New thinking and new funding programs for energy efficiency retrofits present an enormous opportunity and even bigger challenge. In our movement, organizations are focusing on making sure clean and green construction creates high quality jobs and offers new career opportunities for low-income job-seekers.

When taken to scale, energy efficiency retrofit programs will create thousands of new jobs across the country as workers are trained and employed to address the needs of private commercial buildings, publicly-owned buildings – including offices, schools, public works yards and housing authority units – and privately-owned residences. These new jobs could support and expand our middle class, and because a huge proportion of retrofit work will take place in cities, these jobs could prove a boon to un- and under-employed urban job-seekers. To meet that potential, public policies across all levels of government will have to attach job quality standards and design and implement job access programs, like targeted hiring, into infrastructure projects, school modernization, energy efficiency retrofit programs and residential weatherization could maximize our national investment’s positive impact on urban communities.

Our partners in New Jersey (GANE), Seattle (Puget Sound Sage), Atlanta (Georgia STAND-UP), Boston (CLU) and Milwaukee (GJLN) are exploring campaigns, implementation strategies and guidelines for federal weatherization assistance, with the goal of creating a recruitment and training pipeline and a set of job quality standards that ensure low-income workers get access to new high quality jobs. Our California partners are engaging in a multi-city effort to establish job quality and job access standards across a range of programs, including residential weatherization, competitive energy efficiency block grants, retrofit programs, and school modernization and construction. As part of a Scope-led coalition, the Partnership’s legal team drafted key legislation that governs the planned retrofit of buildings owned by the City of Los Angeles. This legislation ensures that the work will create high quality construction careers, and lays out an ambitious plan for bringing new workers into union construction jobs to perform this work.

At the federal level, the Partnership has been a key participant in a broad coalition that is focusing on the climate bill. We succeeded in getting language that allows the Secretaries of Labor and Energy to require construction careers programs for construction authorized by the American Clean Energy and Security Act (the house version of the climate bill).

Residential Weatherization