The GND is key to advance carework. Taking care of our planet is a form of care and the GND is key to community building

So, I think we need to ask what work does living well within planetary boundaries require? So we argue that it’s critical to think more broadly about green jobs, to think beyond you know, the kind of typical energy and infrastructure—important as those are, to also take into account work that’s oriented towards sustaining and improving life both human and non-human, and low-carbon waste. So, that in particular we think includes things like care work and education work, centering work that provides care for people, communities, and environment. To reference Sophie’s presentation, I think this is actually an important project of overcoming the family as the site of the only access to care and resources. We need access to care that doesn’t rely on getting married to access healthcare or having children who can take care of you when you’re old.

But as Sophie also points out care can also be brutal, including and especially for those who provide it. And so, care work is both the fastest-growing sector in the country, but also are among the worst-paid, least regulated, done overwhelmingly by women, particularly women of color and particularly by immigrant women. So, it’s hard work even if it sounds nice. It’s like we like care and it’s deeply exploited so you know, we need to improve that work, we need to protect people doing that work and organizing around that work as we’re thinking about building the no-carbon economy and adjusting a division of labor that gives women and people of color the worst-paid and lowest-status jobs.

Prioritizing care I want to say also means taking better care of the planet we live on. The historian Nick Estes has recently argued that many indigenous people are currently performing unwaged and unrecognized caregiving work for the Earth. And he argues, like unwaged caregiving work, land defense and water protection are undervalued but necessary for the continuation of life on a planet teetering on collapse. So we support Red Nation’s call to center multispecies caretaking in a Green New Deal. I think that could involve a lot of things, but including employing people in the work of caring for and restoring ecosystems. I think the CCC is typically the example here. You know, planting trees, revegetating hundreds of thousands of acres of rangeland, soil conservation and so on, and I think we could think about what other kinds of projects could a new CCC do.

We’d also want to think about building care for the Earth into things like agriculture, which I think could also be a way to connect rural areas and farming communities to the Green New Deal. And this of course is also another site of racial capitalism, since farm workers in the US are mostly immigrants and deeply exploited.

And so you know— I’m going to reference Sophie’s presentation again. I’m saying that all reproduction is always already assisted and you know, I think we should think about that as we apply that thinking to our planet. So I think what climate change and other ecological crises make clear is that we can no longer take the reproduction of our world, of sort of a living world, for granted. Reproducing life on Earth will actually require a lot more assistance from us. More human labor and human work, while also recognizing the vital work done by non-human nature, by the ecosystems that make the planet habitable. So, this is sort where I do see something like this is a kind of cyborg political economy that’s mixing…you know, recognizing human and non-human labor, mixing the natural and artificial, and doing that towards the project of letting us all not only survive but thrive.

So, I want to now finish with a few comments on the sort of politics and power I’ve mentioned. And I suggest at the beginning you know, there’s sort of like a few ways that I think we should think about work and labor under a Green New Deal. But as I said we need to have the labor movement on board if we’re going to win anything. And I think that this is where sort of some of the coalition question comes in. And you know, what we argue is that a Green New Deal coalition has to go beyond extractive industry workers to make life better for working people more broadly.

And this isn’t just a matter of principle, it’s also I think a pragmatic question. A labor program that’s only focused on transitioning fossil fuel industry workers to clean energy jobs just isn’t going to bring enough workers into the fight to win. There are around 50,000 coal miners working in the US today. Another 1.4 million oil and gas workers. And those people should all have you know, access to good work and livelihoods and benefits and whatever, after we get rid of their industries.

But to win a Green New Deal we actually do need to have the entirety of the labor movement fighting, and that means bringing into the fight the roughly 18 million healthcare workers, 3.6 million teachers who are already doing low-carbon work. These workers are already part of a labor movement that’s fighting for union jobs in connection to a larger expansion of public goods and services, while also undertaking new kinds of organizing that reach beyond the workplace.

They’re also at the forefront of labor militancy. So, in 2018 the US Bureau of Labor Statistics reported twenty major work stoppages in which a total of 485,000 workers went out on strike. And workers in education, healthcare, and social assistance accounted for over 90% of those workers and represented half of all strikes in the past decade.

That is still a ways off from the turmoil that produced the original New Deal. In the 20s there were over 500 strikes a year, even at the low point in 1927. But we think that when political momentum is growing things can change fast.

Recent strikes also show how the labor movement, or labor organizing, can help organize the working class more broadly. So the labor organizer and theorist Jane McAlevey argues that unions win when they do a whole worker organizing, which is organizing that sees workers as connected to broader communities and that organizes those communities alongside them. And so when unions fight and win this way, they win for the whole community, they build the foundation for future fights and future gains.

So the Chicago Teachers Union and United Teachers of Los Angeles have organized in the workplace and the community for over a decade. And this is a model sometimes referred to as bargaining for the common good. So in LA people might remember that teachers went out on strike early this year, in January 2019, and a lot of people in the community went out with them. And they won better contracts, more teachers, more counselors, more nurses, an immigrant defense fund, a commitment to more green spaces and more gardens, and essentially they won a lot of things that we imagine as part of what a Green New Deal could and should be. So we should think I think about more ways that we can be doing that kind of labor/community organizing and not just seeing labor as distinct, separate, and not part of this broader kind of organizing we need to do.

And my final words, I just want to say something about how we can build the kinds of communities that we’re going to need to win. And I think this is something in sort of in…the brief for this panel was around you know, how can we not give into the politics of despair and to honor that sense of despair. And I really think that we can look to the labor movement as well as an example of how to bring joy into the struggle.