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On the side of a rural highway in north central Oregon, sandwiched between rolling hills of volcanic rock and high desert dotted with livestock, solar and wind farms, about two dozen members of Oregon construction, electrical and ironworkers unions came together to launch a new labor coalition.

Climate Jobs Oregon has been more than a year in the making, union leaders announced at a news conference Wednesday along state Route 19 amid a patchwork of clean energy projects south of Arlington and the Columbia River Gorge. Ten construction industry unions are represented in the coalition, including Oregon AFL-CIO, a statewide federation of unions covering more than 300,000 members in the construction, education, health care and manufacturing industries.

The coalition’s pitch is that in order to lower Oregonians’ utility bills and meet Oregon’s clean energy targets, including 100% clean electricity by 2040, the state needs hundreds of thousands of workers on clean energy projects, and the stability, wages and training that unions offer.

“To meet our climate goals, Oregon needs a massive increase in workers, and those workers must be trained to the highest caliber, and safety standards, where they have a meaningful voice on the job, where they have career pathways for advancement and they have wages, benefits and a retirement plan to support their families and get them into the economy long term,” said Graham Trainor, president of the Oregon AFL-CIO. “Let’s be crystal clear: Those are union jobs.”

It comes in the wake of two recent executive orders from Gov. Tina Kotek meant to accelerate the state’s transition away from planet-warming fossil fuels by making clean energy project siting and permitting easier to execute. It also comes as Biden-era clean energy tax credits that spurred billions of dollars of public and private investment in clean energy projects were phased out by President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans via the tax and spending law they passed this summer.

Creating a coalition

Having experienced clean energy projects hitting federal headwinds under Trump’s first term, Trainor and other union leaders began working with Cornell University’s Climate Jobs Institute in 2023. The institute has produced climate jobs plans for 10 other states, including Washington, Colorado, Texas and New York.

Researchers at the institute spent more than a year studying Oregon’s policy, economic and labor environment, conducting interviews and collaborating with the unions to produce 18 climate jobs policy recommendations for the state and unions to advance.

Those include investing in union apprenticeship programs to provide the workforce training needed to more than triple the clean energy produced in the state and nearly double the energy storage and transmission capacity in the state by 2040. Doing so could create up to 200,000 direct jobs and 40,000 construction trades jobs in the next five years alone, said Reyna Cohen, a research and policy development associate at the Climate Jobs Institute who worked on the policy recommendations.

Others include getting the state to collaborate with labor unions on policies that would expedite site permitting for clean energy development, piloting a central energy project procurement system that would set site developers up with the labor they need and promoting union-built solar installations, energy storage and efficiency upgrades in public buildings and public housing.

Tiffany Wilkins, eastern Oregon representative of the Local 701 chapter of the International Union of Operating Engineers and a resident of Arlington, said every wind and solar project in Gilliam County has been built with union labor.

“You can turn around to all these windmills, the solar, and say, ‘I helped build that. I was on that project. And my brothers and sisters here were on it with me.’ It’s the kind of opportunities we need more,” she said.

Ivan Maldonado, a member of the Local 737 chapter of the construction and general labor union Laborers’ International Union of North America, or LiUNA, began his career in construction on oil projects in Texas. Now he works as a foreman on solar projects.

“Joining a union and learning a trade changes lives,” Maldonado said. “I see it in younger workers everyday. Climate Jobs Oregon will help more people change their lives for the better.”

Trainor said the coalition hopes to get union labor on a higher number of clean energy projects to reach and exceed the proportion that typically works on fossil fuels projects. Although fossil fuels-powered energy industries don’t employ a huge proportion of union workers — roughly 9% on average across fuel types, according to a 2020 report by the National Association of State Energy Officials — it was still about double the proportion of union labor employed on solar and wind projects, according to the report.,

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News Source : https://www.opb.org/article/2026/01/21/labor-coalition-oregon-clean-energy-targets/