Explanation

New technologies on the horizon will have a profound effect on the labor market that will rival the impact we have already seen with globalization, automation, and the digital revolution. For example, the advent of driverless vehicles could result in a drop in the number of deadly motor vehicle accidents; however, it could also result in significant losses for auto mechanics and job losses within the insurance industry. As well, the millions of people who support themselves and their families by driving trucks, buses, and cars face great uncertainty as their expertise and careers are threatened. Academic studies are just now underway to examine the potential labor market impact of new technologies on the transportation, logistics, health care, food industry, and other sectors; we don’t know yet whether the effects will include massive job loss, or simply new erosions in job quality for certain sectors and communities. With automation and digital technologies we may see new off-shoring of jobs that until recently were seen as impervious to being moved abroad, such as in the medical diagnostics and legal fields. And we may also see production facilities relocating back to the United States as automation reduces the investment needed in labor, which would mean change coming at the expense of overseas communities that have benefited from manufacturing in recent decades. What we can count on is that there will be disruptions to the labor market both domestically and globally, and therefore to workers and the communities and regions they live in. This resolution seeks to establish a baseline policy for The Episcopal Church, in line with past resolutions on jobs, to support public policies that take into account and address the human benefits and costs of new technology development and implementation, including for workers and communities that rely heavily on certain industries, as well as overall economic growth and benefits to consumers. In particular, this resolution recognizes that the necessary transition to clean energy technologies will entail disruptions for workers, especially since jobs in the fossil fuel industries (coal, gas, oil) have often been union jobs with good pay and benefits, whereas new, clean-energy jobs such as rooftop solar installation are not mostly union jobs at this point; thus there is a potential issue both of retraining workers and of a drop-off in job quality in this transition, absent public policy regulation or worker organizing to address the issue. This resolution endorses public funding for universal access to community college programs to educate workers for the evolving job market, as some cities and states are already doing , and apprenticeship programs that can provide paid on-the-job training, recognizing that previous generations had access to high school vocational programs that are now defunct, and that some kind of post-high-school education or training is now required for most jobs, especially those that pay a family wage. Apprenticeship programs are especially important for those who need to get a paycheck while getting trained—for example, parents of all ages who need to support a family while getting training, or getting retrained in the case of workers in transitional industries. Finally, this resolution affirms the Church’s support for local communities having a voice in industrial policy through community benefits agreements, and for workers having a voice not only in a specific jobsite or company but also in sectoral policies and national industrial policies, whether through traditional trade unions as laid out in current labor laws, or through new vehicles that may emerge for worker participation and voice.