 
Virginia Activists Target
Green Jobs Training Grants
July 2008, Electrical Worker
 A recently-formed coalition
may be a model for local
unions pursuing federal
funds for training members
in green technologies, thanks to James Avery, business manager of Newport News, Va., Local 1340, and other activists
who launched the Green Jobs Alliance three months ago.
Avery didn’t expect to be helping other locals and trades formulating funding proposals
when he attended his first meeting to help form the alliance.
“We started out just talking about eastern Virginia, but our vision has expanded,”
says Avery, who serves as treasurer of the alliance that includes nonunion employers,
community colleges and nonprofit organizations. Avery sees his participation in the
group as vital to protecting organized labor’s stake in the developing green economy.
The group, which has submitted an unsolicited proposal to Secretary of Labor
Hilda Solis seeking funding for enhanced training of apprentices and journeymen in
renewable technologies, is gaining national recognition for looking ahead to how
money appropriated under the 2007 Green Jobs Act will be spent.
With the stimulus package, the Obama administration has imported most of the language
from the Green Jobs Act and upped the ante to $500 million for renewable energy.
With out-of-work books still growing, Virginia locals are looking for seed money to
establish courses for journeymen and apprentices to learn wind turbine technology.
“Labor has been frozen out of the equation for eight years and it’s time to make a
serious statement,” says alliance president Randy Flood, a former congressional
staffer who started the group after reading the book Green Collar Economy, by Van
Jones, founder of Green for All, who is now a White House advisor on green jobs.
The alliance, says Flood, answers the Department of Labor’s requirement that
non-profit groups seeking funds include both labor and management. The legislation
calls for the money to be spent to bring a wide array of constituencies into the green
economy—from unemployed youth to ex-offenders to workers who have lost their jobs
due to outsourcing.
During the May congressional break, Joint Apprenticeship Training Committee
training centers across the country will open their doors to local and federal leaders
to show them why the IBEW is the right choice when it comes to providing a skilled
electrical work force for renewable energy projects.
“If Congress is looking to invest stimulus money wisely in training a new green
work force, they don’t have to look any further than their area IBEW training center,”
said International President Edwin D. Hill.
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