EE#18 No more green jobs
It a bad message, and we're not sure we can deliver
Shiny new jobs have been one of the main ways politicians, policy people and NGOs have tried to sell net zero. And it’s true that the transition will create thousands of job roles, both in the initial buildout of new infrastructure and beyond that.
‘Green jobs’ were born out of the pandemic. Everyone was worried that unemployment would skyrocket and that green investment could stem the tide. There are two problems with the green jobs narrative now. The first; it doesn’t work for the public, the second; the labour market is a world away from 2020. Green jobs are no longer a great bonus of net zero, they are one of the biggest challenges to reaching it.
We have spent years in roundtables on green jobs (I apologise for any that I organised). All these discussions got stuck on definitions. Do we focus on discrete sectors (as Government did), do we look at certain job roles (like PwC), do we define it by skill sets (LinkedIn)? What about those in transition industries, does a job in steel become green overnight if a company moves from a blast to an electric arc furnace?
This confusion is not limited to policy types. In 2021 Public First ran several focus groups on green jobs with the public. People don’t know what green means. You very quickly end up in a discussion about recycling, or maybe working in a nature park. Most people think they are outdoors and hard work.
Worse, because of this lack of understanding, people think moving to green work is risky. There’s a worry they won’t be around in the long term, or (slightly tied to Boris Johnson) are a political gimmick that won’t come to fruition.
In Public First’s more recent work with Prince’s Trust, focusing on young people, the same holds. Most people think of the green economy as conservation. Don’t get me wrong, conservation is very important, but there’s a lot else going on in net zero.
This disconnect makes hiring hard. Energy companies need an awful lot of electrical engineers with a fondness for hard hats and high vis, but they also need thousands of project managers, data specialists or finance experts (or whisper it, lobbyists…). Net zero is far from the death of the office job.
Even if they knew what they were green doesn’t work as a message to encourage people to move roles. Environmental purpose alone does not make a role attractive. Whether you’re talking to working-class, middle-class, young or old, what matters is job security i.e., the likelihood that they will still be in employment in the long-term. Close runners-up are pay, flexibility, and working conditions. For young people in particular, while people associate green jobs with having a positive impact it isn’t determining their career choices.
But maybe it works for convincing people that net zero is a good thing, maybe not for them personally but for the UK as a whole. But in testing the effectiveness of various messages for Labour’s own green investment plan, Steve Akehurst points out that although jobs messages give Labour a warm fuzzy feeling, they don’t actually work.
“I’ve simply never seen a piece of UK message testing where jobs does that well. In short, it has a bit of a credibility problem.
I think it’s the case for a few reasons. Firstly unemployment is low, so the salience of the subject is low, outside a few specific constituencies. Secondly, no matter how you package it, it can struggle a bit for believability with voters, being the sort of ‘jam tomorrow’ promised to them by politicians for yonks. It might be different when the jobs exist.”
As Steve points out unemployment in the UK is low. It’s not just that this lowers the salience of job messages, it makes the promise of fulfilling them incredibly difficult.
Think tank reports tend to pick big numbers of gross jobs to amp media coverage (again, mea culpa). But in reality, jobs are net. The transition will mean some jobs no longer exist, and it will mean employing people mostly from existing industries. The net zero strategy promises 450,000 jobs in the UK - that isn’t 450,000 brand-new people. And while UK unfilled job posts are falling, they are still almost double the average of the previous decade.
Side point, there is obviously a large pool of underemployed people in the UK. Worryingly, in the Prince’s Trust report, understanding, awareness or enthusiasm for green work was lower in those without jobs or qualifications, and lower in women or minority groups. For these groups pay, security etc is even more important than the population generally.
In a tight labour market, net zero industries are competing with other sectors within the UK. Hinkley Point employs a reactor full of electricial engineers. The hope was, when they finished, they’d be free to work on building renewables in the nearby Celtic Sea. Two things went wrong, Hinkley was delayed, buggering up timelines, and government signed the AUKUS deal on nuclear submarines. The defence industry pays better and you get to spend several months in sunny Australia, a no-brainer career choice. Queue several people leaving, Hinkley further delayed and offshore wind in Wales looking around for workers.
A tight labour market is compounded by a poor view of immigration, something made even harder if politicians are championing domestic job creation. Take home energy efficiency. The construction sector has more vacancies than others, a greater proportion of workers nearing retirement, and was hit harder by Brexit. We need between 120,000-230,000 new workers in retrofitting by 2030. That’s a new Exeter or Reading of only insulation installers. Government is only funding 9,000 training opportunities in heat pumps - and that doesn’t mean 9,000 new installers. Some drop out, lots can’t set up new businesses and all are still very junior.
Green jobs are not a good sell to convince the public of the merits of net zero, or to convince people to work in the roles we know are needed. For both of those security wins out whether job security or energy security. Government and employers need to sell preparing for and protecting people in the future. Biden didn’t promise green jobs, he promised well-paid, secure, union jobs.
Fulfilling green jobs is more challenging. For a start government needs to restore its abilities in labour market intelligence, with an accurate picture of what professions we need, where to meet public policy goals. That should inform shortage occupation lists, hiring initiatives and state-backed training offers.
Moving away from talking about green jobs should also mean a greater focus on specific challenges. How do we make training offers commercially viable, how do we convince over 55s to retrain, how does the school curriculum improve awareness and readiness for key roles?
The public doesn’t want to be convinced that green jobs are going to be a good thing, they want to be shown that government can actually deliver something and prove it to them.