Poverty and unemployment are significant problems in Berkeley and other Bay Area cities and there is an urgent need for a new source of living wage jobs for low income residents with barriers to employment – a population that includes youth and adults who do not have a high school degree, have been out of the labor market for a long time, were formally incarcerated, have limited education and/or labor market skills. This report describes a category of jobs with significant potential to fill this need – green collar jobs.

Green collar jobs are blue collar jobs in green businesses – that is, manual labor jobs in businesses whose products and services directly improve environmental quality (Pinderhughes, 2006). Green collar jobs are located in large and small for-profit businesses, non-profit organizations, social enterprises, and public sector institutions. What unites these jobs is that all of them are associated with manual labor work that directly improves environmental quality.

Green collar jobs represent an important new category of work force opportunities because they are relatively high quality jobs, with relatively low barriers to entry, in sectors that are poised for dramatic growth. The combination of these three features means that cultivating green collar jobs for people with barriers to employment can be an effective strategy to provide low-income men and women with access to good jobs - jobs that provide workers with meaningful, community serving work, living wages, benefits, and advancement opportunities.