"Climate Strike at Mendocino", by Bob Dass, CC BY 2.0
There are many reasons why climate change should be among the top priorities for all unions. The climate crisis will affect working people in a myriad of ways, from higher grocery prices and greater exposure to extreme weather to the risks of relying on industries that are likely to undergo major upheaval in the near future. Unions have every interest in being able to shape how these changes unfold and to ensure that they remain relevant through a period of enormous stress and transformation.
Yet, organized labor around the world faces many barriers to addressing this crucial challenge. Across North America, we are still confronting a well-financed denialism that shades from outright refusal to recognize the science to a downplaying of the gravity of our situation. There are other problems beyond denialism that we should be thinking about. Effective climate action requires a working-class base and this base will have to be built through the labor movement. What problems internal to labor do we have to work through to make this so?
Lessons from Québec’s Labor Movement
Over the past few years, I have been co-teaching a graduate-level seminar at my institution on “The Climate Crisis and the Future of Work.” In the first couple of years, the class relied almost exclusively on invited presentations from labor activists, staff and leaders from across the Québec labor movement. These trade unionists spoke about how they have been working to foreground the climate crisis in their organizations. A reflection on these discussions, published in the Labor Studies Journal, highlights both the promise and the persistent challenges of integrating climate action into the labor movement.
Québec is an interesting case to assess the barriers to more effective labor climate action. The province does not have a fossil-fuel extraction industry to fund climate denialism or block climate policy. It has already de-carbonized its energy grid by shifting from fossil fuels to renewable sources of energy with generation and transmission under public ownership.
Our labor movement has lost power over the past 40 years, but remains resilient. Unions still represent 40 percent of the province’s workforce and our unions have a strong record of strike action. The climate justice movement has a number of victories to its credit, among them having organized the world’s largest climate strike to date. In September 2019, 11 union locals representing 7,500 workers in Montréal joined students and community groups in a mass walkout shutting down schools and workplaces across the city to demand urgent climate action.
Union leaders understand the long-term strategic importance of labor climate action. Given this organizational resilience and willingness to take action, you would expect our labor movement to be moving ahead with a strong climate agenda. Yet, while progress has been made, the movement has also encountered tensions and barriers that are likely to be commonly shared across national and regional labor movements confronting the climate crisis. Québec’s unions differ markedly in how they understand and respond to the climate challenge reflecting the distinct pressures facing the public and private sectors.
"Climate Change Protest", by Michael Gwyther-Jones, CC BY 2.0
Divided Procedures: Public vs. Private Sector Unions
For many union leaders in some private-sector industries, climate action is not just an environmental issue but a challenge to those industries’ long-term survival. These concerns are especially acute in Québec’s high-carbon-emitting sectors—metal processing, cement, oil refining, pulp and paper, and mining. After road transportation, these are the province’s largest sources of greenhouse gas emissions. They also are all heavily unionized.
Union leaders believe that, if unions do not push for mitigation, the multinational corporations that control these industries will come under strong public pressure to shut down their Québec operations. This is based on the questionable assumption that the cost of carbon in Québec will continue to rise relative to the global floor due to domestic political pressure. Union leadership also fears that industrial unions that are not aligned with the climate movement will lose public support and social legitimacy. This seems a more likely scenario. Without broad public support, industrial unions will be unable to negotiate the transition and may not survive as organizations. Climate change poses a threat, but so too do climate policies and movements that leave unions and the industrial working class behind.
In the public sector, climate change threatens to worsen working conditions as public services come under increasing strain from extreme weather and other climate impacts. The municipal sector will place mounting demands on workers tasked with public health and safety, emergency relief and continuous infrastructure repair. Public sector buildings are old. They were not built to withstand flooding. They tend to be poorly ventilated and unequipped to deal with extreme heat. Extreme heat and new infectious diseases will lead to more occupational and general illness, putting added pressure on public healthcare providers. An unknowable number of climate refugees will require housing and assistance accessing public services and employment.
The experience of frontline public sector workers during the pandemic offers an early glimpse of the kinds of stress and strain that the climate crisis is likely to produce. In sharp contrast to private-sector labor, climate mitigation is framed as an opportunity for a renewed public sector that could take on a new importance in transitioning workforces, building climate resilient communities, and creating low-carbon employment opportunities.
Beyond these differences in framing, public sector and industrial unions have very different visions of their ecological futures. The industrial unions have aligned themselves with a “high-road” version of green capitalism – one that relies on technological fixes to cut carbon emissions in industrial processes with workers committees and union pressure ensuring job security and high labor standards during the transition. In practice, much of the investment needed for this approach will likely come from public loans and subsidies. In the public sector, union activists and leaders advocate for a transition led by public institutions towards a more equitable society – one in which a good life for all is ensured within the planet’s ecological limits. Public sector unions criticize the government for spending hundreds of millions of dollars on battery plants controlled by multinational capital while cutting basic services.
These differences within the house of labor have yet to open organizational rifts for two reasons. First, unions understand the importance of maintaining unity and discipline in positioning themselves vis-à-vis the environmental movement. Second, neither the public nor the private sector have unions that have been able to build the political power necessary to push the state in one direction or another. For now, these tensions persist below the surface rather than emerging into the open.
The biggest barrier, however, is simply that labor climate activists, staff and leaders have not yet found effective ways to make climate action a higher priority within their organizations. In the high-carbon-emissions industrial sector, union messages about climate often collide with a deeply rooted belief that environmental action threatens jobs. A “just transition” sounds to many workers like their unions are organizing them out of well-paying union jobs. There is a well-founded skepticism of unions’ abilities to negotiate a just transition given the failure to negotiate previous restructurings, including those affected by free trade, and the simple fact that current and recent governments visibly exclude unions from climate policy making. Union leaders who may wish to lead on climate have struggled to overcome this distrust. Finally, there is the question of what labor’s demands should be, aside from attempting to collectively bargain over investment and technological change.
In the public sector, workers are fighting to maintain living and working standards in the context of decades-long austerity. In some sectors, notably education, rank-and-file activists push unions and their leaders to take stronger actions on climate, including strike action. The climate strike that emptied out Montréal schools on a Friday in September 2019 was largely the product of their organizing. This increases the pressure on union leaders who are constrained by laws and tensions within labor federations. In the wake of the pandemic, rising inflation and renewed austerity have made everyday economic concerns the top priority pushing the climate movement into the background.
The climate crisis will intensify, and as the climate justice movement revives, as it must, unions will once again be forced to work through their differences. The way forward in Québec as elsewhere is for unions to invest more resources in member engagement on climate. Through this engagement, unions can identify alignments between worker grievances on the job, opportunities for building worker power, and science-based climate policy. Public ownership should trump public subsidies to the multinational capital that controls our resource base, if only to dampen rifts between public and private sector workers. Ultimately, it is through sustained investment in member education and engagement that unions can bridge internal divides, align climate policy with workers’ interests, and reclaim a leading role in shaping the transition.
