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Bloomington’s GE union president Carven Thomas urged local leaders Thursday to start attracting and encouraging green jobs.
And he knows a local workforce to fill them — the 730 local union employees now working at GE but who won’t be by 2010 when the refrigerator plant shuts down.
Thomas joined Tom Szymanski, a local union organizer with IBEW 725, in a morning news conference in a gravel lot of the former RCA/Thomson plant where the first color television was manufactured.
“This is the story of Bloomington,” said Thomas, listing local lost jobs at Otis Elevator and soon GE.
With the heavy-industrial scene all but gone in Bloomington, he said growing green jobs is the future and “we need to stake our claim.”
The organization 1Sky helped stage the conference in which members wore green hard hats and held a “We’re ready for Green Jobs Now” banner.
The nonprofit organization is bipartisan and partners with other groups to get the word out about reducing emissions and creating green jobs to assuage the economic and environmental crisis.
“It is a better energy policy, more cost-effective, and a greater return on investment to pursue green technology now instead to trying to invest in traditional energy sources that continue to wreak havoc on our environment, have excessive costs, and will take decades to have any impact on our energy needs,” Szymanski said.
For this to happen, he said, leaders need to invest in solar, wind and geothermal energy sources and provide incentives for companies to hire people for a green technology boom.
Szymanski pointed to Germany, which he said has created 57,000 new jobs in the industry from 2004 to 2006.
Now’s the time to start the push for these types of jobs here in the United States, said Caitlin Corner-Dolloff, 1Sky field organizer in Indiana.
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