[PEN-L:4725] Re: Labor party environmental plank

[Laurie Dougherty <g3357mdoug@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Thanks to Paul Zarembka for posting the Labor Party
environmental plank to pen-l.  OCAW has been talking
about the transition fund (although I think by some
other name) for a while. It is a good idea as far as
it goes.  But it doesn't really involve the working
class in shaping an environmentally sustainable future.
It just tries to protect workers from bearing tbe brunt
of change.  (And there is in the short run a trade off
between jobs and the environment.  American Standard
closed a plant employing thousands of people near
downtown Louisville because the neighborhood, which was
undergoing gentrification, organized in opposition to
its emissions.  Which were in fact putrid.)

In the late 1980s, during the time that the Montreal
Protocol to protect the ozone layer was being completed
and signed, I was working on a line at GE that checked
refrigerator compressors and condensers for leaks before
final assembly.  So what's in these parts that could leak?
FREON - one of the major culprits in destruction of the
ozone layer*. (By the way, GE got kudos for running leak
checks with helium while evidently some manufacturers
actually ran the checks after the parts were charged with
FREON.)  I remember feeling so guilty being there.  I had
only recently been called back after a long layoff.  I
badly needed this job, and as GE jobs went, some of the
best I ever had were on that line. There was no, and I mean
no, involvement of the workforce in the environmental
issues of what we were doing.  I can count the times and name
the contexts in which it was even mentioned.  I brought it up
with a few people I knew, who didn't really care.  I used
to argue (about a lot of other things too) with a quality
control supervisor. His attitude was that it would be a pain
in the butt to retool and would be his problem to get the new parts
up and running right (but the water would run out in the
California growing fields and we'd all starve first anyway -
this was a very cynical man.)

The building manager brought up in an "informative meeting"
that some components would have to be changed.  One guy asked
what that meant for his job.  I know I kept wondering
since they had to retool, would they do it in Louisville.
The company had been moving work out of there steadily and
automating what was left.

There was a one paragraph note in a company publication to
the effect that GE was going to meet the technological challenge
posed by the need to meet CFC and energy reduction standards
at the same time.  (This actually was a technical challenge
because the new refrigerants being developed were less efficient
& required more power - so they said - and GE had just had a
major fiasco in trying to design a more energy efficient compressor
- which it produced in Tennessee in a non union plant, after
tearing out its capacity to make the old style pump in Louisville.
But that's another story, one told with breathless enthusiasm by
Ira Magaziner in The Silent War.  In Magaziner's telling, he
singlehandedly saved GE from competitive humiliation at the hands
of the Japanese in the matter of the rotary compressor, the major
fiasco being a minor obstacle.)

The one other reference to the ozone issue I can recall was in the
company newspaper when some vice president went on about how glad
he was that the company was going to do right by the ozone layer
because he couldn't sleep at night worrying about it.  Nothing about
industry attempts to trash the whole effort.

I don't ever remember the union mentioning the ozone issue at all.

When they finally bit the bullet and redesigned the components
that would need to change, the company proposed to build or source
one major part somewhere unless the Louisville workforce could meet
the price.  This is the first time I know of GE using this tactic in
Lousville, but they did it again a couple of years later with the
redesign of the washing machine. That happened after I left, but evidently
this was a major product and process redesign.  In effect, the workforce
had to bid on its own work as if it were an outside vendor.  In both these
cases, the work stayed in Louisville, but with fewer people working on
highly automated processes.

The company is willing to involve workers and the union in costcutting
measures, but there is no engagement in the larger issues of what needs
to be done to meet the needs of the environment. I think defense and the
environment pose similar questions on how to redirect resources, develop
new technologies and processes and the skills to use them. I don't think
it makes sense to project only a defensive posture for working people.
It's a tragic waste of people's abilities and all too often puts labor in
a position of protecting what is instead of struggling for what could be.

Finally, we have to address the issue of consumption.  The American Dream
lifestyle - subdivision house (and all its internal furnishings and
accoutrements) + riding lawnmower + car + your choice of van, motorcycle,
pickup truck or sport vehicle + house at the lake + boat + trips to Disney
World, Opryland and Las Vegas is not an entitlement and it's not sustainable.
I had a professor from whom I took economic history one semester and
environemental history the next.  The econ history class ended up posing the
question of how to get on track to a high growth, full employment economy.  The
environmental history class ended up posing the question of how to get to a
reduced growth, smaller footprint on the earth economy.  The next year he
planned to teach them in the same semester. I told him for the sake of his
own sanity I hoped he figured out how to get them to the same place.  This
is not easy, but it is what we have to do.

* Technical note on FREON for anyone who cares:
FREON (as well as other HFCFCs) is a problem because it is so
stable it lasts long enough to float into the upper atmosphere
and then reacts chemically with ozone when catalyzed by UV radiation.
Most chlorine compounds break up and turn into table salt or
whatever long before they reach the upper atmospehere.  FREON was
developed because early refrigerants were based on ammonia and other
very caustic substances that were very dangerous if they leaked and
caused some terrible industrial accidents.  So DuPont set out to
develop a refrigerant that would be safe to work on and use. I never
actually worked around the FREON in the refrigerators, but I remember
in the early 80s when GE still made room air conditioners in Louisville,
they kept buckets of FREON in the open in the pump room as a
degreaser.  You could just dip your hands in and they would come clean.)

			----------Laurie