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Green Collar Jobs
Study and Report
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Poverty and unemployment are significant problems
in Berkeley and other Bay Area cities and there is an urgent need
for a new source of living wage jobs for low income residents with
barriers to employment – a population that includes youth and adults
who do not have a high school degree, have been out of the labor
market for a long time, were formally incarcerated, have limited
education and/or labor market skills. This report describes a
category of jobs with significant potential to fill this need –
green collar jobs. Green collar jobs are blue collar jobs in
green businesses – that is, manual labor jobs in businesses whose
products and services directly improve environmental quality
(Pinderhughes, 2006). Green collar jobs are located in large and
small for-profit businesses, non-profit organizations, social
enterprises, and public sector institutions. What unites these jobs
is that all of them are associated with manual labor work that
directly improves environmental quality. Green collar jobs represent
an important new category of work force opportunities because they
are relatively high quality jobs, with relatively low barriers to
entry, in sectors that are poised for dramatic growth. The
combination of these three features means that cultivating green
collar jobs for people with barriers to employment can be an
effective strategy to provide low-income men and women with access
to good jobs - jobs that provide workers with meaningful, community
serving work, living wages, benefits, and advancement opportunities.
Alternative Urban Futures:
Planning for Sustainable Cities throughout the World (Rowman &
Littlefield, 2004).
This book focuses on
planning and policy approaches and appropriate technologies that can
be used to minimize a city's impact on the environment while
providing urban residents with the infrastructure and services they
need to sustain a high quality of urban life. The book's focus is on
ecologically and socially responsible planning and management of the
urban infrastructure in five critical areas: water supply and
management, waste minimization and management, energy production and
use, transportation, and food systems.
The book is unique in its
emphasis on sustainable urban infrastructure management, processes
and appropriate technologies, its pragmatic focus, its
comprehensiveness, and its truly
international, non-Eurocentric approach... (find out more) |