Winning Fossil Fuel Workers Over to a Just Transition
Among the hard problems in tackling climate change is addressing the needs of workers employed by the oil and gas industries. In California, labor and climate organizers are working together to ensure a just transition as fossil fuel production scales down.
A driver unloads raw crude oil from his tanker at Marathon Refinery on May 24, 2022, in Salt Lake City, Utah. (George Frey / Getty Images)
I have a dream. I have a nightmare.
The dream is that working people find careers with good pay, good benefits, and a platform for addressing grievances with their employers. In other words, I dream that everyone gets what I got over twenty-plus years as a unionized worker in the oil industry.
The nightmare is that people who had jobs with good pay and power in the workplace watch those gains erode as the oil industry follows the lead of steel, auto, and coal mining to close plants and lay off workers. It is a nightmare rooted in witnessing the cruelties suffered by our siblings in these industries — all of whom had good-paying jobs with benefits and the apparatus to process grievances when their jobs went away.
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