Residential Decarbonization Industry Study

For this study commissioned by the Bay Area High Road Training Partnership and Rising Sun, Movement Economics, in collaboration with Ponder Analytics, produced a descriptive analysis of the current landscape of jobs, firms, and funding for the Bay Area residential decarbonization industry and modeled the economic impacts of adopting an industry wage and benefits standard.

Our team produced two papers describing the findings of our study. The first paper provides an overview of the landscape of public investment, workers, and firms in the Bay Area (Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, Napa, San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Solano, and Sonoma counties). The second paper compares the status quo in to two different labor standards that could be adopted in the industry: (1) prevailing wages and benefits and (2) setting a wage floor of 180 to 250 percent of the state minimum wage, depending on a worker’s trade, and requiring that employers provide health insurance and retirement plans. We estimate the impacts of each of these wage and benefits standards for workers, employers, consumers, local government, and the local economy. Many climate advocates are concerned about a tradeoff between maximizing the impact of climate investments and ensuring that jobs in the industry are High Road. However, we find that adopting a labor standard will not significantly increase residential decarbonization project costs. In contrast, a labor standard is likely to increase the quality of residential decarbonization work and, therefore, the likelihood that projects will successfully reduce residential carbon emissions while also magnifying the impact of climate investments on the local economy by drastically improving the lives of workers and their families, reducing the racial wage gap, and boosting local tax revenues.