Calling all potential community organising superstars! Get involved in a green jobs campaign!

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Hello! Were you excited by our subject line, or know someone that might be? Then hoorah, because we need you!

Here at The Otesha Project UK, we are passionate about green jobs. We lurve them. (Don’t know what a green job is? Check out the UK Youth Climate Coalition’s definition here). There are over 1 million unemployed young people in the UK right now, and we are facing ever greater environmental challenges from the effects of climate change, pollution, waste, and degradation. They are, like, these two MAJOR problems, and we believe that we can go some way to addressing both of them by matching up the people that need the work, with the work that needs to be done. 

That’s why we have been working hard in East London over the past year, coordinating the East London Green Jobs Alliance. We have brought together all sorts of different people – from unions, to job centres, to think tanks, to youth workers - to advocate for green jobs and skills, influence policy, engage our local community, and do practical, on-the-ground work creating training and job placement programmes for young, unemployed people in our area. 

We are hoping that this project will be a ground-breaking demonstration of what’s possible - reducing youth unemployment in East London, having a positive environmental impact, building capacity within local organisations and businesses and putting green jobs higher up the political agenda.

The exciting news is that our ambitions aren’t just local. We want to spread this movement BIGGER. We want to support people who want to set up similar initiatives, and we want to learn about other people who are doing cool stuff and bring those stories back to London. We want to create a network of people working together on these issues, because when we all work together, better stuff happens!

We will be travelling the UK this year, visiting communities to help them start conversations and get some green jobs stuff off the ground. If you are an organiser (or just a really enthusiastic person with good networks) who would like to host an event, or start something up in your community, then get in touch and we will come on down! Or if you know anyone that you think might fit the bill, then please pass this on. You can contact me (Hanna Thomas) on hanna@otesha.org.uk, or on 0207 377 2109.

It will be great to meet you, and we can’t wait to work with you!

People power meets pedal power

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It’s no secret that here at Otesha we love bikes. It’s also no secret that we think green & decent jobs are super important if we’re going to find a good way forward out of this whole ecological/economic collapse situation (let’s face it, it’s kind of a mess right now).

Recently I wrote a blog enthusing the power of worker-owned cooperatives because when the jobs aren’t there, why the heck not make them ourselves, right? This time around, I wanted to follow up on my mostly American example by showcasing some homegrown people-powered projects.

So, enter Brixton Cycles and the Edinburgh Bike Co-op – two lovely places that between them have created hundreds of jobs, including more than 120 co-op owners, since they opened their doors. Both of them operate on the same basic system – if you’re a co-op member then you’ve got equal rights, equal responsibilities and equal ownership. No member is higher up the food chain than another, and no member is immune to the risks that come along with any kind of businesses. Both shops take on workers on a trial period, where after a year of employment they become eligible to join the co-op. Right now, Brixton Cycles has 13 co-op members and the Edinburgh Bike Co-op (which has also opened shops in Aberdeen, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Leeds, Manchester and Sheffield) has around 100.

If you want to know more, I’d recommend reading up on the Brixton Cycles history and checking out this article on what it means to Edinburgh Bicycles Co-op to work cooperatively.

And this year is the UN’s international year of co-operatives, which aims “to raise public awareness of the invaluable contributions of cooperative enterprises to poverty reduction, employment generation and social integration.” Hear, hear!

This post was written by Liz McDowell, Chair of the East London Green Jobs Alliance, and is cross-posted from The Otesha Project blog. 

Youth for Green Jobs!

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Alliance member, the UK Youth Climate Coalition, launched the new Youth for Green Jobs campaign this week! We’re super excited about this, and you can check it out here - http://youthforgreenjobs.ukycc.org/blog/

You can Take Action and email your MP asking for governmental departments to work together to create and implement more Green Jobs for youth.

We supported the launch of the Youth for Green Jobs campaign by attending the Budget Day UK Uncut action with the UK Youth Climate Coalition. Here are some of our best pics:


Green economy: new jobs for a new generation?

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Green economy: new jobs for a new generation?

Last year, OECD analysis of the labour market emphasised that ‘persistently high unemployment could eventually result in discouragement and permanent withdrawal from the labour force, especially among younger and less skilled workers. In at least 10 countries (e.g. the United Kingdom) the share of long-term unemployment has risen significantly … pointing to a significant risk’. (OECD, April 2011)

Imagine you had been born in 1992, at the time of the first Rio summit. Today, you would be 19, maybe 20. Environmental crises have been a fact of your existence – pollution, climate change, extreme weather events – as well as energy crises such as nuclear meltdowns and oil spills. If you’ve been through education, you and your friends are graduating into the worst global economic recession in a century, and jobs are scarce. If you haven’t been through education, jobs are more than scarce.

I ask you to imagine this, and to wonder about how little this upcoming generation has to lose. Their future prospects have been greatly compromised by those who have gone before. In response, 2011 saw young people at the forefront of the Indignados and Occupy movements, as well as the UK riots this summer. We must listen. It is time to inspect and challenge the environmental and economic legacy that today’s young people are set to inherit.

Firstly, we could start appreciating young people rather than vilifying them, taking their vibrancy and new ideas and recognising that that is exactly what we will need to transform and rebuild our world in the vision of a ‘green economy’. There is much work to be done, and there are many that need the work.

It was in this spirit that the East London Green Jobs Alliance was launched last year. We are a coalition of trade unions, NGOs, community representatives and green businesses working together to create green and decent jobs for East London citizens, especially those who are young and unemployed. We are currently putting together a programme that will feed some of these young people through a ‘jobs pipeline’, through training and into work placements or apprenticeships in the green trades. It’s a small project, but it’s a start and we will be working to help other communities replicate our model this summer.

We’re excited about our work, but it’s not easy. Obama’s promise back in 2008 of the creation of 5 million green jobs was always going to be a gross exaggeration – you can’t will jobs into being. But we could certainly make it easier for those who have been traditionally excluded from the job market to make the most of this new green opportunity.

  • We could create more incentives for employers (and especially small and medium-sized ones) to take on apprentices.
  • We can push and advocate for training and education in setting up worker-owned cooperatives.
  • We could ask our local governments to require employers to hire a certain percentage from the local workforce.
  • We can better educate our young people in STEM skills, and help them become environmentally literate, so that they understand how meaningful and dignified it is to work to create a better world, no matter how small your part, and they have the skills to carry out that work.

We don’t suggest that green jobs are the only answer. The green jobs agenda is just one part of what will help us transition to a successful green economy. And there are many questions still to be answered about what the exact definition of a green job is. Are we talking about highly skilled, clean-tech jobs? Entry-level work in recycling? Or are we working to ‘green up’ everyone’s jobs, inviting everyone to be a part of this green revolution?

Another issue is, since the green jobs discourse is one that started in the States, the perspective isn’t exactly global. In the UK, with the introduction of the Green Deal later this year, many of the ‘green jobs’ we can expect to see will be in solid wall insulation, since we have to improve our old Victorian housing stock. But what will a green job look like in Vietnam, or Nigeria?

These are all questions that need to be answered and perhaps, together, we can go someway to finding those answers.

Hanna Thomas, Green Jobs Director, The Otesha Project UK