As Bellingham steps away from natural gas, local labor grapples with its future
As planet-warming fossil fuels are phased out in Bellingham, a question bubbles to the surface of conversations between labor leaders and local officials: What happens to the living-wage jobs the fossil fuel industry supports?
“Laborers are understandably nervous,” said Trevor Smith, political director for Laborers Local 292, which represents about 1,400 members across Whatcom, Snohomish, Island, San Juan and Skagit counties. “They want to know what this means for them and their families.”
Bellingham passed a building electrification ordinance last week, after years of public debate and work by city employees and volunteers. Along with establishing rooftop solar and energy efficiency standards for buildings, the new rule requires that all new commercial buildings and new apartment buildings more than four stories must be outfitted with electric space and water heating equipment. It’s one of Bellingham’s first steps toward ending its reliance on natural gas, which emits greenhouse gases when burned and contributes to climate change.
Proponents of the ordinance are celebrating what they describe as a climate win, but there remains much work to be done to ensure a “just transition” for people like gas pipefitters, whose jobs will be obsolete in a natural gas-free world, City Councilmember Dan Hammill said. (The transition could benefit some laborers: HVAC companies are expected to see more business as purveyors of electric heat pumps and water heaters, said Lance Calloway, Northern district manager for the Associated General Contractors of Washington.)
“A greener economy in theory should be a greater economy, but we have to make sure we are replacing those good-paying jobs with equally good-paying jobs,” Hammill said.
Through the union, general laborers can make $54 an hour including benefits, Smith said. As home prices and rent in Whatcom and Bellingham soar, he said some workers are worried that they won’t be able to find new jobs that allow them to pay their bills or send their children to college.
City, labor working together
Labor leaders are collaborating with Bellingham officials to ensure workers don’t get the short end of the stick in electrification, and Smith said that he is happy to see that City Council seems motivated to work together. But it’s still a “thorny question,” he said, and there aren’t other local governments to look to for guidance.
“This language doesn’t really exist anywhere in the U.S.,” Smith said.
“There was such a big push to get people to recognize that climate change is not coming, it’s here. As labor, we recognize it is here,” he continued. “But the focus was getting legislation around protecting the environment. Somewhere in that conversation, labor got lost in the wayside.”
Retraining laborers is an important element of a just transition, Smith said, and he’d like to see Bellingham support apprenticeships in city-funded, all-electric construction projects.
There also needs to be jobs for retrained laborers to step into, a lesson learned the hard way for some former employees of the Ferndale Alcoa Intalco aluminum plant, he said: When the plant was curtailed in 2020 and around 700 people were laid off, workers were offered grants to go to community college for retraining, Smith said. But when the laborers completed their new education, they often had trouble finding jobs with the same wages and benefits, he said.
Many of those men and women went to work at the Cherry Point refineries, but as the world looks at a transition off of fossil fuels, they feel like they are being pushed out of their livelihoods yet again, Smith said.
If the transition is well-planned and collaborative, laborers can actually be part of fighting climate change, he explained: They can be the ones who harden our infrastructure to better withstand extreme weather wrought by global warming. They can be the ones who separate stormwater and sewer water systems, improving local water quality. They can protect our communities against sea-level rise and flooding by armoring beaches and building dikes and levees.
Industry holds much of the responsibility for ensuring workers’ well-being, agree City Councilmember Hammill and Simon Vickery, the climate and energy policy manager for local nonprofit RE Sources.
Companies decide what pay and benefits look like, as well as determine what shape retraining takes, Hammill said. The behavior of companies is what will decide laborers’ fates, Vickery said. He points to scenarios where industrial refineries and plants unexpectedly shut down — “cut and run,” as he describes it — leaving employees with few opportunities and nobody to hold accountable.
“That’s the scenario that really affects labor,” Vickery said. “It’s not city council passing an ordinance that incrementally shifts the market over several years.”
What labor leaders, climate advocates and local officials do seem to agree on is that a successful transition will rely on collaboration and communication.
“We don’t want any of these electrification bills to come at the expense of labor,” Vickery said. “The more conversation we can have in all these things, the more we can make sure regulation and policy is shaped for everybody.”
This story was originally published February 16, 2022 at 5:00 AM.
