Workers and Trade Unions for Climate Solidarity: Tackling climate change in a neoliberal world

Workers and Trade Unions for Climate Solidarity: Tackling climate change in a neoliberal world

Language: English

Pages: 230

ISBN: 1138283630

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


This book is a theoretically rich and empirically grounded account of UK trade union engagement with climate change over the last three decades. It offers a rigorous critique of the mainstream neoliberal and ecological modernisation approaches, extending the concepts of Marxist social and employment relations theory to the climate realm. The book applies insights from employment relations to the political economy of climate change, developing a model for understanding trade union behaviour over climate matters. The strong interdisciplinary approach draws together lessons from both physical and social science, providing an original empirical investigation into the climate politics of the UK trade union movement from high level officials down to workplace climate representatives, from issues of climate jobs to workers’ climate action.

This book will be of great interest to students and researchers in environmental politics, climate change and environmental sociology.

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Grip’ (AWL 2009g).4 Dan Rawnsley, another key activist involved in leafleting the factory and organising the 3 July public meeting, recalled the assessment in early July that there seemed to be only a 20 per cent chance of an occupation taking place (Rawnsley 2009). Other reports in the socialist press suggested that the campaign against the closure had stepped up with mass leafleting and petitioning on 11 July (Walker, T. 2009b; Norman 2009). Some 50 people turned up in Newport in solidarity.

Forms of industrial action and solidarity with workers taking collective action, is discussed in Chapter 6. The Vestas workers who occupied their workplace and their colleagues outside who supported them indicated a strong commitment to carbon-mitigating employment. Their response was more than simply disappointment with redundancy; rather, workers had taken seriously the low-carbon transition promised by the firm and the government. Similarly, the climate solidarity offered by other trade.

Effects it produces – and to abandon vital political actors. In terms of its global social weight, the waged working class has grown both absolutely and relative to other classes. The global waged working class appears to have at least doubled in size in the past three decades. Far from disappearing, the majority of the world’s direct producers now probably do waged work rather than (or alongside) work for themselves in peasant agriculture (McNally 2010: 51–3, 134). Recent decades have witnessed.

Choice for trade unionists: the framing of interests, the modes of representation and the methods used to engage with it are likely to depend on individual unions’ organisational capacity, leadership reflexivity and their chosen orientation within the market–class–society triangle. The approach does not ignore differentiation between and within trade unions. Union leaderships may pursue strategies incongruent with the general interests of workers, in particular, by juxtaposing their members’.

Labour Market Imperfections’, Climate Policy, 11(1): 768–88. Hackett, P. (1991) ‘The UK Unions and the Environment’. In P. Schulte and J. Willman (eds) The Environment. Challenges and Opportunities for Trades Unions. London: Friedrich Ebert Foundation. Hewett, C. and Foley, J. (2001) Trade Union Sustainable Development Advisory Committee (TUSDAC), 2001. Employment Creation and Environmental Policy: A Literature Review. A Report by Public Policy Research Associates Ltd. October. London: IPPR.

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