Q&A: David Foster

David Foster, the alliance’s executive director, spent 16 years organizing workers in the western United States before taking the reigns at Blue Green. He says that working on the West Coast, specifically in the Pacific Northwest during the 2001 energy crisis, taught him that the best way to solve far-reaching problems is to push local groups into conversation with one another.

He’s taken that experience and is now working to parlay it into success in the fight against global climate change. As the movements to create green economy and so-called green-collar jobs have gathered momentum in the political world the popular consciousness, Sustainable Industries took the opportunity to talk with Foster, a long-time labor leader, about the promise the transition toward a green economy holds, for both business owners and workers.

SI: What does the Blue-Green Alliance do?

DF: The Blue-Green Alliance is a partnership between the U.S. Steelworkers Union, which is North America’s largest manufacturing union, and the Sierra Club. The group’s 1.3 million members and supporters make it the largest manufacturing organization and the largest environmental organization in the country coming together in a unique partnership focused on the fundamental transformation of the economy taking place, and trying to ensure it happens in a way that’s good for both workers and the environment.

SI: Why is global warming an important issue to a union?

DF: The union’s particular interest in the partnership grew on two fronts. As we looked at the kind of hemorrhaging of jobs lost in the manufacturing sector of the economy over the last two decades, we could come to no conclusion other than that the best allies in trying to slow down that process—and turn it around—were our allies in the environmental movement. These were people that had a common view about what was wrong with how the global economic system was set up.

The second big reason was we became convinced the solutions to global warming were going to provide us with the most powerful economic development tools most of us were going to know in our lifetime. The kind of effort necessary to solve global warming will be a powerful builder of new manufacturing jobs.

SI: How do you go about convincing industry to keep manufacturing plants here in the face of lower costs overseas?

DF: I think there are two very persuasive arguments. No. 1, and probably most important, by solving global warming, we are almost certainly going to change the price of energy in the global economy. When we do that, those who have the comparative advantage in managing pollution all of a sudden are getting paid to do that in exactly the way the market forces in the global economy previously rewarded people who strove to go to the lowest standard and the most pollution. When we start pricing carbon, exactly the opposite is going to happen, and American industries that have learned to live within a system of environmental regulation over the last generation and a half will be considerable steps ahead of their competitors.

The second area is readily apparent to those in Western Europe and Japan. It is the degree to which a concentrated effort investing in energy efficiency is giving companies a distinct advantage over companies that have chosen to operate in a slothful, energy-inefficient manner. European countries generally use half the energy we do in the United States. Pollution is not a sign of general advantage in a manufacturing company. It’s a clear sign of waste and inefficiency.

SI: So you’re trying to convince the companies to look more at their long-term bottom line by making investments now?

DF: That’s right. I don’t want to sound Pollyanna-ish about this, because I think there are very real competitive issues coming into focus that are going to be a part of the big debate about how to solve global warming.

SI: How are you working on those issues?

DF: We had a delegation over at the U.N. conference in Bali. I think there was definitely a consensus among labor delegations, regardless of what country, that we need global warming regulation that accurately reflects the development needs of every country, and that no country, including ours, should be disadvantaged; nor should any country’s workers be disadvantaged by a global effort to clean up the environment.

SI: What kind of training or retraining do union members need to get ahead in the “green” economy or to move the “green” economy forward?

DF: I think that can vary by both magnitude and degree in terms of what part of the economy you’re talking about. In Minnesota, community colleges have started up classes teaching people how to do maintenance on wind turbine installations. In a certain sense, they’ve taught the finer points to electricians on installation issues.

In other areas, such as the manufacture of component parts for renewable energy equipment, it isn’t so much that there needs to be specific training of workers to teach them how to make gearboxes for wind turbines when before they were making gearboxes for automobile assemblies. What does really change in that area is the demand for workers. You’re talking about training larger numbers of workers in what were seen as declining operations. That’s exactly the problem of the United States having downsized and out- sourced our domestic manufacturing capacity. A generation ago, all those systems were in place.

SI: How can the United States overcome the manufacturing capacity shortage?

DF: I think it’s a question of simply allocating the resources to do it and of convincing policy makers to understand that in a clean-energy economy, we’re going to be building a lot of things that we weren’t building before. In a global economy that starts pricing carbon, there’s going to be a real premium to doing things locally.

There’s a whole other area of training expertise that is wrapped around the decision to make America’s cites and buildings far more energy efficient and far more conducive to living. When you take on a project like that, I think it creates a huge number of jobs in the retrofitting of buildings to make them more energy efficient.

In the U.N. debate on climate change, one of the German delegation said that for every billion euros they invest in making their building stock more energy efficient, they are creating 25,000 new jobs. A lot of those jobs are in urban centers and are opportunities to create pathways out of poverty, to provide job-training programs for hard- to-employ populations.

If we’re talking about this massive rebuilding of American cities around the adoption of energy- efficient technologies, it’s a huge opportunity to rebuild what you might call unskilled and semi- skilled work forces of American cities.

SI: How can the supply chain become both labor-friendly and sustainable?

DF: One of the most important things we can do from a public policy point of view is provide market guidance by providing stable markets for the products that these new companies want to provide. Our failure to provide long-term stability for renewable energy is one of the big blocks to having this industry take off even more than it already has. Somebody was reminding me that we passed major tax breaks to get the domestic oil industry off the ground almost a hundred years ago and never allowed those to expire despite the maturity of that industry. We still can’t do anything for the wind industry at more than a one- or two- year interval.

There’s a lot that can be done at the local level. Chicago had a solar hot water program in which they aggregated the buying power of Chicago city schools to help put solar hot water heating units in all the schools. They used that piece of market direction to attract a solar heater manufacturer to Chicago, employ Chicago residents to build the units, which were then installed in Chicago schools.

SI: I understand Washington is one of the first states that the alliance focused on. Why was Washington at the top of the list?

DF: I think Washington—and the Pacific Northwest— has always had a very interesting relationship to energy and has a long history of believing public involvement in energy policy, in order to promote general economic development, is the right way of looking at the world.

When I was running the Steelworkers Union in that part of the country, we were encountering all types of problems with the energy crisis of 1999-2000: Its effect on manufacturing, its effect on consumers, its effect on long-term economic development.

Through the course of trying to deal with those very real and immediate problems, I learned that you could bring together unions, environmental organizations, Native American tribes and con- sumers, and you could have an extremely powerful dialogue that allows you to start changing public policy and start changing behavior.

SI: What’s next for the alliance?

DF: I have noticed in the last six to nine months that there has been a sea change across the country on the part of state, local and federal governments picking up this idea that environ- mental challenges are economic opportunities. Or as Henry J. Kaiser, the industrialist engineer from Spokane, Wash., used to say, “Problems are just opportunities in work clothes.”