What Happened to All Those Green Weatherization Jobs?

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http://www.alternet.org/story/156002/what_happened_to_all_those_green_weatherization_jobs_/

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A hundred million US homes need to be weatherized.” “Tens of thousands of jobs in home weatherization.” In 2009 weatherization was all the buzz. It looked like a triple win: create jobs, save money and energy, and slow global warming. The Obama administration made home weatherization a high priority for stimulus money and the Laborers union set up a program to train new workers to weatherize up to a million homes a year.

Three years later, some of those jobs have materialized. The U.S. Department of Energy reported last September that stimulus funds had weatherized half a million low-income homes and employed 14,000 workers for some period of time. But judging by the experience in Massachusetts, raising wages and standards for existing weatherization workers may be a better goal than trying to create new jobs.


Like residential construction, its parent industry, weatherization is a low-wage field. It doesn’t take years of experience to seal drafty leaks around windows or blow cellulose insulation into walls. In Massachusetts, weatherization workers are largely immigrant and the typical contractor has one truck and one crew.

The utilities that run Massachusetts’s weatherization program keep the prices and profit margins low, which squeezes larger contractors out of the field.

But despite the low wages and profit margins, home weatherization is still too expensive for most working class families in Massachusetts. In 2010 the Green Justice Coalition—construction unions, neighborhood organizations, and environmental groups in working class communities like New Bedford, Springfield, and neighborhoods of Boston—launched a pilot project to make weatherization affordable and create good jobs.