Health and safety

Climate change is a serious health and safety issue confronting workers and their unions. Workers, especially those working outdoors, face increased risks from heat exposure. This can be fatal. Emergency workers especially face dangers caused by forest fires, flooding and other environmental catastrophes. Workers need laws protecting them against working in excessive cold or heat. Unions should negotiate workplace climate adaptation policies to protect workers from the impact of climate change.

Just transition

Just transition means changing to a greener economy in a way which is fair to working people and does not put the costs of cutting carbon emissions on to workers here or in the Global South. The concept also applies to those making nuclear weapons and in the armaments industry, raising the demand for socially useful jobs to replace armaments production.

For workers in fossil fuel industries there is the question of how a just transition can be achieved. Workers in industries such as coal-mining experienced transition away from fossil fuel jobs with no decent alternative employment provided and experienced decline in living standards and the decimation of their communities.

Workers need secure, unionised, green jobs with decent pay and pensions. We all need socially usefully work, undertaken in a socially responsible way, and we need trade unions to fight for this.

Climate justice

The struggle for climate justice should be central to the work of trade unions. The idea of climate justice focuses on who suffers most from global warming – communities in the global south already losing not only jobs but land – and in the most extreme cases being forced to migrate by heat, floods or the desertification of the land used for crops. The costs of transition must be borne by the capitalists who pollute the planet, not by the poorest of the world. Movements for climate justice must be internationalist.

The far-right threatens workers and the planet

Far-right and fascist politicians are exacerbating the climate crisis, denying science and the climate emergency; with “drill baby drill” and continuing to extract fossil fuels. They seek to divide workers on the basis of nationality, scapegoating migrants and refugees for the problems workers suffer under capitalism. They attack equality and diversity policies, union rights and public service jobs. In their “war on woke” they target trans people and weaponize divisions around race, sex and gender identity. Reform UK echoes many of these arguments

Labour backtrack

The Labour Government at Westminster has back-tracked on policies to introduce a green new deal; focusing on growth not sustainability. Unions must campaign for the development of green jobs, which tackle the climate emergency and safeguard working-class living standards and life on the planet.