Workers as climate actors
What can unions do about climate change? Introduction
Bibliographic Data
Climate change is an existential threat requiring mitigation and adaptation efforts likely to affect workers, their workplaces and their communities. The introduction to this thematic issue of Transfer: European Review of Labour and Research explores how workers and their unions become climate actors. In addition to presenting the seven studies featured in this issue, we identify cross-cutting themes emerging from them. These include: the importance of unionisation and collective bargaining on attitudes to climate change measures; the diversity of strategies and the need to move from typologies of union climate strategies to an understanding of how these strategies emerge and are linked to specific sets of conditions, notably unequal exposure to climate impacts, divergent development trajectories and asymmetrical access to institutional resources; the intractable complexity of climate change strategies; whether union strategies are predicated on growth or on degrowth/post-growth, on paid labour in the labour market or all forms of labour including social reproduction; the influence of gender on climate vulnerability and climate action; and the promise and the perils of just transition.
Climate change · Collective bargaining · Political economy of climate change · Digital Economy and Work Transformation · International Labor and Employment Law · Labor Movements and Unions
Understanding union power
Agents of transition or defenders of the status quo? Trade union strategies in green transitions
Industrial relations and climate change
Striking for a Just Transition? North American Auto Unions and the Electric Vehicle Transition
Negotiating just transitions
How to Get Coal Country to Vote for Climate Policy
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |