A Brief Review of the “Roadmap to Contra Costa County Refinery Transition”
Recently a group of refinery workers’ unions and Bay Area environmental justice groups released an overview of a Roadmap to Contra Costa County Refinery Transition. In a reformist context, at least, this is an excellent proposal that measures up to what a “just transition” should look like. While it doesn’t quite measure up to a green syndicalist approach, it at least opens the door to that possibility.
The Contra Costa Refinery Transition Partnership (CCRTP) includes United Steelworkers District 12, United Steelworkers Local 5, the Asian Pacific Environmental Network, UA Plumbers & Steamfitters Local 342, and the Contra Costa Central Labor Council, with support from the United Steelworkers International Union, the California Federation of Labor Unions, UC Berkeley Labor Center, and the BlueGreen Alliance Foundation. It is the culmination of several decades of organizing effort jointly conducted by many of these organizations — dating back to the mid 1990s. (For some background, see the introduction and introduction and first chapter from the anthology, Power Lines: Building a Labor-Climate Justice Movement.)
The roadmap offers practical and specific recommendations on how to provide a managed decline of the remaining four oil refineries in the Bay Area (three in Contra Costa County, specifically Martinez, Rodeo, and Richmond; and one in Solano County, specifically Benicia).
These include environmental justice demands — many of which include community input on refinery conversions as well as reparations for impacted communities. Simultaneously, the roadmap includes numerous demands union workers might make in contract negotiations, including provisions for making workers adversely affected by refinery transitions “whole”, including everything from early retirement without penalty, to right of transfer to other still operating facilities by the company, to paid retraining, with seniority rights being a determining factor in who gets first dibs. Indeed, this document reads as a joint contract negotiated by the workers and the community that can serve as a model for similar cases globally.
As visionary as this document is, however, it isn’t the first instance of such an attempt. Three decades ago, in northwestern California, a one-time labor organizer turned radical environmentalist named Judi Bari authored a very similar (albeit far less detailed) proposal, titled, But What About Jobs? (This was co-authored with the help of several timber workers who chose to remain anonymous, either because they were not represented by a union or their union collaborated with the timber bosses.)
For its time (1996), this was a very radical proposal. However, three decades later, such ideas have become mainstream as (some) unions and environmental justice organizations have recognized that any hope for a better future for all depends upon their working together.
Those of us who are feeling demoralized over the rise of the far right and the oft-repeated notion that the Overton Window has shifted far to the right can find some solace in the fact that it has also shifted leftwards. (In fact, in many ways, what’s happening is that societal norms have shifted leftwards, and what was once mainstream conservative is now considered far right. Far from having a popular mandate, the far right uses bullying, threats, and fear to induce subservience rather than manufacture consent through persuasion. The problem for the reactionaries is that authoritarianism is actually far less stable than manufactured consent in the long run).
Green unionism has slowly become mainstream, in spite of efforts by those threatened by it (namely extractive capitalists) to quash it. However, many workers dependent upon jobs in extractive industries, even those represented by unions, see environmentalists as “outsiders” (and to no small degree, until recently, many environmental organizations inadvertently reinforced that mindset by not making concerted efforts to cultivate relationships with potentially affected workers). Therefore, many previously attempted “just transition” frameworks and roadmaps (even very well-crafted ones) have fallen upon deaf ears from the workers.
This study is different for the simple reason that workers — and not just any workers, but refinery workers employed in the very refineries potentially impacted as well as officials from the unions that represent them — helped craft it. That goes a long way in giving such a roadmap credibility among potentially adversely affected workers who’d otherwise be very skeptical and reticent.
This proposal both addresses very real cost of living, bread-and-butter concerns that workers (and front-line communities) have while also providing a means for addressing climate emergency and capital blight.
On a macro-scale, this also offers a roadmap for defeating MAGA and Trumpism, because these reactionary forces thrive on sowing divisions and stoking prejudices that split the working class. More such specific proposals crafted by workers and environmental justice activists centered around similar facilities across the US and globally would definitely help build a more viable, transformative movement, comprising what Jeremy Brecher of Labor Network for Sustainability describes as “A Green New Deal from Below.”
If there is one shortcoming in the plan, it’s that it doesn’t quite go far enough. The document neither discusses collectivization of the refineries (either through nationalization or workers’ control) nor a Lucas Plan style repurposing of them by the workers themselves so there are limitations to it. Whether those limitations are due to such ideas being beyond the pale for the coalition that wrote the document, or due to the possibility that the organizers believe that offering them would be too much too soon isn’t clear. In these chaotic opening weeks of the Trump administration, its reactionary overreach paradoxically opens up opportunities to rethink societal norms in radical opposition to far right hubris. That said, this “roadmap” was largely crafted before all of that went down.
Regardless of all of these circumstances, it nevertheless represents a major step in the right direction, a model for just transition, and a crucial piece of the puzzle on how to extricate ourselves from the perils we currently find ourselves in.