Do Green Jobs Create Greener Americans?
Most “green job” training programs aim to teach low-income workers the job skills necessary to join the nascent clean-tech economy: energy-efficiency retrofitting, wind turbine maintenance, brownfield remediation and so forth.
Most “green job” training programs aim to teach low-income workers the job skills necessary to join the nascent clean-tech economy: energy-efficiency retrofitting, wind turbine maintenance, brownfield remediation and so forth.
But do these programs train low-income people to become environmentalists, too?
“I’m getting greener,” said Wayne Gatlin, a recent graduate of the Bay Area-based Solar Richmond, that prepares low-income adults for jobs in California’s burgeoning solar industry. Mr. Gatlin now earns far more as a photovoltaics installer for the Berkeley-based Sun Light & Power than he did working security or selling shoes at an Adidas retail store.
“I recycle now,” Mr. Gatlin said. “I ride my bike. This was stuff I wouldn’t do before.”
That doesn’t surprise Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins, the chief executive of Green for All, a national organization working to give low-income people access to the opportunities represented by the green economy.
