A new study finds that the new “green” jobs are not going to the poor. A lead­ing think tank shows that the US Obama admin­is­tra­tion push to cre­ate green jobs is not help­ing poor or minor­ity Americans.

As one of the fea­tures of the stim­u­lus pack­age that the US gov­ern­ment released ear­lier this year, 200 mil­lion dol­lars was to be spent in cre­at­ing “green” jobs or jobs that will help the envi­ron­ment. The authors of the study looked to see if the 200 mil­lion dol­lars helped the lives of the poor in the US.

From IPS, Haider Rizvi reveals the report’s details.

“The com­mu­ni­ties of colour are hard­est hit [by job­less­ness],” said Terry Kele­her, who co-authored the report, “Green Equity Toolkit: Stan­dards and strate­gies for advanc­ing race, gen­der and eco­nomic equal­ity in the green economy”.

“They can ben­e­fit from the emerg­ing green econ­omy. But that is not hap­pen­ing,” he told IPS.

The report, released this week by the Oak­land, California-based Applied Research Cen­ter, says that a vast major­ity of green jobs are being filled by white men, even though there is no scarcity of tal­ent among peo­ple of colour and women of all ethnicities.

Accord­ing to Keleher’s find­ings, which he con­cluded in col­lab­o­ra­tion with his col­league Yvonne Liu, African Amer­i­cans and Lati­nos com­prise less than 30 per­cent of those employed in green indus­tries and economies.

“Gen­der dis­par­i­ties are even starker,” said Liu, who found that African Amer­i­can women are employed in only 1.5 per­cent of the energy sec­tor work­force. The num­bers are even worse as far as Asian and Latino women are con­cerned. Their share in jobs stands at 1.0 and 0.7 per­cent, respectively.

The term “green econ­omy” refers to busi­nesses that care about envi­ron­men­tal pro­tec­tion, energy effi­ciency, preser­va­tion of bio­di­ver­sity, com­mu­nity self-reliance, and sus­tain­able devel­op­ment.
…

Both Kele­her and Liu argue that the Obama admin­is­tra­tion should con­tinue its quest for eco­nomic recov­ery and the efforts to pro­mote a green econ­omy. But, they insist that such efforts are not likely to pro­duce pos­i­tive results if mil­lions of job­less peo­ple from minor­ity com­mu­ni­ties are not offered equal opportunities.

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