Thinking about Climate Change
as a Construction Worker
I think about climate change as a female union construction worker. In my part of the United States, many of the union construction workers I organize with are primarily Catholic heritage and first-, second-, and third-generation European immigrant men from Portugal, Italy, Poland, and Ireland.
I entered the construction field because I wanted to be part of energy, transportation, and residential infrastructure changes to prevent and mitigate the effects of climate change. And I was looking to organize my life around relationships with direct production workers whose perspectives and voices I want to be central as we move to address climate change. Also, I was raised middle class, and I thought that challenging my distress related to class oppression in this way would both move my life forward and give me a new perspective on the environment.
As construction workers, we have so much knowledge that is key to stopping climate change. We know about water and drainage and slopes and soil types and emissions and electricity and energy production! We are familiar with hard work and taking on [undertaking] challenges because they must be taken on—whether we feel like it or not. We understand well the concept of limited resources.
We are very familiar with the realities of capitalism and the class system, and we know that the bosses want to make money no matter the human cost, even if they say otherwise. We know that work is often done poorly and wastefully when intelligence isn’t applied.
In my area, we are rural people with recent agricultural pasts. It’s pretty [quite] common to hear construction workers talking about hummingbird migration, whether or not the bees are making their nests high in the trees this year, or where there are fiddleheads [fiddlehead ferns] nearby.
As construction workers we are very connected to the land and natural systems. When it rains, we get rained on and our job sites are muddy. We work in the heat and in the cold. And when there are climate disasters, we are the ones cleaning up the mess. I have friends who tell me that when the last big hurricane hit, they didn’t stop working for two months.
Unfortunately, on the whole [in general], we hate environmentalists. Yesterday on my job site someone yelled at us about how we were poisoning the land and cutting down too many trees. He was upset by our water truck spraying water to keep the silica dust down for worker health. It’s likely the trees we were cutting down were largely non-beneficial, non-native trees and could easily be replaced by sensible landscaping and fruit trees that would provide habitat and food. We spent the truck ride home laughing about how dumb the guy was. He wasn’t stupid, but he didn’t win us over either.
I’ve been flipped off [targeted with an obscene gesture] by a woman driving by in her car as I was building a natural gas pipeline. I agree that gas pipelines are a bad idea, but her attitude made me think, “#$%^@ [swear word] you! I’ll build it right through your backyard and then I’ll pave it!”
For the most part, we see efforts to stop climate change as efforts to put us out of work and make us feel stupid. So, unfortunately, we say, “No thanks.”
Because of working-class oppression, the projects we work on usually serve the interests of the owning class and are exploitative and destructive, further colonize Indigenous land, and contribute to climate change. We know this. We aren’t stupid. When we are blamed for the set-up of the class system, we are lost to the environmental movement—and that’s a huge loss. We have perspectives and skills that are essential (absolutely a hundred percent essential) to setting things right.
I try to think every day about ways to talk about climate change with other workers. I’m rarely successful, but it’s been good to try. I learn about which stories are relevant to our lives, what we think is dumb, and what we find interesting. I think about how I can teach “climate people” to talk to “builder people.” I discharge and think about working-class oppression, unionized labor, the class system, and what it would take for us to take charge of what we will and will not build.
As a female, I discharge toward allying myself with women around the world, especially Indigenous and Global Majority women who are currently most impacted by climate change. I think it’s important for U.S. women in male-dominated fields to remember that there is a global sisterhood and remain conscious that we are bribed by capitalism to be upwardly mobile.
Reprinted from the RC e-mail
discussion list for leaders of Catholics