There is no green transition without a workers’ plan
For at least the last 40 years, the environmental movement has been associated with strategies centred around sustainable or reduced consumption as a way to mitigate the impacts of the ecological and climate crises. While green groups focus on implementing adequate policies in the remit of transport, energy, food or housing to reduce our carbon and nature footprint, there is a lack of concern about their impact on labour and issues of industrial policy. To this day, the language of labour and industrial policy remains essentially the terrain of unions and labour rights organisations. However, the deliberate cleavage of matters of consumption from production is problematic from a purely pragmatic basis, as changes in consumption patterns will necessarily impact workers in those targeted sectors. Indeed, a drop in consumption levels will constrain businesses’ revenues and ultimately impact workers’ livelihoods. This reality points at the fundamental structures of our capitalist economies, whose ability to create value and accumulate profit is essentially due to its exploitation of people’s labour. As the article discusses below, addressing workers’ concerns in the context of policy changes around consumption is a necessity to effect meaningful and long-lasting change and move away from the fallacious distinction between jobs and the environment.
The problem with consumption
The core of environmental thinking boils down to the fact that overconsumption is the greatest driver of our planetary systems breakdown. Here overconsumption is not to be thought in terms of consumerist practices but as an economic system geared towards capital accumulation — or relentless growth — in order to perpetuate itself. Behind this consumption, one finds structural inequalities given that only 10% of the world’s richest people are responsible for more than half of global carbon emissions between 1990 and 2015, whilst a mere 100 corporations are responsible for more than 70% of cumulative greenhouse gas emissions.
The unequal share of responsibility in driving climate and ecosystems collapse ultimately calls for a response that factors this in and attributes the largest costs to the biggest polluters — the fossil fuel and corporate executives of this world. This strategy stands with Marxist principles, which recognise that our capitalist economies are inequitably structured along the lines of those who make a living through work and those who reap profits by owning wealth. Latest research shows that it is indeed the affluent capitalist class that is responsible for driving consumption and economic growth through the roof.
Furthermore, Marxist economists argue that change will not materialise from a desire to reduce one’s consumption — or an aversion to greed — given that capitalists are themselves cogs in a system that cannot function without the relentless accumulation of wealth.
With the dogma of neoliberal economic policy-making infiltrating environmental organisations since the 1980’s onwards, environmentalists increasingly favoured policies tackling individual acts of consumption rather than those leading to structural shifts. Despite recent calls for “system change” and plans for a Green New Deal among climate activists, the effects of more than 40 years of neoliberal policy-making run deep in the movement and illustrate why it is still in those individual terms that consumption is framed — rather than in a systems-wide transition via a reconfiguration of our economies’ productive capacities.
Environmentalists working in the remit of “green” or reduced consumption, argue that changing individual practices are not only necessary to move to a society/economy that respects planetary boundaries but that these strategies are beneficial to reinforce positive behaviour change. This evidence contrasts with arguments that individual changes aren’t sufficient in creating the paradigm shifts required in moving towards a new economic model. While individual consumption patterns should still be of concern for policy makers, a more useful approach would be to look at it within its broader politico-economic context. As such, Eco-Marxists have come up with the concept of ‘systems of provision’, which take into account the different politico-economic constraints affecting or preventing behavioural changes. One example is a study on the political economy of car dependence, which recognises the various barriers hindering the transition towards low carbon transport modes such as the powerful automotive industry, the effects of urban sprawl or even cultural factors.
Despite its relevance, such approach is still not prevalent among most environmental practitioners and scholars who often disregard the role that productive forces and economic imperatives play in shaping consumer behaviours and practices. The infamous story of the Gilets Jaunes (yellow vests) in France — whereby a hike in fuel prices gave rise to months of protests and clashes between people and the police — clearly illustrates how a mere focus on cutting consumption can be counter-productive in worst case scenarios.
The fundamentals of capitalist economies
If the separation between matters of production and consumption dates back to the neoliberal turn the environment movement took, it somewhat today remains common practice to address consumerism through behaviour and policy change while neglecting concerns for jobs and workers in those targeted sectors. This logic is ultimately problematic for two related reasons. On a purely pragmatic basis, dismissing aspects of workers’ rights in the transition towards a green economy will eventually backfire as countless instances have demonstrated. The fight to shut down highly polluting industries, such as coal mining in Australia and Germany, were first met with resistance from unions in the sector who feared for the job losses and the detrimental economic impact onto their local communities. However, most unions in those sectors have now joined calls for a “just transition” and demanded that the government set up taskforces on industrial climate strategy. In the present global economy, jobs losses in one sector will also likely lead to further impacts down the global supply chains. As a result a lack of attention for the jobs in those sectors will eventually prevent any meaningful policy change altogether as it is likely that governments will end up siding with these industries due to fears of economic repercussions.
The second point is that these examples clearly illustrate how on a purely theoretical basis, labour is a fundamental function of our capitalist economies which must be reckoned with if one wants to devise any successful policy change. Indeed, value under capitalism is defined as ‘socially necessary labour time’ — the time that is required for the workers to produce commodities. To keep the capitalist engine of growth demands that capitalists get more output from what workers are being paid which is done via extending the length of the working day and its intensity or by increasing labour productivity through introducing new technologies. This is not to say that resource consumption isn’t the main driver of ecological damage but that it is essentially through putting people to work — to extract planetary resources — that this consumption results from. As such, it is simply impossible to separate consumption and production under the capitalist logic.
Putting just transition in practice
The concept of a “just transition” dates back to the 1990s and was devised by workers’ unions and grassroots communities in an attempt to centre the attention to the workers in the industries likely to be affected by the phasing out of those high-carbon sectors in order to meet the new international climate targets. Rather than resisting those changes, these unions advocated for their members to be put at the heart of any decision and be given the opportunity to retrain to move into green sectors.
It might sound surprising that while this concept was born many decades ago and despite environmental organisations and scholars frequently using it, only a handful are actually invested in doing the work. The truth is that the ‘just transition’ rationale hasn’t so far made it much outside the technocratic policy remit of UN climate summits in which it was devised. As a recent study reported, 91% of workers in the oil industry had never heard of the term despite 81% of them wanting to leave the sector altogether. The research concludes that just transition strategies must be shaped by workers themselves in order to be effective and worthwhile.
Coalitions among different interests groups are not commonplace in the green NGO sector, which has a tendency for working in silos rather than encouraging cross-collaborative practices with other allies in the movement. However, encouraging relationships outside one’s usual suspects will deem inevitable to create effective policy change. In particular environmental groups must actively seek to work with unions in those high-carbon sectors that are facing large-scale redundancies and encourage social dialogue to take place. On countless occasions, climate organisations have missed the opportunity to create meaningful social dialogue with unions. In France for instance, the Government has been floating the introduction of an eco-tax on aviation for over a year, which was lately brought back onto the agenda with the recommendations from the French Climate Citizen Assembly. Last October, a coalition of green groups rallied in several cities across the country to advocate for a just phasing out of the sector. Despite the organisers attempting to engage dialogue with some unions in the sector, these actors were mostly absent from the movement. Meanwhile, representatives from the industry are disputing the eco-tax by lobbying the government to ditch it in order to prevent large-scale jobs losses. Similarly, the fallout of the fossil fuel, car manufacturing and aviation industries from the pandemic offered a unique opportunity for environmental groups to lobby governments to put in place measures that would protect workers and give them a chance to retrain towards green sectors. However, for the major part campaigns around fossil fuel and aviation focussed on consumer changes via the introduction of appropriate tax incentives and price-mechanisms with no real concern for the workers in these industries. Many governments then bowed to these companies’ pressures to bail them out without neither climate strings, nor workers’ guarantees attached.
Following the Covid-19 outbreak, news of large-scale high-street shops closures and the fallout of entire sectors like aviation stress the need to extend just transition strategies beyond the traditional focus on extractive industries. To place the accent on jobs creation and work redistribution is probably the most important task ahead for the green movement, if it really wants to play a role in building back our societies post-covid. In this current climate of mass unemployment, not only is there a moral argument for environmental groups to address workers’ concerns at the heart of their campaigns around sustainable and reduced consumption, but it will also prove essential over the coming months and years to shape the political landscape around a just and green recovery.
