Trade Unions in the Green Economy: Working for the Environment

Description

Combating climate change will increasingly impact on production industries and the workers they employ as production changes and consumption is targeted. Yet research has largely ignored labour and its responses. This book brings together sociologists, psychologists, political scientists, historians, economists, and representatives from international and local unions based in Australia, Brazil, South Africa, Taiwan, Spain, Sweden, the UK and the USA. Together they open up a new area of research: Environmental Labour Studies. The authors ask what kind of environmental policies are unions in different countries and sectors developing. How do they aim to reconcile the protection of jobs with the protection of the environment? What are the forms of cooperation developing between trade unions and environmental movements, especially the so-called Red-Green alliances? Under what conditions are unions striving to create climate change policies that transcend the economic system? Where are they trying to find solutions that they see as possible within the present socio-economic conditions? What are the theoretical and practical implications of trade unions’ "Just Transition", and the problems and perspectives of "Green Jobs"? The authors also explore how food workers’ rights would contribute to low carbon agriculture, the role workers’ identities play in union climate change policies, and the difficulties of creating solidarity between unions across the global North and South. Trade Unions in the Green Economy opens the climate change debate to academics and trade unionists from a range of disciplines in the fields of labour studies, environmental politics, environmental management, and climate change policy. It will also be useful for environmental organisations, trade unions, business, and politicians. Cover Trade Unions in the Green Economy: Working for the Environment Copyright Contents Contributors Acknowledgements Foreword 1. Mending the Breach Between Labour and Nature: A Case for Environmental Labour Studies Trade Union Perspectives 2. Developing Global Environmental Union Policies Through the International Trade Union Confederation 3. From Sustainable Development to a Green and Fair Economy: Making the Environment a Trade Union Issue 4. The International Labour Organization and the Environment: The Way to a Socially Just Transition for Workers 5. Food Workers’ Rights as a Path to a Low Carbon Agriculture 6. Moving Towards Eco-Unionism: Reflecting the Spanish Experience 7. Cars, Crisis, Climate Change and Class Struggle Analyses of Trade Union Environmental Policies Across the Globe 8. The Neo-Liberal Global Economy and Nature: Redefining the Trade Union Role 9. Questions for Trade Unions on Land, Livelihoods and Jobs 10. Climate Change, Trade Unions and Rural Workers in Labour–environmental Alliances in the Amazon Rainforest 11. From ‘Jobs Versus Environment’ to ‘Green-Collar Jobs’: Australian Trade Unions and the Climate Change Debate 12. Just Transition and Labour Environmentalism in Australia 13. Will They Tie the Knot? Labour and Environmental Trajectories in Taiwan and South Korea 14. Green Jobs? Good Jobs? Just Jobs? Us Labour Unions Confront Climate Change 15. Us Trade Unions and the Challenge of “extreme Energy”: The Case of the Transcanada Keystone Xl Pipeline 16. From Blue to Green: A Comparative Study of Blue-Collar Unions’ Reactions to the Climate Change Threat in the United States and Sweden 17. Trade Unions and the Transition Away from ‘Actually Existing Unsustainability’: From Economic Crisis to a New Political Economy Beyond Growth 18. Local Place and Global Space: Solidarity Across Borders and the Question of the Environment Index