As United States Energy Transfers Partners began building the Dakota Access Pipeline through territory sacred to the Standing Rock Sioux tribe, the tribe began an escalating campaign against the pipeline. By this summer nearly 200 tribes around the country had passed resolutions opposing the pipeline and many hundreds of their members joined nonviolent direct action to halt it. Amidst wide public sympathy for the Native American cause, environmental, climate protection, human rights, and many other groups joined the campaign. On September 9, the Obama administration intervened to temporarily halt the pipeline and open government-to-government consultations with the tribes.
The Dakota Access Pipeline has become an issue of contention within organized labor. When a small group of unions supported the Standing Rock Sioux and opposed the pipeline, AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka issued a statement discounting Native American claims and urging that work on the pipeline resume. Other constituencies within labor quickly cracked back. Why has this become a divisive issue within labor, and can it have a silver lining for a troubled labor movement?
As video footage of private security dogs attacking nonviolent Indian demonstrators spread through the media, a small number of unions felt compelled to express their support for the anti-pipeline movement. All of them had previously opposed the Keystone XL pipeline and advocated for strong climate protection policies.
The Communications Workers of America issued a statement supporting the Standing Rock Sioux.
The Standing Rock Sioux and potentially 17 million others are threatened by the Dakota Access Pipeline route, a 1,170 mile oil pipeline that would run from North Dakota to Illinois. In addition to endangering those communities, the pipeline could possibly desecrate the ancestral burial grounds of the Standing Rock Sioux; this utter disrespect and violation cannot be allowed. CWA, through our Committee on Human Rights, stands with working people and against corporate greed, whether we’re fighting for clean water in Flint, Mich., against bad trade deals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership that would hurt U.S. jobs and communities, or the rights of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe to safeguard their community.
In 2009, North America’s Building Trades Unions (NABTU) forged a partnership with the oil and gas industry to develop North American energy sources called the Oil and Gas Industry Labor-Management Committee (OGILMC). Sean McGarvey, president of NABTU, is president of the OGILMC and Jack Gerard, President of the American Petroleum Institute, is Secretary-Treasurer. McGarvey signed the letter to Trumka. The API has been a major financial sponsor of building trades conferences.
The day after NABTU statement, the AFL-CIO issued a statement supporting the pipeline. It endorsed pipeline construction as “part of a comprehensive energy policy that creates jobs, makes the United States more competitive and addresses the threat of climate change.” Pipeline construction and maintenance provides “quality jobs to tens of thousands of skilled workers.” When community involvement decisions have been completed, “it is fundamentally unfair to hold union members’ livelihoods and their families’ financial security hostage to endless delay.” The Dakota Access Pipeline is providing “over 4,500 high-quality, family supporting jobs.” Furthermore, “trying to make climate policy by attacking individual construction projects is neither effective nor fair to the workers involved.
Many people have found the AFL-CIO’s decision to support the pipeline against so many of its needed allies hard to fathom. After all, it does not issue a public statement every time workers are threatened by layoffs.
Of course, every job is important if it is your job. And while pipeline jobs are sometimes denigrated as “just temporary jobs,” nearly all jobs for construction workers are temporary – and important for those who hold them. Construction workers qualify for health care and pension benefits based on hours worked in any given quarter. So temporary construction job assignments can secure benefits for construction workers and their families. Construction workers naturally want to preserve their jobs. But that is not a sufficient explanation for why the AFL-CIO intervened.
This is beyond disgusting. So disappointing. The almost total disregard for the indigenous peoples who are waging a courageous struggle to protect their land, water and ancestral burial grounds is maddening to say the least. Rage is increased each time I hear from community allies about this terrible state of affairs.
Similar sentiments led to an unprecedented decision by the Labor Coalition for Community Action — the official “constituency groups” of the AFL-CIO — to issue a statement in direct opposition to the AFL-CIO position. The LCCA includes the A. Phillip Randolph Institute, the Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance, the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists, the Coalition of Labor Union Women, the Labor Council for Latin American Advancement, and Pride at Work.
Opposition to the Dakota Access Pipeline is turning out to be a rallying point for those in the labor movement who share that view of solidarity.
Trade unionists should of course support the struggle against the Dakota Access pipeline. But at least as important is the longer-term strategic battle to change labor’s approach to climate and energy. Climate change is already causing unprecedented heat waves, coastal inundation, desertification, extinctions, and extreme weather. But that is just a love tap compared to what will come if we don’t start a rapid transition from fossil fuel energy immediately. And organized labor itself will just be climate change road kill if it does not join and help to lead the fight to protect the climate. We will be scorned by young people whose wellbeing we are putting at risk. Our jobs are already being harmed, our members’ health and safety threatened, and our communities devastated by climate change effects. There are no jobs on a dead planet.
That dialogue is incompatible with a policy guided by the American Petroleum Institute and enforced by unions that portrays destruction of the earth’s climate as little more than an opportunity for good-paying jobs. But as its own actions isolate it from its essential allies and its own activist members – especially young people who will have to live with the consequences of climate change – the pressures on the AFL-CIO to shift direction will only increase.
Isn’t it time for the AFL-CIO to pursue the dialogue it proposed about how to build the new fossil-free infrastructure that will indeed create jobs “turning our nation’s economic future in a low carbon emission direction”?
 “Dakota Access Pipeline Provides High-Quality Jobs,” Statement by AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka regarding the Dakota Access Pipeline, September 15, 2016.