Labour and Societal Relationships with Nature. Conceptual Implications for Trade Unions

Climate change and industrial relations: Reflections on an emerging field

“…While, as the legal scholar Tomassetti has argued, ‘sustainability’ holds immense conceptual promise as a ‘fundamental principle of law’ embodying the principles of efficiency, capability and equality which underpin both labour and environmental law (Tomassetti, 2018), in practice the idea has had weak legal purchase in staunching and redirecting employment relations systems from their existing fossil-intensive trajectories. As Barth and Littig note, the key mechanism for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals has been the formalisation of the workforce and expansion of paid work, processes which may be highly consistent with the expansion of fossil dependency (Barth and Littig, 2021). Current conceptions of ‘sustainability’ are broad and flexible enough to enable companies devoted to the acceleration of fossil fuel extraction (Dauvergne, 2020) and gig economy platforms predicated on non-employment-based work relations to claim their mantle (Novitz, 2021).…”

“…The overwhelming focus of climate-oriented industrial relations scholarship has been on the role that organised labour is playing or could play in climate action, and the extent to which climate change might be a catalyst for unions to reconfigure their identity and purpose. While it is self-evident, as a matter of logic, that ‘working-class people are intrinsically ecological subjects’ and that no work at all can take place without a functioning environment, longstanding theories of trade unions lead us to expect that any process of fundamental reinvention, should it occur, will be conflict-ridden (Barth and Littig, 2021). It is now well understood that climate action pulls most unions in opposing directions.…”

“…While most unions tend to see their purpose and strategies within the existing political-economic framework of capitalism, rarely endeavouring to act on behalf of members as subjects outside the sphere of paid work (Barth and Littig, 2021), others have appealed to a more radical union and working-class agenda (Brand and Niedermoser, 2019; Lawreniuk, 2021) in suggesting that the climate crises opens new opportunities for socio-ecological transformation. Other readings of the role of organised labour emphasise its productivist origins and tendencies, positioning unions as, at best, ambivalent climate actors (Hyde and Vachon, 2018; Mildenberger, 2020).…”

“…How might concepts such as skill, occupation, task and craft be re-thought in light of climate change? What does the complicity of the industrial relations discipline with industrial activity mean for how scholars recontextualise the normative evaluations applied to industrial relations systems such as efficiency, voice and fairness (Budd, 2006)? Need such conceptual frameworks to be abandoned, or might they be qualified in new ways, by asking, for instance, ‘what affordances does this system offer to low- and high-carbon industries in terms of efficiency?’; ‘ whose voices are privileged (actors that are part of a fossil-fuel dependent systems or their opposite?…”

Metabolic politics: Industrial relations as if nature mattered

“…Work is central to the social metabolism with nature (Foster, 1999;Barth and Littig, 2021). Workers are the primary agent in the transformation of energy and matter through the labor process (Barca 2012, p. 75).…”