By The Skilled Worker

John Cartwright looks to the other side of the 49th Parallel and sees a greener, better place for skilled workers. What the Toronto union leader wants is what America has got. In Ontario, Canada’s most populous province, the economy is sinking because of the loss of manufacturing and automotive jobs. With those positions outsourced overseas or lost altogether because of the recessionary times, workers are searching for new industries for employment.

Cartwright thinks Ontario should follow the lead of California and other U.S. states in aggressively promoting the creation of green jobs. The same economic factors that hinder parts of Canada leveled traditional manufacturing centers in the United States, but that country is developing new industries to replace lost wages.

A recent report co-produced by Cartwright’s group, the Toronto and York Region Labour Council, advocated a similar push to reinvigorate the lagging Ontario economy with “green-collar jobs”. Entitled “Work Isn’t Working for Ontario Families”, the 27-page report was presented to Ontario politicians by Campaign 2000, a national non-poverty group, the Canadian Labour Congress and Cartwright’s organization on Monday.

“In the United States, cross-sectoral coalitions … are working to create jobs and renew the manufacturing sector by focusing on green economic opportunities,” the report says.

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The three promoters of the paper think the economic downturn caused by the loss of 205,000 Ontario manufacturing jobs between 2002-07 can be alleviated with government incentives for industries. The develop of environmentally conscious projects that require skilled workers to perform such tasks as installing solar panels and building more sustainable housing complexes can get people back onto payrolls fast.

“Green-collar jobs download Nightmare Man – manufacturing for the developing global green economy – can replace disappearing blue-collar work,” Anne Decter of Campaign 2000 told reporters. “American Great Lakes states are fostering alliances between environmentalists, labor and green innovators to rejuvenate abandoned manufacturing capacity. This is a direction Ontario can take as well.”

The international growth of green jobs continues to be a hot trend in the construction industry. At this week’s meeting of leading industrialized nations in Japan, labor and environmental policies were linked for the first time by the Group of Eight. In a joint statement, the G8 said the need for green-job stimulation is so great that not to pursue it “would entail catastrophic consequences for human society, the global economy, and prospects for sustainable jobs.”

The G8’s stance backs up the case for more green ventures in Ontario.

PHOTO: Toronto and surrounding areas can benefit from government incentives that promote green-collar jobs.

By The Skilled Worker

Developers in Dubai and its smaller, lesser-known peer Abu Dhabi claim they are not in competition. But from a distance it certainly seems the two largest emirate cities are trying to one up each other. As Abu Dhabi aims to keep pace with Dubai’s stratospheric success, Dubai continues to stretch to new heights with each construction project.

The beneficiaries of this boom in the Middle East are skilled workers, especially those willing to relocate from Australia and the West. Abu Dhabi is home to 1 million people, of which 80% are expatriates, according to the city’s website. Those workers who come to the United Arab Emirates do so to take advantage of the hotbed industries of oil and tourism.

Until recently, Dubai stood alone as the emirate of choice for developers and workers. It’s the jewel of the region, with a waterfront that is nearly double the size of Hong Kong and the world’s largest airport soon to be complete. When the Burj Dubai hotel is ready for occupation in the coming years it will be the world’s tallest building. Each day it shuttles 8,000 workers up and down its sleek, slender façade as they erect the monolith.

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“As the building got taller and the tapered structure became more slender, working at extreme heights was very challenging,” Ahmad Abdelrazaq, Samsung’s executive vice president for high-rise and structural engineering, told ENR Magazine.

To keep pace, Abu Dhabi had to look outside its borders. It recently tabbed former Vancouver planner Larry Beasley as the man to transform it into a hallmark city. Vancouver, the gem of the Canadian west coast, is renowned for its promotion of high-density living and alternatives to car travel.

“I found out that they wanted me to develop a plan for [Abu Dhabi], that they wanted it to be one of the best cities in the world and that they had been doing a search for the person to lead the way,” Beasley told the Financial Times last month.

One reason Beasley was attracted to Abu Dhabi was its budget. Unlike Dubai, Abu Dhabi is flush with oil reserves. Dubai’s main industry is now tourism because its oil has depleted. On the other hand, Abu Dhabi rakes in more than $150 million of oil each day. Much of that money is going back into newly announced building projects estimated to be worth $213 billion.

While Dubai aims for bigger, Abu Dhabi wants its mark on the world to be revolutionary. It has proposed the first zero-carbon city on the planet, an 800-hectare metropolis powered by solar cells. The Masdar City project will create thousands of green jobs in Abu Dhabi, which underlines the overall effect of the two emirates’ development efforts.

As the two cities, which are separated by 120 kilometers along the Sheikh Zayed Road on the Persian Gulf coast, continue to burst with visionary undertakings the need for workers also explodes. Once, those in search of work were advised to go west. Now, it appears time to move in the other direction.

PHOTO: Abu Dhabi is aiming to make its already impressive skyline even more dramatic.

By The Skilled Worker

Historically, when representatives from the countries on either side of the English Channel met to discuss land it was about how to carve it up. On Thursday, we received a glimpse of the future as the United Kingdom and France focused on ways to care for the environment.

Calling for a mandate to create a vast number of green-collar jobs, UK Minister of Europe Jim Murphy and his French counterpart, Jean-Pierre Jouyet, told attendees of a roundtable discussion in London that Europe’s health depends on widescale change.

“The economic case for an urgent shift to low carbon is compelling,” Member of Parliament Murphy said during the “Towards a Green Europe” meeting. “The Stern Review found that climate change will be more devastating than both of the World Wars and the Great Depression. Ignoring it could reduce global GDP by as much as 20%.”

Murphy cited a 700-page report from former World Bank lead economist Nicholas Stern, who said the impact of climate change on global commerce has been vastly underestimated. When Stern’s report was published in 2006 he was criticized for being alarmist but in an interview with the Financial Times last month he stated his findings were too conservative in their estimate of climate change’s potential threat. “The damage risks are bigger than I would have argued,” Stern said. “We can’t be precise about what it would be like but you can say it would be a transformation.”

Stern, other economists and environmentalists advocate a rapid shift to a low-carbon society. Believing the change toward such a world is inevitable, Murphy told the roundtable the British government is targeting the addition of one million green-collar jobs to the labor force over the next two decades. The UK currently has more than 400,000 workers in green industries.

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“Countries that take early action in developing green technology will have a competitive advantage as this boom industry grows in the future,” Murphy said. “The government is committed to making sure the UK is ahead of the pack - in the future we want an economy offering a mix of good blue-collar jobs, good white-collar jobs and good green-collar jobs. Our aim is to have over a million UK workers in environmental industries within the next two decades.”

France is also committed to greening its economy under president Nicolas Sarkozy, Jouyet said. Prime minister Gordon Brown championed the meeting partly because France and the United Kingdom are behind some other European countries in greening their economies. Germany is on pace to have more jobs by 2020 in environmental industries than in its car-manufacturing sector.

In other news related to green jobs this week:

Germany’s Ruhr Valley Rises from Its Ashes

One of the most depressed areas in Europe is redefining itself as a center of green commerce by exploiting the global environmental movement. With an unemployment rate of 18%, the district of Hörde is one of Germany’s most disadvantaged regions but a new building project designed to be sustainable promises to attract businesses that will take the place of steel mills and coal mines that have been shut down over the years.

“We are trying to create a new urban environment. In Phoenix, there will be a completely new landscape of jobs, work, technology, business and services. Everything will be new, with up-to-date standards,” said Paul Blanke-Bartz of the city of Dortmund’s economic development agency.

Located in the Ruhr Valley, the Phoenix project aims to transform the area from an industrial center to a site with modern housing complex with 900 units and a lake that covers 28 acres. The transformation is predicted to create 10,000 jobs as the area aims to attract businesses looking to save money on land.

Vinod Khosla Talks Green

In a wide-ranging question-and-answer interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, leading environmental-sector investor Vinod Khosla discussed the advantages that green-collar jobs will have on local economies. “You know, one of the great things about most renewable technologies - not every technology, but many of them - is the jobs have to be local,” Khosla said. “When you’re talking about a power plant and power generation using solar thermal technology, the jobs will be where the plant is. They may be in Nevada or Arizona, but you can’t move them to China and ship power here from China. And by the way, the biggest beneficiary of these will be the rural economies, because whether it’s power plants or biofuel plants, you’re going to build them in agricultural areas.”

PHOTO: Jim Murphy (left) talks about greening the UK with discussion chair George Parker (center) of the Financial Times and France’s Jean-Pierre Jouyet.

Global Job Watch is a weekly feature of The Skilled Worker.

By The Skilled Worker

Months ago, the United Nations declared 2008 the International Year of Planet Earth. So it should be no surprise that when the world’s governing body announced its plans for renovations to its Manhattan headquarters the environment was emphasized. More specifically, the UN’s security general and his staff pointed out the reduced impact the 2.6-million-square-foot facility will have on an increasingly green-conscious society.

The architectural renderings of the $2-billion renovation to the headquarters along the East River call for a 40% reduction in energy use and 30% decline in fresh water usage from the current building. The aggressive construction schedule, which was unveiled on Monday, will see the work on the UN’s flagship center completed in five years, instead of the previously planned seven.

“Over these five years we will make our facilities greener and more efficient,” UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said during the unveiling ceremony. “We will make them a model of environmental stewardship by reducing our electrical and water usages and removing harmful materials that were used in original construction.”

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The UN headquarters will be the latest New York project to underscore the green movement. With several major construction projects under way – including a revamped Penn Station and a new NBA arena in Brooklyn – the Big Apple is generating thousands of green-collar jobs as well as more conventional construction work.

Earlier this year, mayor Michael Bloomberg announced plans to have solar panels installed on city-owned buildings, increasing the city’s energy output by two megawatts (roughly the equivalent of what one large wind turbine would produce). The Freedom Tower, which is being built on the site of the World Trade Center, will also have a significant amount of renewable energy sources. The world’s tallest building is scheduled to open in 2009 and workers are busy installing solar panels and a wind farm while erecting the 1,776-foot skyscraper.

“We’ve set a target of shrinking our carbon footprint by 30% by the year 2030,” Bloomberg said earlier this year when discussing New York’s green projects. “Increasing the use of renewable energy, like solar power, is a key strategy in that effort. Using solar power decreases demand for electricity from the power grid, which is typically generated by burning the fossil fuels that contribute to climate change.”

What the UN expansion will do is halt the negative impact of the current facility on both the environment and human health. The Secretariat building on 1st Avenue and 46th Streets is plagued by falling asbestos from the ceilings and leaded paint in the walls. When it rains, the roof above the General Assembly often leaks. The UN has also violated 866 health and safety codes, according to NYC health inspectors.

The UN opened in 1948 and had one set of renovations in 1952, but little work has been done on the facility since. The renovations should rectify all of the health and safety concerns as well as make the UN more eco-friendly. The construction effort will also help the UN better accommodate the increased traffic to its headquarters. It has 192 member states, each with its own representatives who regularly work at the building, as well as 4,700 UN staff and more than one million visitors annually. At its inception, the UN only had 70 member countries.

“The UN will look just as it does today, five years from now; however it will be a greener more sustainable building,” Assistant Secretary-General Michael Adlerstein told ENR Magazine and other publications. “It will be a much safer building and it will be modern. It will have much more up-to-date control systems for heating and ventilating and it will be much safer for diplomats, visitors and staff.”

PHOTO: Ground is broken on the revamped United Nations headquarters in Manhattan. (Courtesy of the UN)

By The Skilled Worker Staff

Few countries have benefited by the recent boom in commodities as much as Canada. So you might think representatives for the country’s labor force would want to maintain the status quo, but that’s not the case. Last week, the Canadian Labour Congress said it wants to see more green jobs created by the nation’s employers.

“Canadian workers increasingly recognize that a contaminated environment can hurt our health,” the CLC said on its website. “Cancer rates are rising, asthma is an epidemic and workers are dying from occupational diseases. Meanwhile, our over-dependence on fossil fuels causes the release of greenhouse gases which contribute to the decreasing health of our atmosphere.”

Post Your Green Job Listing

With its oil and gas and mining industries experiencing historic growth, and with its real estate markets continuing to show resilience despite the downturn in the U.S. economy, Canada has reaped the rewards of a global economy dependent on natural resources. With an abundance of water, oil, lumber, wheat and minerals, the world’s second-largest nation is in need of skilled workers in order to sustain profits. But as the CLC points out, there will be a cost if the environment is not considered in future work projects. The good news is employment will remain high if green jobs are created to curtail the negative environmental effects of such activities as tar-sands recovery.

“The biggest challenge of our generation could also be the biggest opportunity of the century for economic growth and good job creation,” the CLC said.

In other news related to skilled workers this week:

Gaining Tech Skills Made Easy

The University of Texas announced on Friday that it had received a $1-million national grant to teach workers in the construction industry how to use the latest advances in technology on job sites. The plan calls for increasing the skills of the construction workforce and for creating what the Austin-based school’s engineering professors call “intelligent job sites”. There’s an emphasis on making sure the program is effective and relevant to the people who will be using the technology. “All this wondrous technology is of no value if human beings can’t figure out how to use it,” associate professor Randolph Bias said. “The team will be conducting usability studies along the way to ensure that the technology is designed to fit the target audience.”

New Underwater Star

Subsea 7 Inc. announced on Friday the launch of a state-of-the-art vessel that will be integral to the deepwater recovery efforts of the oil and gas industries. The Seven Seas can dive 3,000 meters and lay pipe as well as perform construction and engineering work. The vessel was designed and constructed by companies in the Netherlands, which worked with Subsea 7 to deliver it within the two-year deadline. Subsea 7 CEO Mel Fitzgerald said, “This project has been achieved due to successful alignment of the interests of Subsea 7 and its key shipbuilding and pipelay suppliers.”

Global Jobs Watch is a weekly feature of The Skilled Worker.

By The Skilled Worker Staff

Few job sectors are hotter than those in oil and gas, construction, and mining. With the demand for alternative energy sources and the mad dash to get as much oil and natural gas out of the earth and seas as possible, ground is being broken on new projects daily and many existing work sites are expanding. With such heavy production comes the demand for skilled labor.

Finding workers can be difficult, however, as many employers and labor experts will attest. Also, many workers in the past have had to peruse listings and newsletters in order to locate their next gig. But a few months ago finding a job and filling open positions got immensely faster.

SkilledWorkers.com, the Vancouver-based job board that is a global leader in pairing workers with employers in those most highly competitive industries, launched its Short Message Service (SMS) in October. The technology allows for instant connection between businesses and the most qualified prospective candidates.

“We’re looking to revolutionize the job board industry,” said Gus Klemos, President and CEO of SkilledWorkers.com. “Trade professionals will no longer have to spend their time reading through long and imposing lists of job advertisements to find the right match for them. And employers will have a targeted demographic of candidates to instantly inform about their posting.”

That is exceptionally good news for businesses of all kind, especially those that are booming. If SMS gets people onto payrolls faster, it reduces production lags, increases profits and limits inflation caused by delayed deadlines. With the lack of skilled labor considered a threat to many economies around the world, anything to alleviate the shortage of help on work sites is met with zeal.

“I’m hearing across the board, across industries, companies indicating they can’t exploit market opportunity because they can’t find people with the right skills,” Jeff Summer, an executive at Deloitte Consulting, told CNN last year. “Supply and demand is completely out of whack.”

Through the pioneering service provided by SkilledWorkers.com, employers have the ability to spread word of a posting right to the cell phones of job seekers. Likewise, trade professionals can view a text message that informs them of an opening and they can respond instantly with word of their interest. How’s that for building on the information highway?

By The Skilled Worker Staff

The housing crisis in the United States continued to wreak havoc on the construction industry in March. According to data published by McGraw-Hill Construction, total construction for the first quarter of 2008 dropped 19% year-over-year.

The Massachusetts-based company, which provides analysis and forecasts on construction trends, reported that new housing starts for single-family homes was down 12% in the Northeast, an indication that the credit problems on Wall Street have impacted the building industry.

Non-residential construction was down a 23% in March, but that was after a 36% increase in new projects during January and February. Several hotel and office developments started at the beginning of the year, accounting for the initial burst.

The one sector that McGraw-Hill follows that saw a significant advance was non-building construction. Expansion in electric utilities leaped 146% as ground was broken on power plants in North Carolina, New York and Nebraska. Those projects range from $400 million to $1.1 billion. A $178-million windfarm project got under way in Iowa.

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As governments seek to overhaul aging infrastructure and to introduce green alternatives to traditional energy sources, job seekers will be finding work in projects related to the environmental sector. The difficult times in the real-estate industry have yet to hit bottom, according to McGraw-Hill’s findings.

In all, residential housing in 2008 is down 40% from last year, accounting for a large portion of the 19% decline in total construction nationwide. Regionally, the Northeast has held up well at 10% growth despite the drop in March. Elsewhere, though, the declines are alarming. The West is down 18%, the South Central, 20%, the South Atlantic, 27%, and the Midwest a steep 32%.

Top 5 Construction Markets in the U.S.

If you’re looking for a construction job or are planning your next project, these are the locations you may want to consider looking into. According to McGraw-Hill Construction, they are the top-ranking American cities in apartment construction starts through the first three months of 2008:

1. New York
2. Dallas
3. Washington, D.C.
4. Seattle
5. Austin

By The Skilled Worker Staff

British Columbia calls itself “The Best Place on Earth” and its construction industry is pitching all of the province’s assets in a large-scale effort to attract immigrants as well as Canadians from other parts of the country.

The BC Construction Association estimates it will be short 38,000 workers in less than a decade unless recruitment efforts succeed. Representatives for the industry have attended recent job fairs in Europe and Mexico, and have also teamed with the province’s tourism sector to grow the workforce.

“By partnering up and connecting the families of skilled construction workers with the tourism industry, both sectors will be well served,” BCCA president Manley McLachlan told the Canwest News Service.

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With one of the hotting housing markets in North America, British Columbia has experienced a building boom that dates to the beginning of the decade. With Vancouver, the province’s largest city, hosting the 2010 Olympic Winter Games, the boom has sustained despite slower economic times in other regions of the continent.

The construction industry employs 196,000 people while there are 118,000 tourism workers, which is 84,000 fewer than will be needed by 2015, according to published estimates.

“The two of us together are a pretty strong economic power in B.C.,” said Arlene Keis of the province’s tourism human resources association.

The problem for B.C. is two-fold. First, demand has driven the cost of housing up to extraordinary heights in the major urban centers. One 2007 survey of Vancouverites revealed that 70% of home-owners’ income goes toward housing expenses. Secondly, the competition for skilled workers is a global fight. The aging population of baby boomers is shrinking the workforce in many nations at the same time that developing countries like China and India are increasing the demand for machinery, labor and construction materials.

The Canadian government employment bureau, Manpower Inc., conducted a survey of 32 countries and the results showed that 31% of the 43,000 employers contacted can’t fill job openings for skilled workers.

Lori Procher, the Manpower Canada vice-president, told the Ottawa Citizen that the supply of employees only figures to decrease. “The situation is set to worsen over the next 10 years as social and demographic changes such as falling birthrates, aging populations and increased migration take hold,” she said.

Against those trends and statistics even the best place on earth will find it difficult to cajole recruits to pick up and move there.

By The Skilled Worker Staff

Chances are you’ve operated one of their vehicles or products. Even more likely, you’ve noticed a lot more yellow paint around your work site. These are boom times for Caterpillar, the world’s largest manufacturer of construction and mining equipment and gas engines and turbines.

The company’s stock is the second-leading performer on the Dow Jones Industrial Average this year, which is a feat considering the recessionary times. It reported $922 million and a 13% year-over-year increase in earnings when it disclosed its first-quarter report on April 21. Stock analysts adore the company and continue to tout it as one to own in your portfolio.

Having conquered the earth, Cat is now setting its sights on the moon.

NASA recently announced breakthroughs in its partnership projects with Caterpillar. Lucien Junkin, a NASA engineer, told the Peoria Journal-Star that the space agency’s plans for creating a “lunar truck” using the Illinois-based company’s technology are “right on schedule”.

“Mankind has never done construction or moved dirt on another celestial body. That’s why we wanted Caterpillar’s expertise,” Junkin said.

Caterpillar, which began building tractors at the turn of the 20th Century, has a Technical Solutions Division that is working to create the lunar truck using robotics and remote control. It’s sure not what you expect from a company whose growth story has centered around construction in open-pit mines in China and skyscrapers in Dubai.

As Caterpillar engineer Eric Reiners points out, computerization makes sense for safety reasons. “Robotics and automation takes the human operator out of dangerous situations,” he said.

While it’s highly unlikely you will ever be asked to operate a Caterpillar forklift on the moon, there are plenty of opportunities to do so on this third rock from the sun. With customers in more than 200 countries, Caterpillar is at the forefront of the global growth phenomenon and has elevated its workforce to more than 200,000 across the world, with no plans of slowing down.

“Even though we’re currently weathering a recessionary storm in the U.S, we expect the rest of the world to continue to invest in infrastructure growth well into the next decade,” CEO Jim Owens said when he announced the first-quarter earnings.

With more than $46 billion in sales over the past 12 months, Cat is the top dog in the construction industry.

It hasn’t been the best of times for those Americans who wear hard hats at work.

Two days after a mass service in New York honored construction workers lost during the past year, another laborer in Manhattan landed in hospital with critical injuries after falling 25 feet from a tower. Meanwhile, a man in Albuquerque, New Mexico died after plummeting off a beam at a work site and four workers in Kansas barely avoided drowning after they became trapped in a 1,275-foot tunnel.

The accidents, all within days of each other this month, brought back to the light the dangers construction workers face every day and revealed why an overhaul of safety standards is needed. In March, six workers in New York were killed when a crane toppled over and sparked debate over the diligence of the city’s safety inspections.

The buildings commissioner resigned last week and her replacement immediately told engineers to recommend changes to construction site procedures.

“It’s happening all over the city. Bad breaks, you know what I mean, bad luck,” one construction worker told the TV news channel NY1.

One construction worker dies in the Big Apple each week, according to labor statistics, but the safety issues aren’t only a New York concern. The trapped workers in Kansas City were working on a flood-control project when their boat capsized in the 90-year-old tunnel. Firefighters rescued them and they were taken to hospital to be treated for hypothermia.

The average construction worker in the United States earns less than $50,000 per year, according to a survey by PayScale.com, meaning the reward doesn’t match the risk for many.

“Safety will always be a topic in the construction industry,” says Gus Klemos of SkilledWorkers.com, the online job board dedicated to serving construction, mining, and oil and gas workers as well as those who employ them. “Everyone’s hope is that all involved – employers, the government and workers themselves – perform the due diligence required to minimize the potential for injury.”