Chrissy Lynch is President of the Massachusetts AFL-CIO and a leader of Climate Jobs Massachusetts, a labor-led coalition united to address climate change and inequality with a worker-centered, diverse, and inclusive clean energy workforce.
What's your union story?
I had no path to a union when I first started working, during high school and college and after. I had done a number of non-union jobs — barista, selling pool supplies, personal care attendant, political campaigns — all in workplaces without unions. Frankly, I was pissed off. I was experiencing firsthand what it felt like to not have a union, and I felt like I was working in a broken economy.
I got my degree in journalism to expose some of these injustices, but I realized I was very opinionated, and maybe my time would be better spent fighting them rather than just exposing them. I wanted to be in the fight. It was through political campaigns that I met labor. Of all the constituency groups, my top three were labor, environment, women — I feel a close personal connection to all of them.
Climate Jobs Massachusetts is a coalition of unions across the Bay State that launched two years ago to drive an ambitious and pro-worker climate action agenda. Why did you help organize the coalition?
For a long time I’d been frustrated watching the fighting between labor and the environmental movement, which I think was often, more than anything, a misunderstanding. Some folks in the environmental community didn’t understand how crucial it is that green jobs be union jobs. From labor’s perspective, there was a misunderstanding that environmentalists just want to shut everything down.
We have over 800 local unions in Massachusetts, representing tens of thousands of working people in the energy sector and another 400,000 members who may not work directly on clean energy but care deeply about climate. Anyone who’s known me a long time has heard me talk about how labor needs a climate policy — how do we fight climate change, income inequality, gender and racial inequality all together, knowing that fighting only one could deepen the others.
It wasn’t until I heard from Cornell University’s Climate Jobs Institute and Climate Jobs National Resource Center that we figured out how. That gave us a roadmap for conversations with unions, and crucially, resources to fund the campaign. Without that, we wouldn’t be anywhere near where we are today.
Climate Jobs Massachusetts has helped shift the conversation around climate to “what do we need to build.” How did you do that?
Early on, when I was nagging people that we needed a climate policy, a lot of folks didn’t want to engage, because the conversation to date had all been about shutting down facilities that supported thousands of good union jobs.
The mapping we did with Cornell University’s Climate Jobs Institute let us make that shift. When the conversation moved from what needs to be shut down to what needs to be built up, it was a game changer. It made us think about opportunities instead of threats.
What difference does Climate Jobs Massachusetts make when it comes to working with climate partners?
The coalition lets us map shared threats and opportunities externally, too. Offshore wind, geothermal, battery storage are examples of clean energy infrastructure we want to build for the good union jobs, and environmentalists know we need to build them to meet emissions goals too. Our state’s climate groups now understand that without strong labor standards, those jobs drag down standards across industries and worsen income inequality. We won’t always agree on everything, but we stand together now more often than not to fight for climate action and strong labor standards. We need our environmental partners to get our demands passed.
Has the coalition helped you navigate new challenges, like data centers and load growth?
I’ve taken this model — start with the unions whose jobs have the most at stake — and applied it elsewhere: from AI to housing. We really reject the false choice that, for example, you can’t have affordable housing or energy efficiency investments because of labor standards or prevailing wage laws. We know that’s a lie, but unless we’re deliberate about uniting people, false choices keep winning.
What do you wish people outside the labor movement understood about this work?
First: labor is not a monolith. We have over 800 locals and half a million members across nearly every sector. Second: think about NAFTA. When we debated trade policy in the 1990s, workers were an afterthought, and we saw what that did to the American middle class and our manufacturing base. Cities were hollowed-out across the country. We can’t make that same mistake–implementation first, guardrails later–with energy policy. I’m not going to sit quietly and let that happen again.