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What is a green-collar job?

“We need to make sure that we start jump-starting the jobs in this country again,” Hillary Clinton said during a debate last week. “That’s why I want to put money into clean-energy jobs, green-collar jobs.” John Edwards said he would create 150,000 green-collar jobs a year, while Barack Obama said they were “central to my energy plan.”

Green collars have joined the employment wardrobe of blue collars, white collars, and pink collars and refer to manual-labour jobs in the new ecological economy, from mending bicycles to cladding buildings in solar panels. As much as a quarter of the U.S. workforce could have a “green” job by 2030, says the American Solar Energy Society.

“The potential for job creation is vastly underestimated,” says Dave Timms, economics campaigner for Friends of the Earth.

On the surface, green-collar jobs look like a good thing — as well as the environmental benefits, they would provide new employment, especially for manufacturing workers whose jobs have been outsourced — but Pat Thomas, editor of the Ecologist, is unsure. “Many progressive economists feel that a sustainable society won’t be able to provide full employment because in a world where we don’t produce more than we need, there is less to buy and there are fewer services required," she says. — ©Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2008

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