Working as a construction supervisor one winter, Steven Morones would wake up at 4 a.m. and drive two hours to a Wisconsin cornfield. There, he and the rest of the nonunion crew spent their day assembling a sprawling network of steel I-beams for solar panels to be mounted on. Threading bolts while wearing thick gloves often proved impossible, and so when the temperature dropped as low as -13F, his bare hands would stiffen painfully.
While his body battled the elements, Morones’s mind was beset by a constant worry: that his $25 hourly wage just wasn’t enough to pay his bills. “I was always stressed with the day-to-day,” says the 30-year-old father of four. “I just couldn’t focus on the future.”
Campaigning for the U.S. presidency and now, as his administration steers a $2.3 trillion infrastructure plan through Congress, Joe Biden has touted the potential for the solar and wind industries to create the types of jobs the U.S. economy has been losing for decades. “A key plank of our Build Back Better recovery plan is building a modern, resilient climate infrastructure and clean energy future that will create millions of good-paying union jobs,” Biden said in a Jan. 27 speech laying out his energy policy, which targets zero emissions from electricity generation by 2035.
This story is from the April 26 - May 03, 2021 (Double Issue) edition of Bloomberg Businessweek.
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This story is from the April 26 - May 03, 2021 (Double Issue) edition of Bloomberg Businessweek.
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