At a panel during the recent Climate Week in New York City, Rhode Island AFL-CIO President Patrick Crowley delivered some much-needed good news. He announced that building trades unions in Rhode Island and Massachusetts signed a Labor Peace Agreement with SouthCoast Wind to ensure union work on its massive planned offshore wind project.
The scale of the project and the potential for job creation are significant. For comparison, Rhode Island’s 704-megawatt Revolution Wind project, which the Trump administration unsuccessfully tried to block, employed close to a thousand union members in its construction. At 2.4 gigawatts (GW) of energy, SouthCoast Wind will need even more workers.
This development didn’t come out of nowhere. For years, the building trades in New England have been proactively mobilizing to build out offshore wind power in a way that creates union jobs and revitalizes industrial development. Their vision goes beyond just getting members temporary work; they’re pushing for a comprehensive industrial policy that builds out the domestic supply chain for the industry while upgrading critical port infrastructure. The SouthCoast Wind agreement is a major step toward those goals.
At a time when the Trump administration has launched an assault on offshore wind development, this announcement is an encouraging sign that unions at the state level can still successfully fight for good clean energy jobs. More unions should follow suit and start planning now for what a pro-union clean energy future could look like.
In recent years, the Rhode…
Auteur: Paul Prescod
