3/10/2003

KUFM / KGPR

T. M. Power

Protecting Jobs through Environmental Protection

The Montana state AFL-CIO has joined the Martz Administration in supporting a variety of anti-environmental legislative proposals. One would overrule Montana’s voter-approved ban on open-pit, heap-leach, cyanide mining. Another would seek to invalidate our constitutional right in Montana to a clean and healthful environment. A third would block legal action aimed at forcing state government agencies to enforce environmental law and regulations.

Some might shrug and indicate no surprise that organized labor is supporting bills to weaken environmental laws given that labor’s primary concern is protecting jobs. The implicit assumption here is that environmental protection costs jobs, lots of them, and with our economy in the shape that it is in, we cannot afford any more of those job losses.

Organized labor’s and many citizens’ acceptance of this implicit claim that environmental protection comes only at the expense of jobs is a sign of just how successful those industries who earn their profits by damaging the environment have been in their political propaganda. There is, in fact, no evidence to support these claims either here in Montana or across the nation.

Consider Montana: Over the last decade and a half Montana has not been losing jobs, it has been gaining jobs at the rate of about 12,000 per year. To put this number in perspective, metal mining in Montana provides a total of about 2,100 jobs. That extractive industry provides only about four-tenths of one percent of Montana’s 560,000 jobs. Just as interesting, each year we have been adding about six times as many jobs as metal mining, in total, provides.

The effort to overrule the vote of the people of the state and reinstate cyanide mining seeks to increase the 2,100 metal mining jobs to some larger number while ignoring the source of our 560,000 jobs or the 12,000 new jobs we create each year. The usual justification for this misplaced focus is that unlike mining jobs, most of the new jobs we have been creating are “lousy” jobs, paying barely minimum wage.

But that too is political propaganda that ignores the facts and demeans the work done by an increasing proportion of Montanans. Over the last 15 years we have added about 1,500 construction jobs each year, a total of an additional 22,000 skilled, well-paid, blue-collar construction jobs. Each year we have also been adding about a thousand medical services jobs, a thousand financial services jobs, 700 state and local government jobs, a thousand business services jobs, 250 repair services jobs, and 550 engineering and management jobs. These are not lousy jobs, but together they have been adding 6,000 jobs per year or about 90,000 jobs over the last 15 years.

If organized labor in Montana is worried about creating jobs for Montanans, it should be focused on what the source of all of these new jobs was instead of focusing on the industries that are least likely to be the source of new jobs in the future and the ones that represent the biggest threat to the livability of Montana.

This is not a trivial point. Consider those 22,000 new construction jobs that were created. Given that metal mining and our other extractive industries were losing jobs during this time period, just were did all of these construction jobs come from? Clearly they were associated with the influx of new residents and businesses that demanded new or remodeled homes and created the economic basis for a much-expanded commercial infrastructure. But why were these people and businesses coming here? To live next to toxically polluted rivers and streams? To gaze out over the raw eroding spoil piles and yawning open pits full of the poisonous chemical residues of mining? Not likely! Montana’s relatively unspoiled environment has been the engine of that growth.

For over a century Appalachia has tried the mining path to prosperity that the Martz Administration and the Montana AFL-CIO are now urging on us but Appalachia has gotten the opposite, region-wide poverty. Our neighbor Wyoming has tried this path too, yet, over the past 20 years, Montana has grown three times as fast. Could there be lessons there?

Even if we were able to create more mining jobs by relaxing our environmental standards, the number of jobs would be trivial compared to the normal job creation process in Montana, and the jobs would be temporary. Mining is a mature industry in which technological change is constantly displacing workers. As a result, even when production can be kept constant or is actually increased, employment systematically declines. Chemical mining, such as cyanide heap-leach mining, leads the pack in its ability to mine huge amounts of ore with very few workers in a short period of time and then shut down, usually leaving an environmental disaster in its wake. That is not speculation. That has been Montana’s and other states’ actual experience. It is unclear why we would want to sacrifice much of anything for that result.

A state cannot grow by systematically trashing its environment in a desperate attempt to lure irresponsible industries to it. Nor can it grow by clinging to the industries of the past at the expense of new sources of employment and income. That frame of mine simply puts an area into a downward economic death spiral. It may not be surprising that Governor Martz wants to lead us there. What is surprising is that what are supposed to be the spokespersons for Montana’s workers want to take us there too.