Green jobs can include those with direct and indirect environmental benefits Before discussing the role of PES in supporting green employment, it is important to understand what is meant by ‘green’ jobs. The definition adopted by Eurostat centres on the environmental goods and services industry (OECD, 1999), comprises “activities which produce goods and services to measure, prevent, limit, minimise or correct environmental damage to water, air and soil, as well as problems related to waste, noise and eco-systems. This includes technologies, products and services that reduce environmental risk and minimise pollution and resources’. This sets the focus on green jobs firmly within green industries explicitly concerned with environmental improvement, although the definition could potentially be broader than this. ILO/UNEP (2008) broadly defines a green job as any decent job that contributes to preserving or restoring the quality of the environment whether it is in agriculture, industry, services or administration. Recent publications from the European Commission divide types of employment into those in ‘eco-industries’, in which jobs are green because the nature of the products or services are green and ‘transformation’ industries where all jobs will become greener because the products and services generated are adapting to meet the EC’s environmental standards (European Commission, 2013). Winter Mayr (2012) points out that different groups of people within the labour market may experience different effects of greening economies and that not all groups may benefit equally. For example, women may be less likely to have the skills required to benefit from the creation of high quality green jobs and so a ‘just transition’ to a green economy may be needed to offer equality of opportunities to different labour market groups. This paper does not adopt a strict definition of what constitutes a ‘green’ job, because there are a number of different interpretations, which vary according to whether such jobs are found solely in environmental sectors, and how many and how new the ‘green’ skills are which they demand. However, the predominant focus determined by the examples found for the paper is on green jobs associated with environmentally friendly industries, including renewable energy, eco-construction and waste management. Green jobs can contribute to employment growth Green jobs are potentially significant in a number of ways from a European policy perspective. Firstly, they may contribute to achieving targets for mitigating the effects of climate change and environmental degradation. Secondly, they offer important employment policy opportunities. The creation of green jobs is a key measure of progress towards ‘sustainable’ growth as part of the European Commission’s Europe 2020 strategy. Moreover, the European Commission’s Employment Package ‘Towards a job-rich recovery’ (EC, 2012) identifies the green economy as a job-rich sector. In particular, the Commission actions highlighted in the Employment Package include a set of specific employment actions which explicitly focus on the use of PES to PES Dialogue to help ‘strengthen green skills intelligence’ and identify the ways and means of working with business to direct jobseekers and those at risk of redundancy towards emerging green occupations’ (European Commission, 2012). The demand for green skills also has the potential to change the content of existing jobs, since wider national government and European-level policies on issues such as sustainability in construction, energy use and transport can shape the nature of work done by people in these sectors, and consequently the skills required. These may include working with new materials, use of equipment to monitor consumption of energy and developing new ways of managing and evaluating environmental performance. It is potentially likely that these effects may be more widespread in terms of numbers of workers affected, than through the number of new jobs created in narrowly defined ‘green’ sectors. This is because defining green jobs can involve a number of dimensions.
a) A sectoral distinction can be made between employment in environmental goods and services sectors (EGSS) which focus on ‘economic activities whose primary purpose is to reduce or eliminate pressures on the environment or to make more efficient use of natural resources’ (ILO/UNEP, 2008: 1.110) and sectors which make a neutral or negative contribution: for example, a building services manager could work in a firm which manufactures recycled paper or in firm
concerned with petrochemical energy generation.
b) a skill use distinction: the extent to which the job demands ‘green’ skills. For example, an environmental conservation worker may find that most of their work involves ‘green’ skills, whereas a plumber or builder may find that ‘green’ tasks form a relatively small subset of their work.
c) a skill novelty distinction which notes that some skills needs are based on ‘increased demand’ for ‘more of the same’ workers e.g. recycling sorters compared to some skills needs which are ‘new and emerging’ e.g. for energy auditors . Evidence on the likely job creation potential of green employment is mixed and highly variable. Policy sources tend to be optimistic about the role of the green economy in contributing to job growth, but other sources are more sceptical. Experts typically point to ongoing economic uncertainty acting as a break on the speed of growth and a need for national investment to kick start markets for new business and consumer environmental goods and services to stimulate latent demand
