ALIGN is an environmental justice and labor organization that is based upon forming longstanding alliances with workers, the community, and city organizations in order to link the interests of these groups and achieve progress in three core areas: economy, environment, and equity. In the piece Beyond Amazon: Reshaping New York’s Approach to Economic Development, ALIGN, along with many other organizations, argues that in the wake of Amazon’s attempt at establishing HQ2 in Queens, we must develop a clear framework for how to protect our neighborhoods, establish local, truly democratic power, as well as hold corporations accountable for their practices. Beyond Amazon proposes a series of measures that must be taken in order to avoid an event like the Amazon HQ2 fiasco from happening again in the future, including: investing directly in good jobs and improvements in sustainability/public health, legally requiring social impact assessments before subsidizing developments, ensuring fair labor practices, prioritizing employment of low income communities, and establishing measures to make sure corporate power does not go unchecked (such as creating a public database to transparently track relevant company data, banning non-disclosure agreements in economic development negotiations, and progressively taxing CEOs who earn more than 30x their average employee’s pay). What I feel is particularly strong about this document is that unlike the UN New Urban Agenda, it provides much more specific solutions on what needs to be done to reshape our approach to economic development in the city, and even accompanies each proposal with a piece of supported legislation; additionally, rather than simply stating that inequalities at large are wrong and need to be addressed, Beyond Amazon, unlike the New Urban Agenda, actually identifies some of the many structures and systems in place that produce these inequalities.
As Beyond Amazon saw the aftermath of the HQ2 fiasco as an opportunity to emphasize a need for greater structural economic change, Constructing a Greener New York: Building by Building identifies how green legislation concerning the 80×50 goals and building retrofitting could provide an opportunity for a positive restructuring of the job market. In this piece, ALIGN discusses how enhancing energy efficiency can improve the local economy by keeping money used to pay for fossil fuels extraction in New York to be reinvested in sustainable development, creating thousands of new jobs (approximately 23k direct jobs and 17k indirect), allowing tenants and owners to spend less on energy costs and reinvest in other areas, and reducing local toxicity and heat. Perhaps even more so than Beyond Amazon, this piece constructs a very developed outline of what steps can be taken to achieve the desired goal (in this case sustainability, good job creation, and local economic stimulation) and provides clear empirical evidence/methodology to back their claims, as seen in the technical appendix.
I think that often there is this notion that jobs/economy and the environment cannot coexist with one another, particularly as the mainstream environmental movement has historically been led by middle to upper class white environmentalists and focused more on preservation of “pristine, untouched nature” and less on concerns such as maintaining livelihoods and jobs. One of the primary concerns of environmental justice in itself is rethinking the priorities of the environmental movement and who leads it, especially focusing on the disenfranchised populations that have often been excluded from the mainstream narrative (and who have been traditionally coerced by corporations and powerful actors to choose between either maintaining local jobs and or preserving public health/surrounding environment). I believe that Constructing a Greener New York testifies to some of the amazing (and very challenging) work that ALIGN does in order to bridge these oft-conflicting interests of economy/jobs, the environment, and equity/inclusion. Additionally, what resonates with me particularly strongly when it comes to ALIGN’s work is their commitment to greater economic restructuring and change through the proposal of and support of individual policies/initiatives such as these.
I cannot help but read this in the context of our global pandemic when some of the same tensions you describe and ALIGN addresses seem to be coming into stronger relief. Those include the safety and health of humankind vs. economic growth, protection of large-scale economic efficiencies vs. individual contractor and small businesses, and investment in short-term, high-profit solutions vs. long-term, renewable ones. It’s reassuring that ALIGN has already connected the dots and mediated what seem like opposing points of view. Their groundwork will surely help us emerge from this crisis in better shape than if they weren’t around. One of the ways in which they’ve made an impact — as you rightly point out — is in backing up broader claims about a right to the city and equity politics with actionable legislation. I might suggest that you trace some of the ways in which they are able to mobilize electeds in supporting this kind of legislation. Are they successful because of who’s in Albany now, or are they able to capture the support of politicians who would typically oppose environmental legislation? In other words, what do their lobbying tactics look like?