Building a Green Economy Is No Overnight Feat

Chicago native Mario Brownlow, 31, is quick to proclaim his love of green-collar jobs and how they helped transform his life.

A few years ago, his world turned upside down after the death of his grandmother. Brownlow, a high school dropout, opted to sell drugs to help support himself and younger siblings. Before long, Brownlow was living with friends and family until he eventually became homeless and began battling alcoholism. After entering a drug treatment center, Brownlow got sober and connected with Growing Home Inc., a non-profit organic agricultural business that provides job training for impoverished individuals, helping him discover his passion for farming.

His life began to turn around. Brownlow earned his GED and completed a six-month landscaping job-training program in December with Greencorps Chicago, earning certification to do lead, asbestos, mold, and hazardous waste removal.  He’s now in the process of going to college to study horticulture. “This is a passion for me,” Brownlow says.

Several green-collar job training programs are aimed at individuals in urban and rural, low-income communities who were in similar predicaments as Brownlow. However, Brownlow says he, along with 32 graduates who completed the training course with him three months ago, have not been able to find jobs in their new fields, contributing to February’s 8.1% national unemployment rate.

“We have lots of training programs to hire people in our community to do the work but without the business to hire them, you have a lot of highly skilled people who don’t have any place to work,” says Omar Freilla, who six years ago created Green Worker Cooperatives, an organization dedicated to incubating worker-owned and environmentally friendly cooperatives in the South Bronx of New York City.  Freilla also developed the Coop Academy, a job training company that assists people with launching their own green-collar job ideas, and ReBuilders Source, an 18,000-square-foot worker-owned discount retailer cooperative of surplus and used building materials, also in the Bronx.

Green-collar jobs often are touted as the next economic boom, similar to the dot-com explosion that occurred during the 1990s. About $100

billion of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 will go toward green investments, which would create green employment opportunities.  While it’s no question that green jobs will play a vital role in powering economic recovery, the question on many minds is when and who will reap the benefits.

“It’s an evolutionary process. It’s not going to be real long process, but not short too,” says Jerome Ringo, president of Apollo Alliance, a coalition of labor, business, environmental, and community leaders, adding that there are some people who believe there’s going to be an explosion of green jobs in the next two weeks.

To build a green business economy will take a generation  — the next 25 years, explains Bob Pollin, economics professor and founding co-director of the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. “If we do it right, it can create ongoing job creation,” Pollin says.

Pollin, who is completing a study that will be co-published by the National Resources Defense Council and Green for All this spring about the affect green-collar jobs will have on lower-income communities, predicts there will be one million green collar jobs carried over the next two or three years.

Apollo Alliance sent a proposal to President Barack Obama outlining a $50 billion annual investment over a 10-year period that would create five million green jobs, says Ringo.  These investments would “make sure some people of color would get a piece of that pie,” Ringo says, adding that labor unions will be the nucleus of the green jobs movement.

Dispelling the notion that green-collar jobs are just for tree-huggers or college students, Pollin says the term “green jobs isn’t descriptive enough,” often leading people to believe that “it’s different than any jobs they used to have in the past.”

Green jobs focus on addressing environmental challenges such as global warming, carbon emissions, and fossil fuel usage.

“It’s not esoteric or outside the norm.  It’s regular jobs — carpenters, electricians, engineers and their supervisors,” Pollin explains. “These are jobs in every community for every type of skill level. There will be openings across the board.  The jobs are for everybody.”

Pollin explains that 25% of green jobs to be created are considered lower-wage, paying less than $16 per hour, with a lot of them in the construction and manufacturing fields.  But even if a person starts off in a low-paying job, there will be the opportunity to move up the ladder unlike other industries, Pollin says.

Even with this bit of optimism, Pollin admits that construction and manufacturing jobs haven’t always been welcoming to African Americans. “That is changing overtime but not eradicated since a lot of jobs that are in construction and manufacturing, generally are white occupied,” he says.

Regarding green-collar jobs in the African American community, Pollin says, “I think it’s been modest.  I think over the next three or four months, we’ll see it surging.  But [we’re] also battling the current economic climate and job loss.”  He advises that African American communities be poised to take advantage of these opportunities.