On Wednesday, May 27th at 8 p.m. Eastern, EPI President Thea Lee will join a panel hosted by the Labor Network for Sustainability for the launch of the Just Transition Listening Project. She will be joined by renowned linguist, historian, and philosopher Noam Chomsky and Robert Pollin, codirector of the Political Economy Research Institute. They will offer their perspectives and projections of how the economic crisis will unfold in the months and years to come—and what we must do about it.
The need for a large-scale “just transition” for workers and communities has never been more urgent as more than 36 million workers have applied for unemployment in the last nine weeks. The economic crisis developing as a result of the coronavirus pandemic offers an important barometer of whether and how we are prepared socially, politically, and economically for massive changes to our economy. Likewise, the shift to the green economy needed to confront the climate crisis will require economic shifts on a similar scale.
Over the course of the next four months the project will gather the stories of workers and community members as they experience extreme changes in their local economy—the impact of plant closures, jobs lost to automation, company downsizing and market changes, and industries impacted by climate change. A series of webinars will follow every four weeks after addressing different questions related to just transition, including perspectives from workers, the environmental justice movement, indigenous peoples, and international movements.
Who:
- Thea Lee, President of the Economic Policy Institute
- Noam Chomsky, Institute Professor & Professor of Linguistics emeritus at MIT
- Robert Pollin, Distinguished University Professor of Economics and Co-Director of the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst
What: A discussion of the just transition needed to address the political and economic crisis exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic
When: Wednesday, May 27, 8 p.m. Eastern