The building trades have often been one of the more reactionary elements of organized labor in the United States. Even as a tradesman myself — an inside wireman with the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) — I had my own doubts about how much support for the Green New Deal (GND) could be garnered from the building trades.

My recent experience at the 60th Annual Texas AFL-CIO Constitutional Convention shattered that understanding. Not only were many of my fellow trades siblings — plenty of whom work in the fossil fuel industry or represent fossil fuel workers ` — strongly in favor of the GND at the start of the convention, but the political struggle to get most everyone else on board required minimal effort. In the end, our state AFL-CIO passed a GND-style resolution. This victory is a powerful model for conventions across the country; it shows how resolutions like this one can become a standard labor demand.

In March of this year, shortly after the release of the GND resolution in Congress, the AFL-CIO Energy Committee released a memo harshly criticizing the resolution. Surprised by the response of an organization that I felt the resolution intended to strengthen, I set out to identify their reasons for opposition. In the process, I discovered a pro-GND resolution passed by the Alameda, California Central Labor Council (CLC), a confederation of union delegates that make recommendations on local and statewide labor and political issues.