From In These Times: http://inthesetimes.com/article/15000/its_not_easy_being_blue_and_green/
Labor and environmentalists face off over the Keystone XL pipeline.
BY Rebecca Burns
May 22, 2013
In a final push to halt approval of the Keystone XL pipeline this spring, many environmentalists are posing a familiar question to labor: Which side are you on?
So far in the Keystone XL conflict, unions have largely ended up on the other side of the line in the tar sand. The Teamsters, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, the Laborers International Union of North America (LIUNA) and others have backed the pipeline as a way to create jobs. And as environmental groups flooded the State Department with comments opposing the pipeline, members of the AFL-CIO’s Building and Construction Trades Department (BCTD) rallied to send President Obama a different message: “We can’t wait,” said BCTD president Sean McGarvey during an April 24 demonstration calling for the State Department to approve the project.
In other words, the Keystone pipeline fight has turned into an XL-sized problem for an already tenuous labor-environmental alliance.
Four years ago, the future looked more promising. In 2009, amid heady talk of an Obama-backed “Green New Deal,” the BlueGreen Alliance—a partnership between four major unions and two environmental organizations—hoped not only to push for cap-and-trade climate legislation, but to catalyze the creation of millions of green jobs. Today, the legislation lies in disarray, federal funding for a green recovery has never fully materialized, and the alliance is hamstrung over the question of the Keystone pipeline. In 2012, LIUNA left the group altogether, and President Terry O’Sullivan fired a parting shot at unions who continued to collaborate with “job killers like the Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council.”
Faced with such rhetoric, environmentalists have sought to convince workers of their common cause by refuting the rosy job-creation claims made by industry groups. TransCanada says that its pipeline would create nearly 120,000 jobs, but a report produced by the Cornell Global Labor Institute and circulated by environmental activists asserts that this claim is wildly unsubstantiated. The pipeline’s opponents also emphasize that according to TransCanada’s own data, most of the jobs the pipeline does create will be temporary.
Many unions say that this critique ignores the nature of their working conditions now. “Tell me a job today that’s not temporary,” a member of Pipeliners Local 798 said during an April rally for the pipeline in Tulsa, Okla. “We’ve made a living all our lives off temporary jobs.”
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