Green-collar jobs are well-paid, career track jobs that contribute directly to preserving or enhancing environmental quality. Like traditional blue-collar jobs, green-collar jobs range from low-skill, entry-level positions to high-skill, higher-paid jobs, and include opportunities for advancement in both skills and wages.

Green-collar jobs tend to be local because many involve work transforming and upgrading the immediate built and natural environment—work such as retrofitting buildings, installing solar panels, constructing transit lines, and landscaping.

Green-collar jobs are in construction, manufacturing, installation, maintenance, agriculture, and many other sectors of the economy.

While some green-collar jobs (e.g. wind turbine technician) are in new occupations, most are existing jobs that demand new green economy skills. For example, construction companies building and retrofitting America’s cities need workers with traditional construction skills who also have up-to-date training in energy efficiency. And employers doing solar installation need workers with conventional electrical training, in addition to specialized solar skills.

Because the phrase “green-collar job” has been bandied about so much, it is important to emphasize what it means—or rather, what it does not mean. Put simply, if a job improves the environment, but doesn’t provide a family-supporting wage or a career ladder to move low-income workers into higher-skilled occupations, it is not a green-collar job. Such would be the case with workers installing solar panels without job security or proper training, or young people pushing brooms at a green building site without opportunity for training or advancement.

In sum, spurring the creation of green-collar jobs in your community means more than creating short-term work on individual green projects. It means building a sustainable economy, where environmental goals go hand in hand with social and economic goals. It means embracing visionary policies for your community, mobilizing all of the resources at your disposal to meet those goals, and explicitly working to expand the number of long-term, high-quality green-collar jobs for local residents.

Source: "Green Collar Jobs in America's Cities" by Apollo Alliance, Center for American Progress and the Center on Wisconsin Strategy.