Advance Australia Fair - Building Sustainability, Justice and Peace
Workshop - Jobs and the environment
Sunday 31st July 2005

Back to workshop program

Fraser Brindley

Greens Councilor, Melbourne City Council

Charles, Dave and I are revolving around some very common themes here. The ‘jobs versus environment’ debate is really a function of how our values, capital, consumption, and behaviour is set up. Whilst ever we’re active human beings and we want jobs, there is no inherent conflict with the environment. The conflict is actually a function of vested capital and vested government and communities in industries, which we are now beginning to acknowledge, are damaging the very ecosystem and planet that we survive on. I’ll try and work around that central theme. It’s three or four years since Earthworker was in its heyday but it can still be the basis for environmentally and socially progressive people to forge a vision and a way forward.

Work and the economy are interrelated in our paradigm, one is a function of the other. In the paradigm that we are in, where people go to work, as Dave Kerin said, not to make anything but to provide a service which facilitates the making and consumption of things. The economy is built around production and consumption. We in the developed world are piggy-backing on the developing world because manufacturing has shifted off-shore or because jobs have been mechanised out of the equation and it’s now just a matter of managing the whole system.

I hope that this overgeneralisation does not lose too many nuances along the way, but the industrial revolution is what has given us the civilisation that we are in and it comes from an age when environmental externalities, or consideration of the environmental impact weren’t being taken into account. Consequently we have capital, governments, and communities invested in industries that are problematic.

Charles was talking about the shift in electricity production. That particular shift is really as simple as asking how we can do it better. If you say its better to close Hazelwood and create new jobs in cleaner industries through out Victoria, the trick is to recognise that there is a social impact in the Valley. Never mind that the 11,000 jobs lost through privatisation weren’t considered a social impact by the politicians who are now content to sit back and take shots at the environmental movement over these 500 jobs. Nonetheless, we need to recognise the social problem.

It can be dealt with in a raft of ways. Dave’s thesis about superannuation and unions being a bit revolutionary in the way that they consider their investment dollar and being proactive about that social dislocation is one way to tackle that problem. When you are saying that 500 jobs will be lost but that more will be created elsewhere, and you don’t have the details of ‘elsewhere’ it’s a difficult argument to make. Not impossible, just difficult. That’s where the message falls down in the mainstream media. It’s also the central reason why the ‘jobs versus the environment’ debate gets currency.

Most often environmental technologies will either cost more or be threatening to investor capital because they are labour intensive where as the industrial revolution was about mechanisation and removing workers from the production process. Environmental technologies often involve the reintroduction of labour. Take solar hot water as an example. A solar hot water system has actually got more steel involved in its manufacture and of course more manufacturing required to make it. It’s not just a tank with an element in it, it’s a tank with an element and solar panels attached to it. If you look at energy efficiency when you’re building a house you need to look at putting insulation in the walls, spending a bit more time at the architectural stage to make sure the eaves are designed properly, putting in double glazing and using twice as much glass. A raft of environmental technologies whether it's laminated veneer lumbar, instead of cut timber, or a grey-water system have more labour involved in the installation and manufacturing stages or are themselves more material intensive. Those materials themselves also have a flow-on jobs component to them. You are either employing more people to do environmentally sound things or you are buying more things to do environmentally sound things. Of course the irony in that is that you are still a part of the cycle of consumption.

The broad argument is that if something costs more then you will lose jobs, but if you pay $250, 000 for your house as opposed to $200, 000 in order to accommodate environmental designs and technologies you are actually creating more jobs. They make this argument in spite of their claims that if we consume more there will be more jobs and a stronger economy.

If we think about any one facet of our society, it is only our heads, and the investments of governments and individuals that is stopping us from thinking about how to do it better. With Hazelwood it’s about shifting to more energy efficiency across the state and shifting to new forms of generation. With transport, it’s about shifting from car based commuting to public transport, which will require a reinvigoration of the heavy and light rail networks. When the claim is made that environmental technology is going to cost too much money, we need to say yes, and it will also create these jobs, and we need to be proactive about that. The choice between, say, dredging the bay here in Melbourne, or building more environmentally sound, but more expensive alternatives are simple. The politics are not simple.

There has also been a plan for the existing workshops in the La Trobe Valley, that have been vacated as a result of privatisation, to make wind generators. This is a clear example of a new technology using existing facilities to create new jobs in the area. For whatever reason the state government did not see fit to invest money into it to establish Victoria as a part of the global wind generation manufacturing industry.

The superannuation idea has been a slow burner. Six or seven years ago at Earthworker Dave and I were working around that premise. There is a real role for unions to get involved and be part of the solution rather than sitting back and letting global capital dictate what the funds are used for.

However, I think that these types of solutions are only going to get us so far. If we only aim to replace certain goods and energy with more environmentally friendly goods and energy, without really questioning whether we actually need it, we are not going to escape or address the root cause of the problems. We are living far beyond our means in the developed world. The planet cannot sustain the same levels of consumption, at some point there needs to be a personal process of questioning whether you actually need all of these things. This will be the challenge because that is what it is all built upon. The further you get down the road and winning within the existing paradigm of creating better jobs you’re still only going so far and not challenging the central ethos of consumption.

The antidote to that, which is gaining currency as ‘affluenza’, is to question what it is that we actually need to consume. The unions have a role to play here in talking to their members, talking about the false dichotomy of jobs and the environment and then talking to them about the deeper environmental issues surrounding consumption. There is a general societal malaise that we need to challenge. One way would be for a campaign for a 35 hour working week, and then a 30 hour working week. For people to stand up and say, I don’t need to work that much because I want to spend more time at home, because I don’t need to buy a new car, because I get fulfillment from other things.

Spinning out of that is a better evaluation of unpaid work, or that which is not defined as employment. That has as much to do with the jobs versus the environment debate as anything. If you want to be really permacultural about it it’s better that people spend at least 10 hours a week doing their own gardening, craft work, spending time at home, than at work. That may seem a bit folksy but this is an important part of the equation as anything. The idea that the trade unions would start to work on the back of the 35 hour week campaign, that you can do your bit for the environment at home, deconnecting yourself from the consumption cycle, is very difficult. It’s challenging some very central notions to how people go about their lives on a day to day basis, but that’s got to be a part of it. That’s where we can start to get more sophiticated. When people do get onto that train they get more passionate about these things, and it may be a way of engaging with people. It’s about saying that there’s a different way of life available. I don’t think that the trade union movement should be scared of advancing those ideas, because what’s the alternative? Yes we can create a better manufacturing system but that’s only going so far and we need to acknowledge that it’s that cycle of chasing our tale that’s doing us as much harm as anything.

So I hope that’s been of use, it feels for me a bit rusty and a bit big world but I’ve really enjoyed today, hearing Dave Kerin especially speaking with as much fire as he does. There are many issues to work on but this one is central for me because it has bits of everything in it. Socialism and public ownership are built in to it, and the lack of state-based essential services is leading to environmental destruction and deconnecting the political cycle from it, but it’s also about people’s moral outlook and how they go about at their lives.

Thank you.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Back to workshop program