Ryan McElroen had spent years repairing the New York City subway underground when he got the opportunity to work in the middle of the ocean.
“I had no views other than the darkness at work,” he said. “Then I went polar opposite.”
Two years ago, McElroen began being trained by his union, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) Local ۳, for a job in the emerging offshore wind industry. Since then, he has completed six one-month-long rotations constructing New York’s first large-scale offshore wind projects: four on Sunrise Wind, roughly ۳۰ miles (۴۸km) east of Montauk Point, and two on Empire Wind in the New York Bight, ۳۰ miles south of Long Island.
It was a “welcome change”, McElroen said. Instead of seeing rats, he has watched seals and dolphins swim past his Sunrise work vessel. And on the Empire project, his shifts would often end with sweeping sunsets over the open ocean.
“I would love to continue doing this for the rest of my career,” he said in an interview at his union’s Electrical Industry Training Center in Long Island City, Queens, days after his most recent Empire Wind stint.
Labor leaders convened by the Climate Jobs National Resource Center (CJNRC) have spent years working to ensure that workers like McElroen have the opportunity to develop lifelong, unionized careers in clean energy. Their goals received a major boost from Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, they say.
Now, the Trump administration is trying to dismantle some of those gains by slowing the clean energy transition, attacking offshore wind and attempting to revive the old idea that workers have to choose between good jobs and climate action. But the labor leaders say they are ready to fight back.
‘This is going to be union work’
The CJNRC has origins in New York after Hurricane Sandy. The superstorm was a wake-up call for the labor movement, said Mike Fishman, president and executive director of the organization.
“We came to the realization, as you can imagine, that climate change is real and it’s only getting worse, and that workers are getting hit first and worst,” Fishman said. At the time, he was the secretary‑treasurer for the Service Employees International Union (SEIU).
In that moment in ۲۰۱۲, however, unions didn’t have much of a voice in climate policy discussions.
“The climate groups were really all about emissions,” said Fishman. “It was really about, we’re going to reduce emissions at any cost.”
Lara Skinner, founding executive director of Cornell’s Climate Jobs Institute, had seen a similar dynamic, where climate groups would tout potential jobs created by the green energy transition but not focus on whether they would be high-quality or unionized.
“If the answer was going to be yes, well, that was going to take work, that was going to require political power,” she said. She approached Fishman and leaders in the New York building trades and transit unions to begin talking about how to build that kind of power. Together, they developed a blueprint for a statewide clean energy transition that put workers at the center.
To try to make those plans a reality, Fishman, Skinner and members of the New York City Central Labor Council federation of unions formed a committee to launch Climate Jobs New York. They recruited New York organizations representing ۲.۶ million workers, including the local SEIU and several building trades chapters, to join their coalition and commit funds to advocating for unionized clean jobs.
The coalition quickly zeroed in on offshore wind as a priority, pushing for a nine-gigawatt buildout that was far larger than what other climate groups were then demanding. Amid pressure from labor leaders, in ۲۰۱۹, the then governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, adopted the coalition’s ambitious vision, committing the state to building that much offshore wind capacity by ۲۰۳۵, and later that year, the legislature enshrined the target in the landmark Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act.
In ۲۰۲۱, Climate Jobs New York played a key role in securing strong labor and equity provisions for renewable energy, including prevailing wage and project labor agreement requirements for large projects, as well as labor peace agreements – which make it easier for workers to unionize – on operations and maintenance work.
Throughout the campaign for those protections, more climate groups began to see the importance of strong labor standards, said Fishman. The wins also “completely changed unions’ orientation” toward wind projects, said Skinner.
“They were like, wow, this is going to be union work,” she said. “So you’ve seen, even up until now, unions are still defending offshore wind.”
A boost from Biden
The group saw potential to repeat their success in other states. So in ۲۰۲۰, Fishman and other labor leaders formed the CJNRC to help groups in other states build similar labor-led climate coalitions, with help from Skinner and other researchers at Cornell.
These new coalitions quickly gained momentum. In ۲۰۲۱ and ۲۰۲۲, they secured support for unionized green jobs from Texas’s AFL-CIO and strong labor standards for clean energy in Connecticut, Illinois, Rhode Island and Maine.
The coalitions received a boost from Joe Biden, who placed an emphasis on both climate and boosting unions. In ۲۰۲۲, he signed the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which provided powerful new incentives for clean-energy projects to meet prevailing-wage and apprenticeship requirements, helping make good jobs a central part of the clean-energy buildout.
“One of the things that was fundamentally different about the IRA, was, in addition to the massive commitment to investing, it was done in a way that supported good jobs,” John Podesta, climate and energy adviser to Biden and board member at CJNRC, said at a New York City convening held by the group. “That was the first time that ever happened, where labor standards were attached to private sectors.”
Biden also accelerated the development of offshore wind, a sector that had already begun taking shape in New York, Massachusetts and Rhode Island. By September ۲۰۲۴, his administration had approved ۱۰ commercial-scale offshore wind projects totaling more than ۱۵ gigawatts.
Organized labor was excited to take advantage of Biden’s new incentives, and by the end of ۲۰۲۴, the CJNRC group had helped launch coalitions of unions in nine states to help workers do so.
“The IRA solidified our ability to work with the environmentalist groups on the same side to fight climate change by creating good, family-sustaining jobs,” said Chrissy Lynch, president of the Massachusetts AFL-CIO.
Lynch is also chair of Climate Jobs Massachusetts, which shortly after its launch in ۲۰۲۴ worked with green groups to win climate legislation that includes labor standards for workers on all future clean-energy projects.
“By the time the attacks from Trump began, we were married to the environmentalists,” she said. “We weren’t on the same page about everything but we were used to working together.”
Trump’s attempts to interfere
The clean jobs bonanza the IRA helped set in motion met major roadblocks when Donald Trump was re-elected in ۲۰۲۴. Since returning to office, the president has moved to dismantle much of Biden’s climate agenda, including by targeting the federal incentives that helped drive clean-energy investment.
The president also singled out offshore wind, claiming it causes cancer, kills birds and other wildlife, and destroys property values. In ۲۰۲۵, the administration also moved to accelerate the phaseout of the IRA’s clean-electricity tax credits for wind and solar projects. And it moved to halt projects under construction, first ordering work on Empire Wind to halt in April ۲۰۲۵, then targeting Revolution Wind off Rhode Island and Connecticut in August, and in December ordering a stop to New York’s Sunrise and Empire Wind, Massachusetts’ Vineyard Wind and Revolution Wind, and Virginia’s Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind.
McElroen was on the job at New York’s Sunrise Wind farm when news of Trump’s stop-work came down. Many workers were forced to halt their work immediately, he said, but “electricians were considered essential to make sure that things weren’t deteriorating in the ocean while the shutdown was happening”.
“They didn’t want to just completely abandon the place, so we were just out there making sure things could still function,” said McElroen. “But it was a crazy, uncertain feeling.”
As soon as the stop-work order was announced, McElroen’s union, the IBEW Local ۳, and the rest of Climate Jobs New York set out to mobilize against it.
“These weren’t theoretical jobs we were facing losing, it was people looking at actively losing paychecks,” said Chris Erickson, the local’s business manager. “We had press conferences, we rallied, we brought attention to the issue.”
Unions in other states pushed back, too. In Rhode Island, workers and labor leaders joined state officials to oppose the halt to Revolution Wind, which threatened about ۱,۰۰۰ union jobs. In Massachusetts, unions and state officials rallied against the December order targeting Vineyard Wind.
Trump succeeded in temporarily disrupting construction, with workers sent home and developers incurring additional costs. But ultimately, courts blocked each of the stop-work orders and each project has continued.
McElroen said he was grateful for the continued job opportunities. He feels good about contributing to the clean energy economy, and the work has been financially beneficial to him, too. When he began working in offshore wind, he set a goal of saving up for a down payment on a future home. During his interview with the Guardian, he received a text.
“Good news,” he said. “I just got prequalified for my mortgage.”
Headwinds abound
The Trump administration did not successfully halt existing offshore wind projects. Vineyard Wind is now completed and fully operational, while Revolution Wind began sending power to the grid in March. Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind is also progressing and began generating power for the first time in March. And Sunrise and Empire Wind in New York have resumed construction and are moving toward completion.
But Trump’s moves have had a “complete chilling effect” on future offshore wind development, said Erickson of IBEW Local ۳. This year, the administration spent $۲.۷bn in taxpayer dollars to cancel ۱۲ offshore wind leases in five deals with developers.
When Trump was re-elected, market researchers with BloombergNEF projected the US would bring ۳۹ gigawatts of offshore wind capacity online by ۲۰۳۵; its October projections put that figure at just ۶ gigawatts, meaning no new projects – or jobs – were likely to come online. The dropoff has been devastating for unions that have spent years selling the new sector to their members and training them for new jobs, said Fishman.
“By some estimates from some of the building trades, there’s been a loss of ۳bn work hours,” he said.
Erickson has seen that impact first-hand. In New Jersey, several proposals have collapsed amid market and regulatory uncertainty.
“So now there’s zero offshore wind happening off the coast of New Jersey, where there’s thousands of IBEW members and where our New York members could have worked,” he said.
He fears the damage done to the domestic offshore wind industry will be long-lasting – that if the US tries to restart its progress under a new administration, it will be harder and more expensive. Years of investment have gone into building a domestic supply chain, but companies need a steady pipeline of projects to keep investing in ports, vessels, factories and workers.
But unions have continued to notch climate wins, said Fishman. This year, CJNRC worked with state federations of unions to launch climate jobs coalitions in five states and the United Kingdom, while successfully pushing for policies to support clean energy jobs across the US. And ultimately, growth for offshore wind is inevitable, said Fishman, because of its potential to quickly and reliably generate large amounts of electricity near coastal demand centers.
“The wind will change direction on offshore wind,” he said.
When the sector is revived, unions and environmentalists alike would be prepared to fight for the rights of workers, he said.
“The work we’ve done across the country … has set a completely different tone in the industry and in the climate world,” he said. “People now incorporate thinking on wages and jobs into their thinking about building new energy and dealing with emissions. Every governor is talking about affordability.
“None of that is going away.”
