Speaker: Christopher Dols, PE
Abstract
Unionized government engineers responsible for planning for and responding to climate change are uniquely positioned to inform and implement the emergency response needed to salvage our warming planet. With the scientists, architects, planners and regulators they work alongside, public sector engineers can leverage their own expertise and credibility along with the power and influence of the organized labor movement to reform the civil service to better mitigate the climate crisis.
Relatively uncompromised by the direct financial and corporate corruption that has spoiled official politics, these civil servants commonly harbor a sincere desire to play such a role. But these aspirations are systematically frustrated by bureaucratic partition, intimated repression and a volatile executive atmosphere and funding stream accountable to fluctuating political influence. Over time, the typical "common sense" fostered by such experience is marked by cynicism, resigned to the presumed inefficacy of government work.
Widely regarded as passive agents of policy determined at "a higher level", if organized collectively in the interest of the broader common good, rank-and-file government staff possess the potential to restore forgotten ideals and rebuild environmentally responsible government. But collective struggle does not come naturally to engineers.
Straddling technical and professional responsibilities, the engineer embodies the classic conflict of intellectual laborers in capitalism. They are simultaneously a cog within a much larger machine and in some way responsible for the proper function of a piece of the machine itself. In this way, the engineer is pulled in opposite directions: toward a working class collectivism on the one hand and a managerial individualism on the other.
The organization of engineers and similar professionals into trade unions clarifies--but does not resolve--this contradiction. By joining the struggle for climate justice, public sector scientists and engineers and their unions might catch up to the broader labor movement, while making critical technical contributions along the way.
About the Speaker...
Christopher Dols, PE, is a civil engineer at the New York District of the US Army Corps of Engineers where he is also the vice-president of the union which represents the district's non-supervisory staff (IFPTE Local 98). Chris is a Senior Cost Engineer with expertise in coastal flood risk management and seven years of experience in the dredging industry. Chris is the re-founding publisher of Science for the People and a member of the editorial advisory board for the University of Massachusetts book series, "Activist Studies of Science and Technology." Chris is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin College of Engineering and is currently pursuing a Civil Engineering/Water Resources Masters degree from the City College of New York.