Chemical Plants Near Black Neighborhoods Pollute While Hiring Few Black Workers
“People don’t have the jobs here, but people do have cancer,” one Louisiana-based organizer told Truthout.
Anew study confirms what locals and environmental activists across the Gulf South and beyond have said for years: Black, Brown and Indigenous workers do not benefit equitably from jobs offered by the petrochemical industry despite their communities often bearing the brunt of its pollution.
In Louisiana, for example, residents and activists say jobs promised to Black communities located near refineries and chemical plants often go to white workers who commute from their homes a safer distance away from the toxic smokestacks, chemical fires, explosions, leaky pipelines and sky-high cancer rates that make the region notorious.
Published in the Ecological Economics journal by a team of environmental experts last month, the study examines employment at chemical and petroleum manufacturers nationwide. The researchers also conducted a case study of Louisiana’s petrochemical corridors, where local and state politicians lure industrial developers with lucrative tax breaks in the name of creating jobs and revenue.
The study cites years of research showing that the pollution and climate risks associated with the fossil fuel and petrochemical industry disproportionately fall on Black, Brown, Indigenous and poor white communities. Most of the wealth extracted from and created in these communities does not stay there, one reason why academics and activists call them fossil fuel “sacrifice zones.”
https://truthout.org/articles/chemical-plants-near-black-neighborhoods-pollute-while-hiring-few-black-workers/
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