A Clean Energy Workforce and the Path to Equity

Please note this is a hybrid event. We look forward to welcoming guests to the Kleinman Center’s Energy Forum. In accordance with the University of Pennsylvania’s COVID-19 guidelines, masks are optional for all visitors. PennOpen Pass and PennOpen Campus screenings are no longer required for entry to our events. Further details for joining in-person or virtually will be emailed with your registration. Boxed lunches will be available to go following the event!

Electricity is central to society—for organizing, communicating, working, and providing care. Depending on how we design and implement it, energy infrastructure can either enrich or impoverish a society.

In this talk, energy justice scholar Nikki Luke chronicles how subsidized worker training programs in the South, modeled after Van Jones’s “green jobs, not jails” program, grew a workforce of laborers in utilities, energy efficiency, and solar panel manufacturing. Based on interviews and observational data with union, charitable, and community college job training providers in Georgia, Luke demonstrates that more work must be done to instill high-road labor practices in the South, curtail geographical competition at the expense of workers, and support a social wage.

Speaker

Nikki Luke is an Assistant Professor of Geography at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Luke is a 2022-2023 Kleinman Center Visiting Scholar.