Labor Unions Defy Political Pressure to Secure the Future of Clean Energy Jobs

He has since completed six one-month rotations building Sunrise Wind — roughly thirty miles east of Montauk Point — and Empire Wind, thirty miles south of Long Island. "I had no views other than the darkness at work," McElroen says. "Then I went polar opposite." His previous horizon was rats in a tunnel. His current one is dolphins off the bow.

That pipeline — union apprentice to mid-Atlantic turbine technician — is precisely what the second Trump administration is now trying to sever. Federal officials have moved to slow the offshore wind transition, attack permits, and recycle the oldest corporate trick in the book: the fiction that climate action and good jobs are somehow opposed. They are not. The people building this industry know it. They are organizing accordingly.

A labor movement born from a flooded subway

The Climate Jobs National Resource Center traces its origins to 2012 and the wreckage of Hurricane Sandy across the New York region. Mike Fishman, then secretary-treasurer of the Service Employees International Union and now CJNRC's president and executive director, describes the moment plainly: the storm forced labor to confront what climate inaction would actually cost its members. "We came to the realization, as you can imagine, that climate change is real and it's only getting worse, and that workers are getting hit first and worst," Fishman says. Sandy exposed, in concrete and copper, what emissions-driven disasters do to working-class communities — flooded tunnels, blacked-out hospitals, vanished shifts.

What labor found in the wreckage was a power vacuum. Environmental groups, Fishman argues, were "really all about emissions" — fixated on the goal of reducing them "at any cost." The cost question — who pays, who builds, who benefits — was treated as a footnote. Lara Skinner, founding executive director of Cornell's Climate Jobs Institute, watched the same dynamic: climate organizations would tout green-job projections without specifying whether those jobs would be unionized, family-sustaining, or built under project labor agreements. "If the answer was going to be yes, well, that was going to take work, that was going to require political power," Skinner says. So labor built the blueprint itself. Climate Jobs New York emerged from the NYC Central Labor Council; the CJNRC nationalized the model.

The political terrain

The Inflation Reduction Act, labor leaders say, gave this organizing a concrete material base — a major boost after years of advocacy. For the first time at federal scale, the financial architecture of the energy transition could be steered toward apprenticeship pipelines, prevailing-wage job sites, and the kind of long-horizon careers that a thirty-year turbine tech actually requires. It was imperfect, and the unions say so. But it worked.

That is the leverage the current administration is now attempting to claw back. Slow-walking offshore permits, threatening lease cancellations, and reviving the fossil-fuel industry's favorite rhetorical trap: jobs versus the planet. It is a false binary, deployed with surgical precision, designed to fracture the working-class coalition that Sandy-era organizers spent a decade constructing. The CJNRC and its allies are not buying it. They are fighting back.

What to watch

The contest is not symbolic. It is being waged at the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, in state public service commissions, and on the decks of vessels where apprentices like McElroen are learning a trade that did not exist a decade ago. If the administration's permit freeze holds, the apprenticeship pipeline freezes with it. If organized labor breaks it, the climate-and-jobs alliance that emerged from a flooded subway system in 2012 becomes the structural backbone of a just transition — or dies on the vine.

McElroen, for his part, is not waiting to find out which. He says he would love to keep doing this work for the rest of his career. That is the material condition Washington is now debating, stripped of euphemism: whether a man who spent years in subway darkness gets to spend the next thirty years building the energy system that replaces it.