Adversaries to Allies

Richmond’s latest controversy involving Big Oil — and its local friends and foes — reveals the main political divide explored in the anthology Power Lines: Building a Labor-Climate Justice Movement. The collection began as a project of the Forge and was compiled by former Forge editor Lindsay Zafir, now academic director of Leadership for Democracy and Social Justice at CUNY, and Jeff Ordower, North America director for 350.org, It brings together more than a dozen case studies of environmental justice campaigns that have grappled with the challenge of enlisting labor allies and overcoming union objections to reducing fossil fuel extraction, transportation, refining, and use.

Their contributors include “blue-green” coalition builders like Norman Rogers, second vice president of United Steelworkers (USW) Local 675 in Southern California; José Bravo, executive director of the Just Transition Alliance (JTA), which has been trying to bring union members and environmentalists together since 1997; and Tefere Gebre, former executive vice president of the American Federation of Labor–Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), who now works for Greenpeace USA.

Other voices in the collection hail from North Bay Jobs With Justice, APEN, CBE, the Bay Area-based Climate Workers, the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy, state-level and multistate groups like Native Movement, Climate Justice Rhode Island, Good Jobs, Clean Air New Jersey, and the Center for Coalfield Justice, and national networks such as the Green Workers Alliance and Labor Network for Sustainability.

Not all of these projects have survived the fickleness of foundation funders or the shifting winds of union politics. Brooke Anderson, a former organizer for the East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy, spent five years nurturing Climate Workers, a cross-union, rank-and-file formation of mainly low-wage workers backed by the Movement Generation Justice & Ecology Project. Summing up the lessons of that experience, she describes how hospitality workers and port truckers “who had contributed the least to ecological erosion and had the least resources to shoulder a just transition were asked to sacrifice the most to make their industries more ‘sustainable.’”

In her chapter, Anderson recounts one victory of particular significance, locally and nationally (although it remains subject to litigation).  This was the labor-community fight against a coal export terminal in Oakland. She writes:

When it was proposed, many in labor deferred to the building trades, which supported the project. However, once unions with members in the path of the coal trains — often lower-wage, Black and Brown members — spoke out against the project, it put labor’s position back up for grabs. We eventually moved much of labor to oppose the terminal and the city of Oakland, followed suit, rejecting the proposal.

Asian American Activism

In Power Lines, well-deserved attention is given to APEN, which has rallied Richmond residents against Chevron for three decades from its base among Laotian refugees and other Asian American immigrants. Ordower and Miya Yoshitani provide a useful overview of this organizational history; the book also features an interview with APEN codirector Vivian Yi Huang and Amee Raval, its research and policy director, conducted by Yoshitani, who was APEN’s long-time executive director.

APEN has had some success building relationships with oil workers in Richmond who are direct employees of Chevron, as Ordower and Yoshitani observe. Their USW Local 5 represents workers at several other refineries in Contra Costa and Solano Counties. In the last decade, it has struck two of them, including Chevron’s facility for ten weeks in 2022 — the longest walkout there in forty years. During each of these national or local contract fights, local environmental justice groups joined strike picket lines and rallies, with Greenpeace even deploying several protest boats around Chevron’s mile-long pier on the Richmond shoreline.

After the dispute ended, Local 5 vice president B. K. White and four coworkers were fired, in retaliation for their strike activity and White’s aggressive public advocacy for refinery safety measures. While negotiating a settlement of his discharge case, White decided to retire from Chevron, after twenty-nine years. He took a new job as public policy director for Richmond mayor Eduardo Martinez, the longtime Chevron critic now pushing for a “polluters’ tax.” According to the mayor’s chief of staff, Shiva Mishek, White’s role in the mayor’s office is “to help us lead ‘just transition’ work and support union labor and workforce development in Richmond.”

An Adversarial Relationship

As Ordower and Yoshitani report, environmental justice groups like APEN have had “a more adversarial relationship” with conservative craft unions that, in 2015, even blocked a Contra Costa County Labor Council resolution in support of Local 5 strikers at a refinery in Martinez, California. These unions are affiliated with the State Building and Construction Trades Council of California (SBCTCC), which speaks for five hundred thousand workers. Its affiliated unions have often backed management positions on refinery expansion or taxation, undercut campaigns for workplace safety led by the USW, and resisted stronger environmental protection for “frontline” communities.

The long-standing rift between the two wings of refinery labor is recounted in my book, Refinery Town: Big Oil, Big Money, and the Remaking of an American City. It was on dramatic display several years ago when the Western States Petroleum Association (WSPA), the powerful industry lobbying group funded by oil and gas companies, held its annual policy and strategy meeting at a swank beachfront resort in Orange County. The two-day event featured a keynote speech by then State Building Trades Council leader Robbie Hunter, president of Ironworkers Local 433 in Los Angeles.

As a fellow presenter at the conference (on a panel about the concerns of refinery neighbors), I saw Hunter get a standing ovation for his lunchtime address to several hundred oil industry managers and contractors, lobbyists from Washington and Sacramento, and friends in the state legislature. The labor leader spent nearly an hour praising Big Oil and criticizing the “enviros and NIMBYs and all the usual groups that just say ‘no’ to everything” that leads to more hiring of building-trades members to do refinery maintenance and modernization work.

According to Hunter, Richmond was ground zero for such obstructionism because its “city council got taken over by people who didn’t reflect the community” (like RPA). As a result of this political shift, he reported, Chevron is now constantly assailed by “groups with an activist agenda” who are “looking for any excuse to shut down these plants.” He pledged that his organization would continue to work with Chevron so it remains “the neighbor the city wants.” (For its part, WSPA has joined the opposition to Richmond’s proposed ballot measure, arguing that “any additional local taxes or regulatory programs could make [Chevron] operations more challenging and expensive, which could lead to higher costs at the pump for all.”)

An Oil Worker’s Concerns

Norm Rogers is a Southern California union official who has had to address rank-and-file concerns about the impact of refinery shutdowns — but in a different way than Hunter. As he explains in a chapter called “The Dream and the Nightmare,” the four-thousand-member USW Local 675 “is very much tied to its history as a local under the former Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers” that was aligned with the late Tony Mazzocchi, the pioneering labor environmentalist and job-safety advocate who served as national secretary-treasurer and legislative director of the OCAW.

Local 675 joined a union coalition called California Labor for Climate Jobs that, according to Rogers, “successfully lobbied the state for a $40 million fund for displaced oil and gas workers and a $20 million fund for displaced extraction workers.” At Marathon Oil, a Local 675 employer, an ongoing “conversion to renewable diesel has already resulted in significant job losses . . . which is especially challenging for older workers who are too close to retirement for retraining.”

The funding obtained from the state is designed to support laid-off workers, where possible, through retraining programs, plus early retirement and wage replacement, and other services. Yet as Rogers suggests, this is little more than a pilot project in light of California’s plan to reduce crude oil production to 166,000 barrels a day by 2045.

“Currently, my refinery alone produces 360,000 barrels a day,” Rogers reports. “Refineries across the state produce more than one million barrels a day. The plan that’s currently in place doesn’t fully address how we could reduce production so dramatically or what the consequences of doing so would be — including loss of union jobs.”

By grappling with realities like this, Power Lines helps deepen the debate about how to unite and fight for a “Green New Deal” — or any better deal than the status quo, which will leave millions of workers at risk in the hottest summer ever in the United States. As Power Lines contributor Todd Vachon points out in a similar book, Clean Air and Good Jobs: US Labor and the Struggle for Climate Justice, creating “a pro-worker clean energy economy” requires turning “just transition” rhetoric into reality, on a much larger scale.

If most fossil fuel workers believe they will end up on the trash heap — like underground coal miners or Rust Belt factory workers before them — business unionists will have little trouble rallying them based on that fear. Rather than becoming allies in the fight for a stronger social safety net for displaced workers and a sustainable future for all of us, they will, in a fashion very familiar in Richmond, be mobilized by their own unions and employers to protect the power and profits of corporate America.