Cleantech or Status quo Jobs?

by Nick BruseOne of the most exciting aspects of the cleantech/sustainability sector are the opportunities presented to create completely new industries over the coming years.

Transforming the way we approach housing, feeding and powering our society. Whilst at the same time attempting to maintain the quality of life, and I emphasis 'quality' not gluttony, and improve the standard of life for the developing world.

As an optimist I believe that humanity can take on this challenge, with a realistic understanding that its going to take a lot of hard work, innovation and leadership. What frustrates me is when conservative governments stand up and expouse that by leaving our old industries behind we will force our economies to suffer and jobs to be lost.

This is the mantra that we have heard in Australia time and time again under the Howard Government. What i would like to hear in Australia is that with our high quality research institutions, and plethora of cleantech startups we are now putting our hand up to be a leader in clean technology.

So my next question is, how many jobs is the cleantech sector including the jobs that will be created through carbon emissions trading, for auditing and assessment, and how does this compare with and emission intensive industry like coal mining.I hunted down some information on the Australian Coal Industries employment statistics and here's what i found.

Around 30,000 people were employed at Australian black coal mines at the end of 2005. This represents a return to levels not previously seen since the mid 1990's - the most recent peak being around 26,000 in 1996. Along with the decline in the number of underground mines, employment at underground mines declined significantly over the past decade - from around 11,000 in 1996 to just over 9,000 in 2005 - a drop of about 20 per cent. Employment in open-cut mines on the other hand increased from just under 15,000 to over 19,000 (30%) in the same period. 2006 statistics Australian Coal Association

Now I assuming that these figures don't include all the jobs in processing and handling. Possibly another 20-50% the figure. Now at this point the data on cleantech jobs is fairly hard to find, as we are talking about multi-industry analysis, and new industries sectors like emissions trading.

But i have found some stats from a Sustainable Energy Industries Report 2000 Total direct employment in the sustainable energy industry [in Australia] is in the order of 22,800 in 1999-2000 and 25,600 in 2000-2001. This represents an annual growth rate of 12%. The total employment effect of the sustainable energy industry on the economy is in the order of 64,000 in 1999-2000 and 72,000 in 2000-2001.Now there is 6 years between these reports but i think we can assume that the sector in renewable energy has increased somewhat.

Now theres not a huge amount of difference between these figures, So when the government talks about jobs what really is it talking about. My guess is that its talking not purely about economic losses from reducing the mining of carbon and our exports, but what its actually worried about is due to the nature of the way in which the coal mining industry differs from the renewables industry.

Centralised vs distributed. Fuel intensive vs Technology Intensive.My gut feeling is that with coal mining being centralised around mines and distribution routes that means you make policy decisions on coal mining that you affect centralised populations of voters, all in one electorate. When you make decisions about the renewable energy industry you are actually talking about a broad range of technologies associated with many different services providers spread over a broad number of electorates.

Hence decisions on coal mining can flip an electorate to the opposition very quickly, whereas decisions to renewables have only until now had a marginal effect on individual electorates. Sentiment is changing substantially that the federal government can no longer hide behind this dynamic much longer. I don't wish job losses on coal mining towns, but i do wish for the correct decisions to be made to not sell out the future of all Australians for short term political favour.

I'm interested in comments on this article, what's the status in Europe, India, China or the United States. How do other issues of energy security and economic security bear out regarding job creation in these regions.

Nick Bruse runs Strike Consulting, a growth venture consultancy specialising in the cleantech sector and hosts the cleantech show, a weekly podcast of interviews with leaders involved in clean technology research, entrepreneurship, commentary and investment.

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For New York, Big Job Growth Is in Home Care

By PATRICK McGEEHAN
Published: May 25, 2007
New York City’s economy has been booming, with unemployment dropping to historic lows and Wall Street getting most of the credit. But the typical new worker in the city is not a pinstriped investment banker or a corporate lawyer. She is a home health aide like Vivienne P. Smith.

Ms. Smith, a recent immigrant from Jamaica, cooks for and dresses elderly patients in their Brooklyn homes. Though she is a member of a large labor union, she earns just $7.50 an hour and receives no health insurance or other benefits.

In many ways, home-care aides are the garment workers of the modern New York economy. The working conditions may be better, but the low pay, skimpy benefits and weak prospects for upward mobility tend to draw mostly immigrant women with few marketable skills.
Jobs like Ms. Smith’s, poor-paying positions in health care and social services, have accounted for most of the growth in employment in the city in the last 15 years. Indeed, without the rapid health care growth, the number of jobs in the city would have declined since 1990, according to figures compiled by the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The health care and social assistance sector, which includes not only hospitals, nursing homes and doctor’s offices, but also day care centers and food banks, accounts for a growing share of jobs across the country — about 13 percent of all American jobs in 2005. But that is still a far smaller share than in some parts of New York City. In Brooklyn and the Bronx, the sector now supplies about one-third of all private-sector jobs and wages, more than double the contribution of any other industry, the bureau’s data show.

“In terms of wages, the driving force in the New York City economy has been Wall Street,” said Michael Dolfman, the regional commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. “But in terms of employment, the driving force in the city economy has been the health care and social assistance sector.”

The number of jobs in financial services has shrunk in the last 15 years, even as average pay has soared in that industry.

The relative growth of health care employment in New York and other big American cities is a result of the decline of manufacturing and the aging of the population, said Mark V. Pauly, a health-care economist at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. At the same time, personal preferences and financial considerations have fostered a shift toward caring for the frail and elderly at home instead of in institutions, Mr. Pauly said.

Many of the patients of the home-care aides now working in Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx are retired from the factories that formed the streetscapes of those boroughs half a century ago. With many of those shuttered plants having been transformed into high-priced housing, health services are playing larger roles in the local economy.

That growing dependence on a single sector worries some economists, particularly because its fortunes are largely tied to government programs like Medicare.

“I look at that and I think it’s expanding a sweatshop form of work with very low wages, very few benefits,” said James Parrott, chief economist for the Fiscal Policy Institute, a nonprofit organization financed in part by unions, referring to the rising employment in home care.
For most of those jobs, wages are low and rising slowly. In Brooklyn’s growing health-care sector, home-care employment more than quadrupled to 12,160 jobs between 1990 and 2005, the last full year for which data was available. On average, those jobs pay $27,413 a year.

Ms. Smith, 55, said she would not be able to survive on her meager pay if she were not living with relatives. She started out working full weeks and even some overtime. But lately, her employer, Partners in Care, a subsidiary of the Visiting Nurse Service of New York, has assigned her just one four-hour shift per day, she said. That amounts to just $30 a day, before taxes and the cost of her two-bus commute across Brooklyn.

“Sometimes, my pay just goes to buying something to eat and paying my fare,” said Ms. Smith, who added that she was no better off financially than when she was working in factories in Jamaica. “When you’re small and you’re talking about going abroad, the thought of it gets you excited. Then, when you come and see for yourself, you say, ‘Oh dear, it’s just the same.’ ”

Kevin Finnegan, a lawyer for the home-care division of 1199 United Healthcare Workers East, the health care workers’ union, said home health aides were paid less in New York City than in most other parts of the country.

“I believe that is a direct result of this huge immigrant population that is willing to work for lower wages,” he said. “For the same reason, the garment industry was here.”

Mr. Finnegan, who helped the union organize the home-care aides working for Partners in Care, said that in some places upstate, home-care aides had been able to demand as much as $12 an hour. “You leave New York City and the rates go up,” he said.

But Mr. Finnegan said some relief was on the way for many of the 43,000 home-care workers who are represented by the union. The contract with Partners in Care calls for raises to as much as $10 an hour this year, he said.

Karlyne A. Mills is dubious. A veteran home-care aide who immigrated from Haiti, Ms. Mills, who has worked at the job for 13 years, is still earning $8.30 an hour almost a year after she was supposed to get a raise to $9, she said. She receives about $300 before taxes for working three 12-hour shifts a week caring for a Brooklyn woman who needs to be bathed, fed and lifted in and out of her wheelchair.

“It’s getting a little frustrating waiting because we’re working hard,” said Ms. Mills, who lives in her mother’s home in East New York. “From the time that I became a home health aide, I always wondered why this job is so important and why our pay is so low.”

But Ms. Mills, 43, said she stayed with the work because she enjoyed helping people. For the first six years, she earned just $6 an hour, she said. For most of her career, she has gone without health insurance coverage for her daughter, now a sophomore in college, or her son, a high school senior, she said.

Having to take her children to a hospital as charity cases whenever they needed to see a doctor was “very horrible,” Ms. Mills said. She would like a job that provides health insurance for her whole family, but at the moment, she said, she would settle for that raise to $10 an hour.

Jay Conolly, director of human resources for Partners in Care, said the pay raises hinged on the release by the State Legislature of an additional $100 million in funding that was recently approved. Mr. Conolly said his company wanted to keep its workers happy because “we are in a growth mode, and the demand for home care has never been stronger.”

That growth should continue for years, said Mr. Pauly of the Wharton School, unless the government sharply curtails spending on health care.

“People who want to get control of health care spending should be careful what they wish for,” Mr. Pauly said. “Spending less on health care would actually be harmful to the local economy because it’s a good source of jobs.”