Are "Green" Jobs Actually Good Jobs?

Reuters claims to have commissioned the first ever 'green' sector job and salary survey. The full results will be available on Monday, but the preliminary findings show that "green" professionals around the world are reportedly satisfied with their work and make an average salary of $76,000.

US "green" workers are the world's highest paid, averaging $100,000 per year. Financial and legal "green" workers had the highest average salary at $116,000 with an annual bonus of $95,500. Green marketing, PR and media gurus made the least of any sector at $58,000 a year.

So now is the time to go out and get a "green" job, right?

There were a few points of concern from the study. Three quarters of the responding "green" professionals were male. And men earned 18 percent more than women, although the article did offer anecdotal evidence that gender inequality was becoming less of a problem for the sector.

"Green" professionals from the Reuters sample may make decent money. But there was an earlier study this year by Change to Win, Sierra Club, the Laborers International Union of North America and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters which found that many American "green" jobs actually paid well below the federal poverty line.
So the people managing the production of renewable energy are making decent salaries. But the people working in "green" manufacturing are actually making less money than union workers at their "dirty" fuel competitors.

Before "green" jobs become the automatic policy prescription for every economic ill, there needs to be more studies done to disentangle this salary data.

Photo by Flickr user Joel Washing, CC 2.0.