Union Shakedowns Face Renewable Energy Companies

(MoneyWatch)  "It's not a warm fuzzy thing they're doing," says a Sierra Club spokesman of union labor tactics against renewable energy companies. "It's a very self-interested thing." But the question, never quite asked by Todd Woody in an article about unions in the New York Times, is whether it's acceptable for labor groups to hold up green energy projects in the interest of securing agreements for their workers.

Of course, the Times has to keep its editorial distance and not pre-judge. Instead, it just lists companies affected by legal maneuvering done by California Unions for Reliable Energy (CURE). Among them are many of California's biggest solar project builders: Ausra, BrightSource Energy, FPL Group, Martifer, Stirling Energy, Tessera Solar.

The stakes are billions of dollars worth of solar energy, which CURE can hold up with mostly procedural techniques. A company that refused union labor was hit with demands for a study of its project's effect on hawks and rats; another that agreed to union labor had its issues with desert tortoises waved aside. The union appears to enjoy heaping on last-minute data requests to delay construction, a tactic that can cost big projects millions (see the Times piece for details on how each of the above companies dealt with the demands).

The fight is part of a larger picture, the long-declining importance of organized labor in the United States. Unions have not only lost much of their power with the waning of the auto and steel industries, they have taken a bad rap for helping to weaken once strong companies like Ford, General Motors and U.S. Steel. Renewable energy may be more than a battleground; it may be seen as a last chance at relevance.

Before long, lawmakers and the general population will have to decide whether the efforts of unions to muscle in are tolerable. In many way, it appears that the unions are on stronger ground than usual because of the nature of renewable energy projects. Because giant solar and wind plants are built on Federal land, sometimes using public funds, the opportunity for stalling techniques is magnified. It's not a small threat, either; bureaucratic challenges helped bring the nuclear industry down in the 1970s.

And in some ways, unions are already getting a piece of the renewable energy pie. Both Stirling Energy and Infinia are using Detroit's manufacturing infrastructure to build their solar Stirling engines; I covered the latter company's efforts recently in Fortune Small Business. Union workers already at those plants will get the work automatically. There will also be chances for workers at solar panel manufactories to unionize.

On the other hand, President Obama's promise of new jobs from renewable energy projects will mean little if the workers aren't well paid and protected. In the fight over renewable energy, which is more important -- building quickly and cheaply to reap the promised environmental benefits of renewable energy, or giving American labor a second chance?