How New York’s Democratic Socialists Brought Unions Around to Public Renewables
Last month, at the end of a torturous budget season, New York lawmakers secured the passage of the Build Public Renewables Act (BPRA), a landmark win for state-level decarbonization efforts. The law requires the New York Power Authority (NYPA), the state-owned power supplier, to move toward providing electricity to its state, municipal, and residential customers exclusively from wind, solar, and other renewable power sources. This mandate also directs the authority to build, operate, and own renewable-energy projects to meet the state’s goal of 70 percent renewable electricity generation by 2030.
The BPRA also includes historic ironclad worker protections that environmental and labor advocates hope will set the standard for what public investment in a just energy transition backed by good-paying, clean-energy union jobs looks like.
One might think that it would be easy to gain labor unions’ support for public-works legislation explicitly designed with Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal in mind—the NYPA was the brainchild of FDR, who signed the authority into law in 1931. But getting strong labor provisions in the final version of the bill and, consequently, getting labor on board, proved to be no small feat. The BPRA is a product of years of advocacy by the New York chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America and Public Power New York, a coalition the DSA formed with other environmental groups.
When the campaign for the BPRA began in 2019, New York City’s DSA chapter was not yet a serious player in Albany. But they also understood that these unions, especially those that represent the relevant labor forces like the Utility Workers Union of America, are critical to winning major climate reforms. “We knew that we were not going to be successful with BPRA and its implementation unless labor was a full willing partner,” Stylianos Karolidis, an NYC-DSA organizer, told the Prospect.
Since they did not initially have access to state-level union leaders, the DSA organizers started by building relationships with local utilities unions across the state. Public Power New York recruited hundreds of volunteers to help steer the victories of numerous DSA-endorsed state legislators in 2020 and 2022. One successful candidate was climate organizer Sarahana Shrestha, now a state assemblymember from the Hudson Valley. She unseated her long-tenured Democratic primary opponent, in part, by highlighting his opposition to the BPRA.
The bill began to move in Albany in a real way when unions outside of the utilities sector, like the New York State United Teachers, the New York State Nurses Association, and the Service Employees International Union, endorsed the bill. Once the bill passed the state Senate in the summer of 2022, the utilities unions took a more serious interest in the plan.
The BPRA’s labor provisions include prevailing-wage assurances and require that all the NYPA’s renewable projects include collective-bargaining agreements for every employee, including contractors and subcontractors. These agreements must be in place before work can start on a project. The law creates a $25 million just-transition fund to retrain fossil fuel–sector workers who could lose their jobs, and specifies that union leaders must be consulted in this process. It also prioritizes hiring these retrained workers for the NYPA’s renewable projects.
At first, the utilities unions opposed the plan. They were skeptical (and some privately still are) that the public-sector jobs created by the BPRA would match the ones gained in hard-won private-sector contracts. Their trepidation stems, in part, from what it means to be a public employee in New York. The utilities unions say that the NYPA has not typically been a good-faith negotiator, often stalling talks while employees worked under expired contracts for up to five years. Since the state’s Taylor Law prohibits public-sector employees from striking, labor doesn’t have many tools to counter these tactics. But the provision in the BRPA that requires a collective-bargaining agreement to be in place before work can begin on a project site allayed some of their concerns.
To overcome the broader union opposition, Michael Gianaris, the state Senate deputy majority leader, twisted some arms. Gianaris held numerous meetings with Mario Cilento, the New York State AFL-CIO president, and Gary LaBarbera, the Building and Construction Trades Council of New York president. They finally agreed to take a publicly neutral stance on the bill. Another watershed moment came during last July’s marathon legislative session. It included testimony from Patrick Guidice, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers’ business manager, who praised the bill’s labor provisions, calling them the best labor provisions he’d ever seen. So good, he said, that he doubted it could pass.
Guidice’s doubts were seemingly vindicated in January when New York’s Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul introduced her own version of the bill, later dubbed “BPRA lite.” It gutted the original version’s labor language and weakened the NYPA’s mandate to generate electricity from renewable sources. Guidice “was right to be skeptical because Democrats have been treating labor like this useful tool for years,” Karolidis, of the NYC-DSA, says. “We all knew labor was something we couldn’t afford to compromise on.” The version of BPRA in the final budget, which retained the labor language Guidice had praised, was a massive win for progressives and for public-sector ownership and control of clean-energy infrastructure.
As the elation over New York’s first significant climate legislation in four years subsides, new concerns about implementation have crept into the picture. Statewide labor leaders have little faith in the current NYPA CEO, Justin Driscoll, who has contributed to Republican campaigns. Public Power New York has called for his ouster, and the Senate seems to be making good on that request.
The law mandates that every two years the NYPA must assess how well the private sector is keeping up with the state’s renewable-energy goals. If they are slacking, the authority is mandated to build new renewable projects to fill that gap. A plan scrapped from BPRA’s final version would have given the legislature, labor, and environmental justice groups control of this assessment process. Instead of these “democratization” reforms, the NYPA’s planning process includes several channels for public comment.
Karolidis says that if the NYPA’s leaders try to thwart the BPRA’s labor and environmental objectives, advocates will use these channels to turn up the heat on the agency. Much of this activism would likely occur in rural upstate New York, where project-siting controversies are more likely to erupt. NIMBY pressures, combined with concerns about how these new renewable power sources will connect with the electric grid, will pose ongoing challenges for the NYPA.
Fred Stafford of Public Power Review points out another concern about one of the consumer benefits in BPRA, a discount for residential consumers in “disadvantaged communities” (households in certain ZIP codes that are earning 60 percent or less of the state’s household median income). Leaving moderate- and upper-income earners out of this framework could pose challenges to building a political constituency for publicly owned and operated power generation.
Creating good-paying, clean-energy union jobs can provide important political benefits. New York can now help to build planet-saving technologies instead of waiting for the private sector to see an upside in saving the planet. Plus, interest in public power is increasing. “A lot of people were nervous last year that the Inflation Reduction Act represented the horizon for environmental politics right now,” says Karolidis. “I can’t tell you how many people have reached out to us from across the United States who want to do something like the Build Public Renewables Act.”