Table of Contents

Introduction and Executive Summary

The White House Task Force on the Middle Class has a simple mandate: to find, highlight, and implement solutions to the economic challenges facing the American middle class. With that mandate at our backs, it is no accident that we chose to focus on green jobs for our very first taskforce meeting in Philadelphia, PA on February 27.

There are many reasons for our interest in green jobs. The Obama/Biden Administration is deeply committed to reforming how we create and consume energy in America, and project of reform is the work of many different officials and agencies within the government. One part of that agenda is to promote the creation of green jobs.

Green jobs have the potential to be quality, family-sustaining jobs that also help to improve our environment. They are largely domestic jobs that can’t be offshored. They tend to pay more than other jobs, even controlling for worker characteristics. Moreover, green jobs are an outgrowth of a larger movement to reform the way we create and use energy in both this country and the rest of the world. They represent a growth sector, and one that offers the dual promise of providing good jobs while meeting the environmental challenge to reduce our dependence on finite fossil fuels that generate harmful carbon emissions.

We devote more space to definitions below, but we define green jobs quite broadly as employment that is associated with some aspect of environmental improvement. A scientist working on advanced renewable energy alternatives to CO₂-producing fossil fuels is engaged in a green job, but so is a laborer weatherizing a home or a lineman--or linewoman--building out the smart electric grid.

This overview paper presents and discusses a few of the most important developments in green jobs over the past few years. Specifically, we examine the following questions and areas of interest regarding green jobs:

• What is a green job, and what are the characteristics of those jobs?

• Green jobs in the recovery package

• Green jobs in action: a review of ongoing activities in this area

• Policies to help promote the creation of green jobs

• Leveraging private capital investment in green jobs

• Making sure green jobs are good jobs, accessible to all.

Findings

Numbers and Characteristics

• Because definitions of green jobs are so broad at this point in time, it is impossible to generate a reliable count of how many green jobs there are in America today. We can, however, identify jobs in industries and occupations that are likely to be green jobs. Doing so yields these findings:

• Green jobs are good jobs: they pay more, by 10 to 20 percent, depending on the definition, than other jobs.

• Green jobs are more likely to be union jobs than other jobs.

• Green jobs are more likely to be held by men, but less likely to be held by minorities or urban residents, and addressing this will be a significant challenge.

• It will take considerable outreach to make the opportunity to work in a green job available widely available; we present various examples of programs in action intended to provide pathways to green jobs and out of poverty.

Building the Movement
The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) includes various significant investments in green technology and jobs. These include:

• More than $11 billion for investments in a new smart grid, investments that will create thousands of miles of new or modernized high-tech transmission lines, while training and employing highly-skilled and well-paid lineworkers.

• $500 million for research and job training projects that prepare workers for careers in energy efficiency and renewable energy

• $6 billion for a loan guarantee program that will enable green industries to continue their rapid growth.

• $5 billion to the Weatherization Assistance Program that could save homeowners $350 per year on their utility bills.

There are a set of initiatives—policies, programs, and the interaction of key intermediaries, including unions, educators, and public officials—that are strongly associated with building a green jobs movement in communities, states, and the nation. Those pieces, described in detail below and demonstrated in a number of case studies, are:

• a public mandate to achieve an energy conservation goal;

• elected officials invested in meeting the goal;

• private employers interested in creating green jobs to meet the new labor demands for environmentally-sound output;

• financing sources who want to invest in the new initiatives, often involving federal loan guarantees;

• extensive labor force intermediaries, including community colleges, union apprenticeship programs, and pubic/private training programs to serve as a linkage between employers and workers.

What Is A Green Job?

There is no official or even widely-accepted definition of what constitutes a green job. This is not necessarily a disadvantage, as we seek to provide a broad, “lay-of-the-land” survey in this report. However, to have a coherent discussion about green jobs, we need to define some characteristics that broadly define them.

The most general trait of green jobs is that they must be jobs that somehow contribute to the improvement of environmental quality. We can add to this extremely general characterization by examining the far more specific definitions that have been offered by other institutions and groups. The United Nations Environmental Programme expands on our basic theme, that green jobs must work to preserve or improve the environment, with this much more detailed explanation: