Jessie HF Hammerling is the co-director of the Green Economy Program at the UC Berkeley Labor Center. She works in collaboration with government, industry, unions, and community stakeholders to understand the impacts of the energy transition and to develop strategies for decarbonizing the economy that generate quality jobs and equitable outcomes. In prior years, Dr. Hammerling worked with the Labor Center’s Technology and Work Program, where she helped lead research to inform worker-driven responses to managing technological change. Dr. Hammerling has a Ph.D. in geography from UC Davis and a Master of Public Policy from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
States can act to preserve and advance President Biden’s most important accomplishment: a set of policies aimed at growing jobs in strategic clean energy sectors across the U.S. while supporting fair wages and equal access to employment.
In this report, we discuss the challenges and opportunities facing Contra Costa as it prepares for the cascading effects of an energy transition that is already unfolding. We propose a just transition framework to guide an economic development strategy capable of addressing the specific challenges facing Contra Costa and setting the county on a path toward a more resilient, healthy, and equitable local economy.
This report presents a current snapshot of the state’s progress in implementing several of the strategies outlined in our 2020 report A Jobs and Climate Action Plan for 2030. Specifically, we review existing high road standard policies in California, and assess the reach of high road standards across the state’s proposed climate investments in California’s 2022-23 state budget.
Understanding how technological changes may unfold in different industries is essential for developing effective solutions to the challenges that workers face. In this report, we synthesize the findings of five industry studies: trucking, warehouses, health care, retail, and food delivery.
After decades of inaction and failed attempts, the U.S. has finally passed federal legislation addressing climate change. The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) is groundbreaking not only in its efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but also in how it demonstrates that we don’t have to choose between good jobs and action on the climate. By including strong labor standards in incentives for clean energy and energy efficiency work, the IRA will help build a high-road green economy, creating good jobs and clear pathways into them.
“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.”
