Green Collar Jobs

Something I have been interested in (and which is quite germane to Viridus) is the answer to the question, "what is a green collar job and how many are there?"

In terms of what is a green collar worker, the best definition I have seen is this one at Wikipedia which reads in part,

"[A green collar workers is someone who] implement[s] environmentally conscious design, policy, and technology to improve conservation and sustainability."

At Viridus we often use the shorthand definition of "anyone who has the word 'environment,' 'sustainable,' 'green' or something similar in their title on their business card." Obviously it's not a very precise definition, in the same way that "blue collar worker" is not very precise. Over time, I think the definition will broaden to include people who wouldn't fit either of those definitions, for example a packaging engineer or a purchasing manager could be green collar workers if that were their focus. After all, our tag line at Viridus is "everyone has a green collar job" and we hope one day that is true.

Another way to look at the definition is by compensation, but again that gives us a broad range too. For example, according to Salary.com, the median Top Environmental Executive of a Boston-based company could expect to make about $240,000 per year including bonuses whereas PayScale has a Solar Energy Systems Designer with 1-4 years of experience making $49,000. [BTW, there is an opportunity to create a business that aggregates compensation information for green collar jobs because none of the major current sites are doing a good job of that.]

Last year the US Conference of Mayors released a green jobs report wherein they estimated that in 2006 there were approximately 750,000 green collar jobs in the US (using a similar definition to the one above). Over half of those jobs were in engineering, legal, research and consulting and the second largest category was renewable power generation. The report also found that the jobs were spread across the country, although 85% were in metro areas. The top cities for green collar jobs were: New York (25,021), Washington DC (24,287), Houston (21,250), Los Angeles (20,136) and Boston (19,799).

But more importantly, the report's authors forecast over 4 million new green collar jobs (see table below) over the next 30 years which would represent about 10% of the total job growth over that period. In fact, many experts believe that green jobs will be the only sector of the economy that will see growth through the current recession.


President Obama is pushing for a significant portion of the $825 billion stimulus package to be directed to this sector as well. Many people have been picking through the draft legislation since it was first released on January 26th, but anyone will tell you that these bills are extremely hard to read. Some of the best work I've seen on trying to parse the bill is from the folks at Sunlight, but even they were only able to itemize a fraction of the total.

So according to Sunlight, the stimulus bill (officially called the "American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009") includes the following funds directed toward green collar jobs:


That is a lot of money ($30 billion) but still just a small 6% of the $500 billion in direct spending (the additional $325 billion is in the form of tax cuts, some of which are directed toward green sectors). These numbers may be under representing the actual bill because it is so hard to read. If you think we've got this wrong, please comment here or join the conversation on Viridus.