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Update — September 2009
Dear colleagues, Monday marks Labor Day. At Urban Agenda, it’s a day to celebrate our partners from the labor movement. Brothers and sisters who are committed to ensuring that workers and their families have the rights and access they need to benefit from today’s global economy. One of those rights is foremost on our minds today — the right to affordable healthcare for everyone. The late, great Senator Ted Kennedy described this as the cause of his life, introducing his first legislation on the issue almost four decades ago. It’s obvious that our nation’s system is in crisis. It has simply failed too many hardworking families. But now there is a real opportunity to change this. Stand with us and lend your voice to healthcare reform. Below is a list of a few organizations you can connect with to speak up on healthcare: Health Care for America Now: healthcareforamericanow.org/ AFL-CIO Working Families: SEIU: Honor Ted Kennedy by passing health care reform: Have a great Labor Day weekend! Joanne Derwin
FEATURED PARTNERThe Pratt Center for Community Development and Adam FriedmanThe Pratt Center for Community Development, a division of Pratt Institute located in Brooklyn, New York, was the first university-based advocacy planning and design center in the US. It works for a more just, equitable, and sustainable city for all New Yorkers by helping low-income communities build physical development projects that address unmet needs, ensuring that they benefit from planning, and promoting sustainability and environmental justice. 
Adam Friedman is the director of the Center and one of New York City's leading advocates in support of strengthening the manufacturing sector and saving well-paying manufacturing jobs. A core component of those efforts is helping manufacturers to adopt sustainable business practices and expand into growing markets for green products. "This is an extraordinary moment in history because our economic development needs and objectives are merging with our environmental needs and objectives,” says Friedman. “Pratt is committed to providing the professional services low income communities and residents need to seize this opportunity to create jobs and improve their environment." Department of Labor Releases First Set of Wage Schedules for WeatherizationThe American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) has allocated $8 billion for weatherization — $5 billion through the Weatherization Assistance Program (WAP) and $3 billion through the State Energy Program. The WAP program weatherizes low-income households and helps decrease their energy costs. The ARRA allocation is a substantial increase in program funding and, as a result, greatly increases the number of houses that can be weatherized. In contrast, in Fiscal Year 2008, $750 million was allocated for WAP, but only $227 million was actually spent.1 However, progress on weatherizing low-income houses with ARRA funds has been stalled. ARRA requires that all projects must adhere to the Davis-Bacon act and pay prevailing wages, which are based on the median wage for a specific job title in a specific jurisdiction. For weatherization, however, there were no published wage rates and contractors were wary of beginning work without having a set idea of what they were expected to pay their workers. The Department of Labor has since undertaken a wage survey and begun releasing the information. To date, wage rates for 13 states and the District of Columbia are available at: www.dol.gov/esa/whd/recovery/dbsurvey/weather.htm. Wage rates for the remaining state, including New York, are expected to be released shortly. With the wage issue resolved, contractors are expected to begin weatherization work as soon as possible. For more information visit the Department of Housing and Community Renewal (DHCR) which administers the WAP program in New York State. (www.dhcr.state.ny.us/Programs/WeatherizationAssistance/) 1 http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2008/09/heating_assistance.html. SPOTLIGHTThe IMPACT ActThe House’s energy bill — the American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES) — was recently passed in June. It includes a critical provision, inserted at the eleventh hour, which will significantly boost support for clean energy manufacturing, and help keep jobs in America. The IMPACT (Investments for Manufacturing Progress and Clean Technology) provision, based on legislation introduced by Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio, aims to help small and medium-sized manufacturers transition to the clean energy economy. It creates a $30 billion Manufacturing Revolving Loan Fund to provide these manufacturers with much-needed access to credit to improve energy efficiency, shift design and retool plants, retrain workers, and expand clean energy manufacturing operations. Brown’s IMPACT Act of 2009 was modeled on the Apollo Alliance’s Green Manufacturing Action Plan (GreenMAP), which would ensure that increased demand for clean energy that results from a new national energy policy is met by American workers producing the parts, systems and components of the clean energy economy. Apollo estimates that the Act could create nearly 2.5 million jobs to support new and expanded manufacturing operations across the country. According to a recent study by the Pew Charitable Trusts, New York currently has 3,323 clean energy companies and 34,363 green jobs. These numbers are expected to grow – in the U.S., the number of green jobs grew nearly two and a half times faster than overall job creation between 1998 and 2007. In New York, job losses have hit other sectors of the economy much harder than the clean energy sector. Policies likely to be put in place to guide the transition – such as a federal renewable energy standard, enhanced efficiency standards and building codes, and increased vehicle fuel efficiency requirements – will spur investment in renewable energy and energy efficiency, and increase demand for clean energy products and components. The Center for American Progress estimates that these policies will generate $150 billion in annual clean energy investment and create 2.9 million jobs. New York would see an annual investment of $10 billion, and the creation of 109,000 jobs. Of these, 19,900 would be manufacturing jobs. To read more, see Apollo Alliance Backgrounder: How IMPACT will benefit New York. If you would like to express your support of the IMPACT Act on behalf of your business, please click here. If you would like to express your support as an individual, non-profit, or other non-business entity, please click here. |