Posted on 12/02/2011 11:42:26 AM PST by mdittmar
At a White House event today featuring President Barack Obama and former President Bill Clinton, AFT President Randi Weingarten represented labor leaders in joining university presidents and corporate executives in support of the presidential Better Buildings Challenge initiative.
President Obama announced that nearly $4 billion of investments have been committed already, including $2 billion by workers’ pension funds, CEOs, mayors and university presidents for energy-saving upgrades. The labor movement committed to work to invest $150 million in energy-efficient retrofit projects in the coming months.
The goal of the initiative, which builds on work begun by the AFL-CIO earlier this year with the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI), is to spur job creation by harnessing private sector investment in energy upgrades in commercial and industrial buildings.
Working with the AFT, a broad coalition of public-sector unions, and the AFL-CIO Building and Construction Trades Department (BCTD), the AFL-CIO has been part of a CGI initiative for the retrofitting of union buildings, and has already exceeded its initial commitment of working with existing real estate-focused investment funds to invest between $10 million and $20 million of additional capital in energy-efficient retrofits of commercial, industrial, institutional and public buildings over the next six months.
AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, who has been pushing for infrastructure and green-jobs investment at all levels, said in a statement:
The Better Buildings initiative has all the right components to make a real difference—it will create profitable investment opportunities for worker pension funds, create badly needed good jobs, increase America’s competitiveness around energy savings, and address the dangers of climate change.
Today’s action builds on 14 private sector commitments announced at the Clinton Global Initiative conference in June, including the labor movement’s aim to invest $10 billion in pension fund assets in job-creating infrastructure projects over the next five years.
The AFT has been retrofitting its headquarters building in Washington, D.C., to become LEED Silver certified, and the AFL-CIO has committed to a Better Buildings Challenge retrofit of its headquarters, expected to reduce energy consumption by 20 percent. As Weingarten explains:
We not only are asking others to commit to energy-saving retrofits, but we’re also doing it ourselves.
Hmm?,well I'm not in a union,but I always assumed these union pension fund assets were in a lockbox.
Like Soc Security? /s
Hey,Al Gore said it,it must be true.
It's more like a washing machine.
Dirty tax dollars in, "clean" initiative money and campaign contributions come out.
It hardly even looks like my money anymore!!
Unionized government employees now far outnumber private sector union members, in the U.S. today.
What is a private sector union member?
It would be someone who is not employed by the government.
This is not real complex.
LEED certification is pretty much a joke when it comes to energy usage. Great in theory, but in practice LEED-certified buildings arguably use on average more energy than un-certified buildings.
This is very largely because they are mostly certified based on design criteria, not performance. And energy-savings is only one group of the points that are available.
It is to me,cause I can't understand why anyone would join a union?
I work my butt off every day,and my employer knows that,by the way,I get 7 weeks paid vacation a year.
Well, let’s see now, the Unions own a big chunk of General Motors, General Motors still owes Obama 50 BILLION dollars, and now “ - - - the labor movement’s aim to invest $10 billion in pension fund assets in job-creating infrastructure projects over the next five years.”
Okay, that figures out to be a loss of 2 Billion dollars a year from the Unions Pension Fund, and a loss of value from the GM stock that the Unions own.
BTW, if the Unions could decree that no one could retire for the next five years - - - . Nope, it won’t be profitable. It sure looks like the Unions are working themselves up to be “To Big To Fail.”
Would Clinton just STFU.
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