UE General President Carl Rosen was one of three witnesses invited to testify to a Senate subcommittee hearing on Wednesday, July 26 about opportunities to clean up pollution in rail yards, reduce carbon emissions, and create jobs by instituting stricter regulations on railroad emissions.
The United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE) union has long been pushing for a transition to cleaner locomotives, in keeping with the spirit of a Green New Deal. UE general president Carl Rosen says the transition to clean locomotives fits with UE’s commitment to environmental justice and fighting climate change, and it could mean new union jobs including at the Wabtec Corp. locomotive factory in Erie, Pennsylvania.
Building more [Tier 4] locomotives in Erie “would be a benefit to the company, to the community we live in and obviously a benefit to the economy as well,” Slawson said. “Wabtec preaches that they’re all about making the transition into greener jobs and greener technologies, but they just kind of flat out ignored us at the bargaining table with those demands. They preach that they want to become a green company, but they don’t want to partner with the union who’s driving toward the same outcome.”
For about two hours on Thursday, July 6, a busload of strikers from Wabtec’s Erie locomotive plant, joined by hundreds of supporters, chanted, sang and rallied outside Wabtec’s corporate headquarters. Fourteen hundred members of UE Locals 506 and 618 have been on strike since Thursday, June 22, when they voted down Wabtec’s last, best and final offer by a wide margin.
“I want to thank you all so much for waging the fight,” Congresswoman Lee told the crowd. “We know that companies like Wabtec are never going to move unless we the people move them. We are sending a message to Wabtec and every other company & corporation in western PA that Pittsburgh is a union town. We're going to let them know how strong our movement really is — this is how we're going to win the green jobs of the future.”
Instead of using its $8.3 billion in annual sales and 13% increase in profits last year to create good union jobs for people making green locomotives, the [Wabtec] board of directors authorized $750 million on stock buybacks to increase shareholder dividends.
That's an insult — not just to the workers who make the company run, but to the rest of us who stand to benefit if the company followed the union's lead.
Over the past month and a half, UE members from Pennsylvania, Illinois, and California have spoken out in favor of proposed new Environmental Protection Agency rules on locomotive emissions. The new rules would improve air quality for rail yard workers, including hundreds of UE members who work as rail crew drivers, and the working-class communities surrounding rail yards. They would also help create good, union jobs.
On April 27 and 28, UE representatives participated in a Green Worker Organizing conference in New York City. The event, which was sponsored by the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung–New York Office, brought together leaders from unions, worker centers, and climate justice groups to discuss the need to organize unorganized workers as part of addressing climate change.
A new study, conducted by the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, details the thousands of new, high-quality jobs that can be created through the manufacture of “green locomotives” at Wabtec’s Lawrence Park facility in Erie.
The study estimates the number of new jobs that would be created in the plant at between 2,600 and 4,300. In addition to direct jobs in the plant, the increased production would add between three and five thousand new jobs in Erie County due to increased demand for goods and services. The total employment impact throughout the U.S. would be between 9,860 and 14,960 jobs.
After working as a rail crew transportation driver for nearly 13 years, Larry Hopkins says he is starting to worry about his health. “Every day that I work, I’m being exposed to the diesel fumes that are bad for our communities,” says the 56-year-old who was born in Blytheville, Arkansas, and now lives on the southwest side of Chicago.
There is good reason for Hopkins to be concerned. Locomotives typically run with diesel engines that emit nitrogen oxides and particulate matter, both of which are known to harm human health—and even cause premature death. The problem is particularly severe for locomotives that operate within rail yards, making short transfers or assembling trains, because they stay in a small area and are commonly the oldest, dirtiest ones in service. For Hopkins and other members of his union, United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE), this problem has a cause: inadequate regulation.