The Green Workers Alliance fights for fair pay and safe working conditions in the renewable energy sector

In a recent webinar sponsored by the Labor Network for Sustainability, the speaker was a solar installer. He spoke about the dangers and low wages in the largely ununionized industry and explained that he is a member of the Green Workers Alliance, which aims to support workers mainly in the wind and solar energy sectors. The group sees itself as a “stop shop” for educating its members about their rights, where many will choose to join a union.

The group says workers in green workplaces “now face job insecurity, low wages and allowances, lack of benefits and poor safety conditions.” The alliance maintains that our nation “cannot achieve a just transition to a clean economy without more good, green jobs.” These changes won’t happen if employees don’t lead the way.”

Between The Lines’ Melinda Tuhus spoke with Matt Mayers, founder and executive director of Green Workers Alliance. He says that as of 2022, of the roughly 100,000 wind and solar industry workers, 80 to 90 percent worked in the solar industry, and just 10.5 percent were unionized.

MATT MAYERS: Overall, in the green jobs sector, it was mostly non-union. And while we want to help people form unions, in the meantime we wanted to help build an organization that would educate people about their rights, provide training, connect people with unions and other resources.

So we started filling this void. I had about 25 years in the labor movement, so I had a lot of experience in this. We started in the middle of Covid, starting online and more recently with in-person work. This basically led to our founding – there was simply a need for more power for workers in the industry and we built the organization around that. We have approximately 1,500 members who primarily operate in the utility-scale wind and solar industry.

MELINDA TUHUS: All right. And when I heard one of your members speak on the webinar, he really emphasized how terrible the working conditions are. The hours are long – he’s a solar installer, so there’s definitely a risk involved in walking on rooftops, and the pay is certainly not what union wages are for miners or union workers like electricians and so on.

Do you see your organization working with an actual union to unionize these workers and raise their living standards, labor protections, and so on?

MATT MAYERS: Yes, you’re absolutely right. People in the non-union sector see really bad conditions in terms of pay, safety, lack of job security and the constant need to find a new job – they get laid off when the project ends and they have to go online, find another one and go to the service. We think that the answer to some of the problems will be to work with some trade unions in this area, so in a sense we are a step forward for people to learn about their rights, but in the long run there will need to be more trade unions in this sector, so we work with many trade unions to help us with this. We are at the beginning of this process, but everything has been really positive. We have seen good response from trade unions in the industry, such as the Employees’ Union, IBEW and others. And as I said, there is a huge difference in where in a given sector the workplaces are unionized – and in some places they are unionized, especially in some states like Nevada, California and New York, where many jobs are unionized. They have higher pay, better working conditions, benefits, so we want to extend this to the entire industry.

MELINDA TUHUS: What is the demographic structure of your members or people in this sector? It looks like it’s still overwhelmingly male, right?

MATT MAYERS: Yes, I would say it’s still mostly men. That’s a good question. More research needs to be done in this sector. But I would say our membership is probably 30-40 percent women. We probably have a higher representation of women than in the sector as a whole, but in the sector as a whole, at least in the solar sector, we probably have at least 35-30 per cent of the workforce are women and that number is growing. You know, it’s a pretty diverse demographic in terms of racial background. Indeed, as in other parts of construction, there are many white men, but a growing number of Latino and Latino workers; you also have a large black labor force. In terms of diversity, it really resembles a large portion of the American workforce.

And especially on the sunny side, people love this job in the sense that they feel very proud of it; The problem is that they don’t necessarily like the working conditions, so we’re trying to change that.

So most of our members don’t necessarily work on roofs. They are working on what is called utility-scale wind or solar energy. So in the industry, they work on big projects in the field.

MELINDA TUHUS: I just want to understand a little better how your organization works with trade unions. For example, do people join the Green Workers Alliance when they are not in a union, and once they join a union – assuming the sector becomes more unionized in the future – they will no longer be in your organization? How it’s working?

MATT MAYERS: At this point, most of our members are not in a union because if they are in a union, that’s where they handle things and that’s their representative. We have several people who have become union members and remain active. There is no contradiction; they don’t pay us dues apart from the union. I don’t think trade unionists will have a problem with this. I think in the future we would like to see a way for people to continue to engage with GWA in some way even after they become union members, but I will say that most of our work has been, and will likely continue to be, in non-union sector areas and help people assert their rights and establish contacts with trade unions.

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