Good jobs, clean energy, a safer world

05/10/2005

by David Foster, director, District #11, United Steelworkers of America

Since the year 2000, Minnesota has lost more than 40,000 manufacturing jobs—the state’s portion of more than 2 million manufacturing jobs that disappeared throughout the country. These jobs are not likely to return as the global Fortune 1000 companies continue to move manufacturing jobs to the lowest wage areas of the world.

Regardless of how one feels about the reorganization of the global economy, we have ample reason to be concerned about losing our manufacturing base in the United States. Our economy hasn’t simply shifted from making high labor-content products like clothing to low labor-content products requiring high-skilled labor. Instead, we have developed an economy that manufactures less of what we consume, has dangerously increased our trade deficits, and has left us precariously dependent on the pyramids of U.S. debt owned by Japan and China.

This increasingly fragile global economy is one more reason why labor and environmentalists need to chart a new path for energy independence. Without new sources of energy, our country will become increasingly dependent upon shrinking supplies of oil and gas at the very time that the rapidly expanding economies of China and India will also require them.

“The United Steelworkers of America strongly supports legislation to increase the amount of renewable energy produced in Minnesota.”

Over the last 18 months, the United Steelworkers of America has strongly advocated that a key link exists between policies that promote energy independence at home and those that create a new generation of U.S. manufacturing jobs.

In Minnesota, which some have dubbed the Saudi Arabia of wind, we should be especially excited about the possibilities that lie in front of us. Germany, with only 10 percent to 20 percent of the wind resources that Minnesota has, currently produces 16,000 megawatts of wind energy, almost 50 times Minnesota’s current production. Germany employs 40,000 workers in its wind energy industry. And wind turbine manufacture is the second largest consumer of that country’s steel products, second only to its automotive industry. Even tiny Denmark employs 20,000 in its domestic wind energy industry.

Imagine a coherent renewable energy policy in the state of Minnesota: a new industry with the potential to employ tens of thousands of Minnesotans—expanding economic opportunity in our rural areas—and a new manufacturing industry close to the consumers of its products.

Early this year the Spanish wind turbine manufacturer Gamesa decided to build its first U.S. manufacturing facility in Pennsylvania. The Gamesa plant is expected to employ 1,000 workers when it reaches full capacity. Minnesota bid on this plant and lost. Key to Gamesa’s decision to locate in Pennsylvania was the legislature’s recent passage of a Renewable Electricity Standard, mandating 10 percent renewable energy production by the state’s utilities in future years.

Far too often Americans believe that economic forces are beyond human influence. In fact, although globalization may be the next step in the growth of capitalism, the way in which it develops is guided by human actions such as the Pennsylvania Legislature’s.

In Minnesota, we have an opportunity to make our state the center for national development of renewable energy resources. Just as this state invested heavily in the infrastructure and scientific knowledge to bring the state’s low-grade taconite resources to the steel industry in the 1950s, we should decide today to develop and harvest the state’s abundant renewable energy resources, such as wind and solar power. The United Steelworkers of America strongly supports legislation to increase the amount of renewable energy produced in Minnesota.