solar workers’ labor conditions. J. said that “especially customers who are wealthy, they don’t really think about it at all. Their question is not how much installers get paid, but how much is my carbon footprint offset.”

If environmentalists are truly concerned about offsetting carbon footprints and growing the renewable sector, they’ll have to fight for government intervention—and to do so successfully, they’ll need unions on their side. In Philadelphia, a Solar States customer can pay an average of anywhere between $21,000 and $26,000 for solar installation on their home. Without rebates, tax breaks and other incentives, residential solar is financially out of reach for most people, making it seem more like a hobby for the wealthy and less like an important step to fight climate change. The Green New Deal, which calls for “meeting 100% of the power demand in the United States through clean, renewable, and zero-emission energy sources,” could close this access gap. And with more than 12.5 million members, the AFL-CIO (the country’s largest labor federation) is well poised to get more moderate Democrats on board with the legislation, which, if passed, would create millions of jobs and expand unions’ ranks. But most unions see the Green New Deal as an attack on union jobs, rather than an opportunity to create more. And yet if renewable energy got the same kinds of subsidies fossil fuel companies have, members of building trades unions would be clamoring to install solar panels or wind turbines.

In the meantime, if there’s a shared agreement between both the environmental movement and the labor movement that creating millions of union jobs is a priority, both need to actually prioritize it. Jobs that are good for the environment aren’t necessarily good for workers, and jobs that are good for workers aren’t necessarily good for the environment. We need jobs that are good for both, and to get there we need unions and environmental organizations fighting for investment, incentives and jobs—together. This could involve tying subsidies to a certain percentage of union jobs, or fighting for project labor agreements at every potential green job site. Whatever form it takes, this coalition must begin at the premise that a loss of union jobs is detrimental to all working people in this country—and if we want to fight climate change, the labor movement must take the lead, before it’s too late.


MINDY ISS­ER works in the labor move­ment and lives in Philadelphia.