The New ‘Good Job’ $12 an Hour?

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — Massive investment in renewable energy could ultimately create 4 million manufacturing jobs. But for the workers in the bottom rung of this movement, the shift to green jobs could very well mean a pay cut of nearly 60%, a trend spreading across the entire manufacturing sector.

Many of the entry-level jobs making green energy components start at $12 an hour, much less than the now extinct $28 an hour job that had allowed high school-educated workers in the auto sector to achieve middle class status.

Americans are betting that molding steel wind turbines, slicing silicon for solar panels and making batteries for electric cars will put them back on top of the manufacturing game. The 4 million new jobs, estimated by the University of California, Berkeley, would bring back more than half of all the manufacturing jobs lost in this country since the sector’s heyday in the late 1970s.

At a battery plant just outside Indiana, job growth could boom. The plant is owned by EnerDel, the car battery division of Ener1. Here, the company is racing to build a cost competitive battery for an all-electric car. If it gets a government loan it’s applying for, the company plans on hiring up to 3,000 people. That’s roughly what a big auto plant employs.

But $12 an hour is the starting wage for a production worker.

A level pay scale. The diversity of jobs in the renewable energy business is one thing supporters of green manufacturing tout. They say people should look beyond the starting wages for labor when judging the industry.

“I cannot think of an industry that has more diversity in wages,” said Jackie Roberts, director of sustainable technology at the Environmental Defense Fund.