“The core issue is how employers are deploying these new technologies in a way that explicitly weakens the union,” she said in an email. “All of the jobs in the supply chain, from lithium extraction and battery manufacturing all the way up to automotive assembly, could be union jobs.”—Jessie HF Hammerling, UC Berkeley Labor Center

Discussion of the Labor Center report “Fossil Fuel Layoff. ” As we make the necessary transition away from fossil fuels, Forum discusses what kind of jobs will be lost, and gained, in the green economy and what can be done to minimize harm to the workers whose jobs will be erased and to the communities who depend on their industries.

The more recent Inflation Reduction Act provides upwards of $370 billion in incentives for clean energy projects. The incentives are structured to encourage domestic production of various clean tech products.

“In the aggregate, there are going to be many jobs created in the clean energy economy and supply chain,” said Jessie Hammerling. “But the real critical challenge to get right is to make sure that they are good union jobs that pay comparable wages with similar benefits and job quality to the fossil fuel jobs that are at risk here.”

Half a million more construction workers needed as public money floods into infrastructure and clean energy. “When work is paid, it draws more workers into the pool,” said Jessie Hammerling, co-director of the green economy programme at UC Berkeley’s labour centre.

Tech’s effects on job quality — including wages and working conditions — should be as much of a concern for employers as its effects on the total number of jobs available. That’s the conclusion of a new report released by the UC Berkeley Labor Center on how and why employers in key industries are deploying new technologies, and what effects these changes could have on workers.

“All these new jobs that are going to be created [in] actually implementing the work needed to respond to climate change and shift our economy away from fossil fuels are jobs that we want to be good jobs, union jobs, and well-paid jobs with good career pathways,” Hammerling said. “It’s giving the building trades the opportunity to be at the center of building the clean energy economy.”

“This looks like a fairly extreme case of technology scaling back the human’s role in a particular work process,” Jessie Hammerling told the MIT Technology Review.

“There’s often white-collar tech workers doing the exact same work — a contractor and an employee sitting right next to each other, working on the same projects — but with different employers of record and different pay and benefits,” says Jessie HF Hammerling, a researcher at the UC Berkeley Labor Center.

“We have a fairly tight labor market right now and low unemployment,” said Jessie Hammerling, a researcher at the UC Berkeley Labor Center. “And I think that helps give workers greater confidence to stand up.”