Bernie has fought for workers his entire career. He understands that coal miners and oil-rig operators are not the problem. Fossil fuel workers have powered the country for more than a century, working in dangerous and precarious jobs to provide for their families. They have given their lives on unsafe, under-regulated worksites, and they have seen their pensions get cut, their health care get stripped away, and their jobs disappear while fossil fuel executives rake in billions.
For too long, this country has neglected workers displaced by government policy. NAFTA and Permanent Normal Trade Relations with China, which Bernie opposed, eliminated millions of jobs and left entire communities devastated. Bernie will put workers first. Full employment, economic opportunities and high-wage jobs in underserved areas will be supplemented by income, health care, education and pension protections. When we are in the White House, compensation and assistance for displaced workers will come first; the balance sheets of fossil fuel corporations and billionaire investors will come last.
As president, Bernie will:
Ensure a just transition for energy workers. When we are in the White House, we will create millions of union, family-wage jobs through the Green New Deal in steel and auto manufacturing, construction, energy efficiency retrofitting, coding and server farms, and renewable power plants. We will spend $1.3 trillion to ensure that workers in the fossil fuel and other carbon intensive industries receive strong benefits, a living wage, training, and job placement. We will protect the right of all workers to form a union without threats or intimidation from management. The benefits include:

1. Up to five years of a wage guarantee, job placement assistance, relocation assistance, health care, and a pension based on their previous salary.
2. If workers would like to receive training for a different career path, they will receive either a four-year college education or vocational job training with living expenses provided. They will also be eligible for health care through Medicare for All.
3. We will fully fund tenant-based Housing Choice Vouchers to ensure housing assistance to provide safe and affordable housing.
4. If a worker is ready to retire, they may opt for pension support and access to health care through Medicare for All.
5. Currently, the Black Lung Disability Trust Fund and multi-employer miners pensions are paid for by coal companies. We will protect miners’ pensions and provide $15 billion for the Black Lung Disability Fund to ensure it remains solvent as we transition away from coal.

Require strong labor standards. All funding that flows from this plan should have the best labor standards attached. That means that all projects completed with funding from the Green New Deal will have fair family-sustaining wages, local hiring preferences, project labor and community agreements, including buying clean, American construction materials and paying workers a living wage to the greatest extent possible. We will improve worker and fenceline community safety standards at manufacturing and industrial plants. Additionally, we will ensure that workers remain safe on the job by providing $100 million in funding for the Department of Labor Susan Harwood training for high-risk industrial workers.
Provide employers with tax credits to incentivize hiring transitioning employees. In order to ensure that workers who are displaced by this plan are able to find meaningful employment, we will provide the Work Opportunity Tax Credit to employers who hire them.
Invest in workers and de-industrialized communities’ economic development. Counties with more than 35 qualifying workers will be eligible for targeted economic development funding to ensure job creation in the same communities that will feel the impact of the transition most. Economic development funding will be distributed through an interagency effort spearheaded by the Department of Commerce Economic Development Administration. Funds will be allocated through the Appalachian Regional Commission, Economic Development Assistance Programs and the Abandoned Mine Lands fund. Other eligible projects include drinking and waste water infrastructure, broadband, and electric grid infrastructure investments. These targeted investments are intended to supplement, not supplant infrastructure and economic development funding throughout the rest of this plan.
Protecting the right of all workers to form a union without threat or intimidation from management. Currently, the clean energy economy jobs are not yet as densely unionized as fossil fuel and building trades jobs. We plan to change that. Jobs created through this plan will, to the extent feasible, be good-wage, union jobs. In order to do that, we must protect the right of all workers to form a union and collectively bargain by passing Bernie’s Workplace Democracy Plan. We will work with the trade union movement to establish a sectoral collective bargaining system that will work to set wages, benefits, and hours across entire industries, not just employer-by-employer. Unions not only ensure that workers receive fair pay and benefits, they fight to ensure that workers, first-responders, and fence-line communities are safe and healthy.

Source: Sanders

The Green New Deal – Bernie Sanders

The Green New Deal – Green Party