LABOUR: Just Work on the Environment

By Sabina Zaccaro Reprint | | Print |

Sabina Zaccaro

FLORENCE, May 23 2007 (IPS) - Employment stability is linked to environment sustainability, experts said at an international trade fair here last weekend.

“Job is first of all a fundamental need for the human being,” priest Luigi Ciotti, founder of Libera (Free), a network of national and international associations defending democratic legality told IPS. But jobs can be good for the environment, too, he said.

In the early nineties, Libera began to collect signatures in support of a law to allow social use of lands confiscated from the mafia in Sicily, south of Italy. It worked, and the number of signatures rapidly reached a million.

Since 1996, when law 109 was approved, hundreds of hectares of land confiscated from criminals have been assigned to social cooperatives run by young local people, “many of them potential victims of illegality, due to the lack and precariousness of jobs,” Ciotti said.

Land where the mafia had obstructed development for years now gives work to hundreds, and yields wine, pasta, olive oil, tomato sauce, wheat, beans, fruits and vegetables. Much of the land was saved from environmental degradation.

“Criminal clans have the capability to intercept the most fragile peoples, that’s why the government must give as a right what mafia gives as a favour,” Ciotti said.

Employment became a central issue at the fourth Terra Futura (Hearth of Future) trade fair held May 18-20 in Florence, 300 km north of Rome.

There is a close inter-relation between good employment and development of the planet, said organisers of Terra Futura, among them many civil, Catholic and green organisations, and Banca Etica (Ethic Bank), whose mission is ‘the ethical use of moneys’.

Recognising the link between employment and social and environmental change “is a common interest of citizens, work cooperatives and small and medium enterprises,” Ugo Biggeri, president of the non-governmental organisation Fondazione Culturale Responsabilità Etica Onlus (Foundation for Ethical Responsibility) told IPS.

“It’s time to create alliances among those sectors of civil society that are here asking for an ethical change of politics and rules; and politics cannot delay further in responding to these requests.”

But is it possible to reconcile the need for environment protection with that of economic development, particularly by big enterprises?

“In the future, the world must address three main pillars: conservation, more efficient production, and renewable energies,” Peter Hennicke, president of the Wuppertal Institut for Climate, Environment and Energy based in Germany told IPS. “Europe has not understood that there will be an exponential increase of renewable energies that will create many job opportunities.”

In Germany, said Hennicke, 170,000 new jobs have been created in this field, and that number is expected to rise to 500,000 by 2020.

“An increase of energy efficiency will have a positive effect on consumer expenses, and each country will be able to re-invest the savings in the same sector,” he said. “This strategy aims at economic self-sufficiency, and it’s a step towards de-globalisation.”

Sabina Siniscalchi, member of parliament from the Communist Refoundation Party told IPS that “Italy must give clear signals of change through investment in renewable energies and development of new technologies to protect the environment.”

Use of the photovoltaic system that draws solar energy gives employment to 76,000 people in Italy, according to the environment group Legambiente.

The employment sector should therefore consider sustainability aspects, and also the new ‘social enterprises’ as against those aimed exclusively at maximising profits.

“New values are emerging in the economic system; there are nearly 3,000 microfinance institutes in Europe with almost 100 million clients,” said Leonardo Becchetti, professor of economy at Tor Vergata university in Rome.

“Fair trade registered an increase of 20 percent in the last five years; trade in fair bananas reached 50 percent of the market in Switzerland, and fair coffee got 20 percent in Britain.”