California wants to wind down its gas and oil industry. What does it mean for jobs?
For tens of thousands of Californians, a job in the oil and gas industry has been a ticket to a middle-class life.
The work can be dangerous. It can be unhealthy. Still, the industry has been among the few willing to employ Californians without a college degree and pay them well above average.
But as the state seeks to wind down its gas and oil industry — made even clearer last week by Gov. Gavin Newsom’s call to scale back fracking and ban the sale of gas-powered cars in the state by 2035 — those jobs are at risk.
“Can we immediately start talking about jobs? We can hate on oil, but the truth is our refinery jobs are really good middle class jobs,” Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez, D-San Diego, tweeted Sept. 24 after Newsom’s announcement. “Jobs can’t be an afterthought to any climate change legislation.”
Even as the number of clean energy jobs rises in California, the quality of those positions vary wildly, from rooftop solar installers making just above minimum wage to those working in utilities making $50 an hour. Environmental and labor advocates say it’s up to the state to ensure those clean energy jobs are as good as the jobs in the oil and gas industry they will replace.
Middle-class jobs
The oil and gas industry directly employs 152,000 people in California, said Cathy Reheis-Boyd, president of the Western States Petroleum Association, which represents the industry in six western states, including California.
Those workers make $80,500 a year on average. Nearly two-thirds of those workers don’t have a bachelor’s degree, according to a 2019 report from the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corporation.
“It’s one of the few industries left in California for people who are not college graduates, or for second chancers who have a criminal record,” said Rock Zierman, CEO of the California Independent Petroleum Association.
The industry is among the biggest employer in Kern County, with tens of thousands hired to drill wells. But the oil and gas jobs are everywhere in California, from those in the refineries in the Bay Area to others building oil and gas pipelines.
Those jobs are just not comparable in quality to those in the green energy sector, Zierman argued.
“Those green energy jobs just don’t pay the way oil and gas industry pay,” Zierman said. “You have a higher pay and upward mobility in the oil and gas industry than in green jobs.”
Creating good green jobs
The fear of job loss propelled the State Building and Construction Trades Council of California to oppose Assembly Bill 345, which would have prohibited oil drilling near schools and homes. The bill eventually died in committee in August.
“AB 345 risked killing jobs without any plan to avoid the inevitable economic harm that befalls the Central Valley,” Sen. Anna Caballero, D-Salinas, who voted against the bill, wrote in an Aug. 24 Fresno Bee op-ed.
Ron Miller, executive secretary of Los Angeles/Orange Counties Building and Construction Trades Council, said many of his 140,000 members already work in solar fields, windmills and other green energy facilities. The council has been working with environmentalists to achieve carbon neutrality in California by 2045, he said. But still, he said the gas and oil industry still employs thousands in the region.
Miller recalled Southern California’s manufacturing heydays — a car plant in South Gate 7 miles south of Los Angeles, tire manufacturers all over the region, a Boeing facility in Long Beach. Many of those places and industries have gone, but not the oil and gas industry.
“The oil and gas industry is one of the last large industry left here,” Miller said. “We can’t afford to push them out before their time.”
Unless workers in the gas and oil industry see a future for themselves in a low-carbon economy, their first priority is to “save their own livelihoods,” said Carol Zabin, director of Green Energy Program at UC Berkeley Labor Center. For the state to truly achieve its goals fighting climate change, Zabin said, it needs to invest in helping its gas and oil workforce transition.
“Union members are fed this line that there are more jobs in the clean energy economy, and you can get a job as a solar installer,” Zabin said. “And they are going, ‘We know those are pretty crappy jobs.’”
In her report released earlier this year, Zabin said the state should go beyond offering workers a few thousand dollars and having them navigate through a complex job market. The state should offer apprenticeship and training programs through institutions such as community colleges and secure commitment from employers that the programs’ graduates will be placed in a good job, she said.
Zabin also said the state and its counties and cities can mandate certain workplace conditions through a project labor agreement. The Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority, for instance, signed an agreement with BYD Motors for all-electric buses in 2013 that stipulated those buses need to be assembled locally.
Zabin said Assembly Bill 841 in the Legislature this year is another example: Those building an electric vehicle charging infrastructure funded or authorized by the state must have at least one electrician who holds a certain certification.
‘”There’s a set of policy tools to encourage good employers and screen out bad employers” she said.
“We shouldn’t be forced to bargain”
Katie Valenzuela grew up in Oildale in Kern County, a community whose logo has two oil wells, and where people leaving high schools had three options.
“You go to college, you work for oil, or you work in healthcare,” said Valenzuela, an environmental justice advocate and an incoming Sacramento City Councilwoman. “If you lose your job in oil, there isn’t another job, which makes them so dependent on oil.”
Those workers know what working in oil means — toxic fumes, fires and dangerous heavy tools, she said.
Still, “they are dependent on the oil industry because of the lack of investment,” Valenzuela said. “Someone created this problem, and it’s up to the state to deal with it.”
Kern County has seen some green energy jobs as companies build solar and wind farms. But California needs to deliberately invest in creating green energy workforce in places like Kern County, through creating strategies specific to each of the state’s regions and being very intentional about which programs the state will fund, she said.
The oil workers in her hometown, she said, can’t simply be left behind.
“I know the minute there are good jobs available in another sector, those workers will want those jobs,” she said. “They want jobs that don’t pollute their community if they are available. But they are not. And until we crack that code, we will never be able to move forward on any of those goals” on climate change.
This story was originally published October 1, 2020 at 5:00 AM with the headline "California wants to wind down its gas and oil industry. What does it mean for jobs?."
