Speaking Out at a Climate Event as a Worker
I was invited to speak on behalf of labor at a climate justice action at the Rhode Island (USA) State House. I thought about what I could say in a forceful way about the crisis, what would represent what most of the people in my union think, and what would be good for a group of young environmentalists to hear. I was pleased with what I said:
I was invited here to talk about my experience and perspective as a worker. I’m here as a union construction worker. This morning I was installing lights and electrical outlets in a building powered by fossil fuels. The people in my family are and have been factory workers, house cleaners, laborers, custodians, and cement masons. Others have cut down trees and torn the stubs off of movie tickets.
My parents grew up in villages on Sao Miguel, one of the Portuguese islands in the Atlantic Ocean. They heard about the economic opportunity they could find if they came to America. They moved here, with most of their families, so they could have more to eat, have children, and buy a house. They didn’t know that the land had been violently stolen. They didn’t know much about the horrific exploitation and enslaved labor of African-heritage people, from which the wealth of the country had been built. They just thought of America as the land of opportunity. They didn’t know that people here were poor, too, or that workers were treated so badly that they were forced to make impossible choices.
In her twenties, my mother worked in a plastics factory. For thirty years after that, she was a housekeeper, cleaning houses. Decades after she came here, she became a U.S. citizen. When she went to get her fingerprints taken for her citizenship papers, it took many attempts because the prints on her fingers had been worn away from the scrubbing and harsh chemicals. When she was fifty-two, she was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer. It is rare everywhere except in China. I remember the moment I realized how many workers manufacture plastic in China. I believe that my mother’s cancer was caused by her work in the plastics factory. She lived fifteen more years, but because of the cancer treatment she could hardly eat or drink in the last several years of her life. In the last two years, she could only talk somewhat and barely breathe. She didn’t know that with her first job in the United States, she would be exchanging her labor for a wage and cancer.
Last year I was in Washington, D.C. [USA], sitting in at the capitol building, demanding that our elected officials fight for a Green New Deal. I was arrested with a young woman. While we were in a van being transported for processing, she told all of us why she was there. Her father had been a coal miner. She cried as she told us about him making a living and supporting their family by mining coal but then dying very young because of the lung cancer he got.
We workers do not want to choose jobs that make us sick, and make the planet sick, just so we can make enough money to live!
We do not want to choose jobs that poison the land and pollute the water just so we can make enough money to retire!
We do not want to choose jobs that pollute the air; intensify storms, droughts, wildfires, and floods; and have disproportionate and deadly impacts on Indigenous, Black, brown, and small island peoples just so we can feed our families!
These are the choices given to us by the people who are lying about the climate crisis and pitting workers and the environment against each other. These are the choices created by the people who have known that their business interests are making the earth unlivable and incompatible with human civilization. They have sown doubt, created “debate,” and deceived us—funded by their excessive and immoral profits—for the last forty years!
All workers want family-sustaining wages, a retirement, and dignity—while protecting our air, water, and land and human life and all living things.
Even though my mother couldn’t talk at the end of her life because of her cancer treatment, and even though I am terrified to stand here in front of you all, I am deciding to use my full voice and full breath and power to say as clearly as I can that we can’t win this fight without fighting fully for the workers who are affected by the climate crisis and the workers who will be transforming our energy, agriculture, and transportation infrastructure. That and more is why we need a Green New Deal!
Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, USA
Reprinted from the RC e-mail discussion list for leaders of wide world change
(Present Time 198, January 2020)