Must a Clean Environment Come at the Cost of Jobs?
The state Air Resources Board last week delayed a far-reaching program to fight air pollution in Southern California, largely because business leaders raised objections about the costs of the program. Virtually every attempt to regulate industrial pollution has been countered by industry arguments that such regulations will cause the loss of jobs and force firms to move. Yet nearly all of the evidence available for the past 20 years has shown that environmental regulations have little direct bearing on jobs and business location. The situation, in fact, is much more complicated, involving the availability of cheap versus skilled labor, the location of markets or linkages with other industries. Nevertheless, we continue to hear dire predictions of people losing their jobs if we set environmental standards for industry.
Will the new South Coast Air Quality Management District plan hurt our region, as critics claim? In the Los Angeles area, both the economy and the population (especially Latino) have been growing. But the local economy has become based on a two-tier labor force in which the gap between low- and high-income populations, often racially defined, has grown wider. Minorities are concentrated in the sectors of the economy that have been growing slowly, declining or moving out of the country. These are strong trends to which the new air quality management plan is mostly incidental.
Though structurally complex, this polarization is the result of economic restructuring. In Los Angeles it has several general tendencies. For consumer goods, like wood furniture manufacturing, there is intense competition and a relatively static market. Firms try to trim their costs of production by reducing costs and wages. New environmental regulations may require better equipment and retraining, costs that firms would rather avoid. One way to avoid it is by relocating to Mexico or another U.S. region. In other types of industry, like metal plating, environmental regulations have precipitated the restructuring process: Parent firms now are choosing to subcontract these activities to avoid the restrictions imposed on them by workplace health- and-safety and environmental regulations. The parent firms escape compliance, transfering the burden of regulation onto less capitalized and less-informed companies that generally employ non-union and often Latino workers. The real effect of environmental regulations is to accelerate already existing trends in the economy.
Debate about environmental regulation and jobs hides several issues. For one, low- income people and disadvantaged minority groups are disproportionately employed by industries that use hazardous substances or maintain unsafe work environments. Second, low-income and minority people pay more proportionally for environmental cleanup, especially clean air. Finally, low-income neighborhoods often have the worst air quality and water quality, as in East and Central Los Angeles, the East San Fernando Valley and the Southern San Gabriel Valley. In their homes as well as at work, these residents and workers are the most at risk from industrial pollution and are least insulated from its costs.
Saving jobs is often used by employers to justify other objectives, such as cutting wages, reducing benefits and destroying neighborhoods, but the bottom line is maintaining profit margins. It is ironic that the industries pressuring the AQMD to back down from enforcing the Clean Air Act because of the threat of job loss are some of the very same industries that, according to most economic predictions, are likely to be moving away from Los Angeles in the next 10 years anyway.
Moreover, in the current economic landscape, a unionized, decently paid work force is in jeopardy. This makes low-income and minority communities even more vulnerable, since unions have improved standards for workplace safety and job security that have trickled down into many non-unionized sectors of the economy. As jobs have shifted to non-union work forces, the hazards of the whole community have increased.
In casting the proposed AQMD environmental regulations as a clash between jobs and the environment, there is an implicit judgment that low-income people care less about their health and safety and the ambient quality of their environment than others. There is, furthermore, the supposition that as long as industry supplies these people jobs, government ought to stay out of the picture. As a consequence, implicit assumptions are made that low-income people can continue to be exposed to environmental hazards and that, if provided jobs, they will be quiet about their work and community conditions.
Whose responsibility is it, then, to make sure that questions of equity and justice become part of economic growth and environmental regulation considerations? A healthy environment, both at work and at home, has to be a right for all, and its costs should not be borne by those least able to afford it. It is grossly misleading to perpetuate poor environmental quality both in the workplace and in the community for the sake of jobs without questioning the basic premises of capital flight. To make jobs and environment a trade-off raises not only disturbing social policy questions but also disturbing questions about business ethics.
