Schalk van Zuydam/AP Photo
Workers install a solar panel at a photovoltaic solar park situated on the outskirts of the coastal town of Lamberts Bay, South Africa, March 29, 2016.
We are in the midst of the U.N.’s global climate change meeting in Egypt (COP27), and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change tells us we are squarely on track to reach at least three degrees Celsius of global warming by the end of the century. Three degrees will be catastrophic for human society. For hundreds of millions of people around the world, that catastrophe is already here. And their present—in Syria, Central America, the Sahel, Ukraine—is all of our future unless the world’s major carbon-emitting societies are able to organize our politics and economics to much more quickly and effectively fight climate change.
At the heart of this political problem is the question of what fighting climate change will mean for working people. How climate advocates, governments, and working people interact will determine whether we contain a warming planet, or end up setting up an unimaginable catastrophe. And yet the role of working people and labor policies in fighting climate change barely got mentioned at COP26, and seems likely to barely be mentioned at COP27.
In the last few years, we have seen three powerful positive examples of this dynamic. In 2019, we saw the German government of Angela Merkel negotiate with coal companies and the labor movement on a plan for phasing out the German coal industry by 2038, while investing tens of billions of euros in coal workers and coal-dependent communities. In Brazil last month, we saw autoworker labor leader Lula, head of the Brazilian Workers’ Party, oust Jair Bolsonaro, one of the world’s most dangerous political leaders in terms of his impact on the Amazon.
Perhaps most importantly, in this country the Biden administration was able to unify the Democratic Party and the labor movement behind his climate investment agenda by pairing strong labor standards with direct public investment and tax credits for renewable-energy development. It was President Biden’s commitment to working people and the labor movement, in contrast to similar efforts in the past which lacked labor standards and failed, that made it possible to pass the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act and the Inflation Reduction Act, which together give the United States a fighting chance to meet our Paris Agreement climate targets aimed at keeping warming to a relatively manageable 1.5 degrees. Serious challenges remain in drafting the implementing regulations to ensure the promise of strong labor standards is realized in both construction and supply chains, but the initial indications are that the Biden administration will get there.
Globally, the labor movement has been an important voice for action on climate change. The International Trade Union Confederation, the organization of the world’s labor movements, has been an active participant in every IPCC meeting and has strongly embraced climate science and the targets articulated through the IPCC process. However, the closer you get to the shop floor, the greater the unease and unhappiness with climate and energy policy.
Working people fear three things. First, they fear that fighting climate change means they will lose their jobs, that their communities will lose their economic base and face long-term decline, and that their children will not have an economic future. Second, they fear—with good reason, based on what has happened so far—that the new jobs created in low-carbon sectors will be low-wage and precarious and without rights, particularly when compared to the jobs they are replacing. This is why the labor standards in the Inflation Reduction Act are so important and positive. Finally, they fear that climate policy is being driven by people who simply don’t understand how society functions at a physical level, and who are intent on making modern civilization a luxury that only elites can afford. This is the message sent by the focus on Tesla, a luxury car affordable by less than 1 percent of the world’s population, built by workers paid below industry-standard wages in unsafe conditions.
Globally, the labor movement has been an important voice for action on climate change.
These three fears do not exist in isolation. They are fed by employers and right-wing political movements looking to block action on climate or simply build political power. And we have seen over and over again that when the forces of inaction and climate denial are able to enlist working people on their side, they win.
Richard Trumka, the former president of the AFL-CIO, said not long before his death in 2021 that we would “either have a just transition to a low-carbon economy or no transition at all.” Some heard that as a threat. But it was really a prophecy. What Trumka meant was that, in the absence of policies and political leadership addressing these three fears effectively, one way or another working people would join with climate deniers to block action on climate change, regardless of what positions their unions or their traditional political parties took on the question.
Trumka’s successor Liz Shuler is leading on climate policy. One of her first acts at the AFL-CIO was to work with Building Trades to help shepherd an unprecedented comprehensive labor agreement governing tens of thousands of workers constructing an East Coast offshore wind grid. But labor leaders like Shuler—in America and around the world—can’t do this alone.
What labor leaders desperately need are political and business leaders ready to bring the leadership, the money, and most of all the commitment to engage with working people. Political leaders must see workers and their unions as partners with government and business in shaping that transition. In this greatest of innovation challenges, workers are co-creators, not objects.
This is not a moral appeal but a description of necessity. And there is hope. The type of political alliances and public policies that underlay the German coal plan, Lula’s election victory, and Biden’s investment agenda are the only political economy of effective and timely action to contain human-caused climate change. And these are the alliances that are creating a viable path for humanity to meet the Paris Agreement targets and bend the curve away from a nightmarish potential future.
In the language of the U.N.’s IPCC, there are no neoliberal pathways to climate stability, no pathways to a livable future that involve keeping working people powerless. But we are running out of time to learn this lesson.
