Category: Employment

Green Jobs are Not Always Good Jobs

As the federal government prepares to spend billions of dollars promoting the creation of green jobs as part of the huge economy recovery bill, a new report warns that the jobs already being created in climate-friendly sectors of the economy do not always measure up in terms of wages and other terms of employment. The report, entitled High Road or Low Road: Job Quality in the New Green Economy, was produced by Good Jobs First (yours truly was the principal author). It was commissioned by the Change to Win labor federation, the Sierra Club, and the Teamsters and Laborers unions.

Many proponents of green development assume that the result will be good jobs. The report tested that assumption and found that it is not always valid. This is based on an examination of three sectors: manufacturing of components for wind and solar energy generation; green building; and recycling. In each sector, we found examples of employers that compensate their workers decently and treat them with respect. These include the Gamesa wind equipment manufacturing operations in Pennsylvania; developer Gerding Edlen’s commercial and residential construction projects centered in Portland, Oregon; and Norcal Waste Systems’ Recycle Central operation in San Francisco.

Yet we also found examples of purportedly green employers paying substandard wages and not treating their workers well. These include at least two wind energy manufacturing plants—one run by Clipper Windpower in Iowa and another run by DMI Industries in North Dakota—where workers initiated union organizing drives in response to issues such as poor safety conditions and then faced strong union-busting campaigns by management. Some U.S. wind and solar manufacturing firms are weakening the job security of their workers by opening parallel plants in foreign low-wage havens such as China, Mexico and Malaysia.

The report finds that many wind and solar manufacturing plants are receiving sizeable economic development subsidies from state and local governments. This use of taxpayer money provides an opportunity to raise wages and other working conditions. Many states and localities already apply job quality standards to companies receiving job subsidies or public contracts. In the report we urge wider and more aggressive use of such standards by federal as well as state and local agencies. The report offers other public policy options and urges the private U.S. Green Building Council to consider adding labor criteria to its widely used LEED standards for green construction.

The overall message is: green jobs are not automatically good jobs. We have to make them so.

Note: This item is crossposted on the Good Jobs First Clawback blog.

Peeking at a Company’s Pay Rates

Company-specific compensation data is one of those rare areas in which more is known about people at the top of the social pyramid than those at the bottom. Publicly traded corporations are required to file proxy statements each year that disclose down to the last dollar what top executives are paid in salary, bonuses, long-term compensation, stock options and perks. We know what the big boss earns but generally not what the company pays its middle managers or hourly workers.

Glassdoor, a new website launched this week in beta form, starts to fill that information gap. The site was created by Rich Barton, the former Microsoft executive who founded Zillow, a popular website containing data on real estate values. Whereas Zillow is based at least in part on government data, Glassdoor relies on voluntary submissions by users who anonymously reveal their own salaries, along with information on vacation time, medical coverage and retirement benefits. Users are asked to specify their length of experience and geographic location, so that salary variations can be evaluated. Those who do not wish to name their employer can specify the size of the company and the industry sector.

As the site is just getting off the ground, Glassdoor’s data are far from comprehensive. But there are already, for instance, 60 salary reports covering computer networking giant Cisco Systems. The site also provides anonymous company evaluations by current and former employees, including one in which a former product manager at Cisco complained: “They will try to work you to death.”

While we wait for Glassdoor to grow into a richer source, it should be noted that there are some limited sources for company-specific wage and salary data on those who are not top executives. For example:

* A few states that disclose the economic development subsidies they give to companies ask those firms to report on the wages of the jobs they create. The best example is Illinois, which has a database of reports filed by companies with job creation statistics, including average salaries.

* Some jurisdictions that have enacted living wage laws require employers to file periodic reports that may become part of the public record either automatically or as the result of freedom-of-information requests.

* The U.S. Department of Labor has an online archive of collective bargaining agreements—which typically include wage rates and other conditions of employment—arranged by employer. (The Bureau of Labor Statistics has data by industry but not by specific company.)

* Companies in some regulated industries have to report payroll expenses. For example, airlines must disclose this and other operating and financial data on Form 41, which is submitted to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics. The BTS system is cumbersome to navigate, but the Airline Data Project at MIT has used it to compile handy summary tables of wage and salary rates by job category for each of the major carriers going back to 1995.

* And finally, you can always check want ads and job postings to look for salary figures offered by those companies that don’t hide behind the statement that the pay rate “depends on experience.”