Working for Climate Justice: trade unions in the front line against climate change

Abstract

Trade unions have not yet made climate change a major area of bargaining and negotiation on behalf of their members. Trade union approaches have frequently treated climate and environmental issues as non-adversarial and separate from core industrial relations issues. This is partly because British labour law does not allow for workplace climate action; in particular, the right to strike is limited to a narrow range of employment issues. This paper argues that trade unions can however challenge these constraints through building campaigns which link climate and employment demands together. The paper shows how workers are directly materially exposed to climate and environmental harms in terms of the effects of physically and environmentally harmful production processes, and are indirectly exposed through the market effects of the climate and environmental crisis. Workers indirect exposures also include cost-of-living pressures such as climate inflationary impacts and energy price volatility. The paper further argues that there is an umbilical relationship between the precarity of jobs and the unsustainable production practices that stand at the foundations of our economy. It therefore argues that trade union climate campaigns and bargaining models must embed employment security as a key climate and sustainability demand. Dealing with issues of precarity and sustainability requires unions to organise globally across supply chains. The paper concludes that trade unions need to put climate bargaining at the centre of everything they do and channel greater resources into researching the impacts of unsustainable production and distribution practice on the stability of their sector and on the material conditions faced by their members.

Keywords: trade unions, labour, climate change, green bargaining, just transition, workplace organising