McLeod Group guest blog by Edward Jackson, November 23, 2023
This year’s conference of the parties on climate change, COP 28, promises to be as complex, contentious, and consequential as any of its predecessor gatherings. It will also feature the broadest representation of constituencies in the meeting series to date – except, bizarrely, for workers.
Steps Toward Inclusion
The COP process is, in fact, becoming more inclusive. As with earlier COPs, government ministers, investment bankers, company executives, UN officials, and NGO leaders will populate the speakers lists. As well, nearly two thirds of the members of the advisory committee for COP 28 represent developing economies and almost half the committee’s members are women.
In addition, this year’s meeting features a special platform on local communities and Indigenous peoples that respects diverse ways of knowing and facilitates exchanges on grassroots responses to climate change. COP 28 will also sponsor activities aimed at empowering young people to fight climate change.
Further, following several years of effective feminist advocacy, gender equality has found a formal place on the climate-diplomacy agenda. Gender-responsive climate policies and women-focused financing vehicles will be explored, and a wide-ranging gender action plan will be debated, on and around a special Gender Day and through a dozen other Presidency sessions and side events.
Where Are the Workers?
As promising as these initiatives are, the COP process is still far from being fully inclusive. It is, alarmingly, virtually worker-less.
If they are anywhere at all in this crucial game, workers are not on the official playing field – they are sitting on the sidelines. No labour leaders serve on the advisory committee. Union officials are not featured as keynote speakers, although deep in the conference’s unofficial “green zone,” there are a few side events sponsored by the International Labour Organization and the International Trade Union Confederation.
The reality is that there can be no just transition without workers and their organizations. As the Confederation’s former general secretary, Sharan Burrow, said: “Just transition is a very simple concept. It’s all about security. You need secure pensions. You need a bridge to pensions for older workers to retire early. You need guarantees for income, reskilling and redeployment support for younger workers to find other jobs.”
Workforce policies like these should be at the very centre of climate talks, not relegated to the margins.
The main reason for the absence of workers at COPs, probably, is that the driving coalition of COP leaders – senior-level politicians, policymakers, chief executives, even NGO directors – is at best “worker-blind”. They are not rewarded by their institutions for understanding and valuing workplace realities and engaging meaningfully with employees.
Indeed, except for ILO meetings, many other UN conferences face the same criticism of excluding workers from crucial policy discussions. Moreover, private and public climate investors overwhelmingly view labour as a cost to be minimized rather than as an asset that can power productivity. At their worst, these actors can be rabidly anti-union, too often flouting basic labour rights and standards with impunity.
Workers’ Voices Rising
Outside the COP process, however, workers’ voices are rising. They are not waiting for the bankers and technocrats to lead them to the promised land of green jobs.
Workers are shaping the new economy themselves through collective bargaining. In the United States, the United Auto Workers recently reached an agreement with General Motors that the company’s electric vehicle battery plants will be covered by its national contract with the union.
As a Detroit-based, battery-plant worker said of the deal: “A just transition to us means you can keep your job, you’re still making good money, you can still put a roof over your house and feed the family like autoworkers have been able to do for decades.”
Another major union, IF Metall, has called for a strike by 600 mechanics and technicians servicing Tesla vehicles in 16 cities across Sweden, where Tesla is the country’s top-selling car. Here the immovable object, Tesla’s corporate policy of not signing a collective agreement in any country, is facing the unstoppable force of the Swedish labour movement.
In the Global South, fossil-fuel industry unions and their political allies are digging in for the right to define the policy mix and moderate the velocity of the transition to renewable energy. Earlier this year South Africa’s energy minister, formerly a mineworker union leader, criticized Canada for its concessional loan to a project converting a local coal burning power plant to solar, wind and battery storage.
Involving workers in climate deliberations will not be simple or fast. In the short to medium term, some workers will want to speed up change while others will try to delay it. This is how negotiations work. It is the price of creating a transition that is truly just.
Just Transition with Workers
Without the direct participation of workers, net zero and a just transition simply won’t be achievable. At every level, from the local to the global, climate-action advocates should forge respectful and reciprocal partnerships with trade unions and other labour-rights organizations, guided by three propositions:
1. Workers possess valuable, nuanced knowledge about their industries’ potential for transition. As a project on smart, sustainable mobility recently concluded, “Incorporating the expert knowledge of workers in all these industries is crucial to the success of a just transition in mobility.”
2. Business leaders can and should affirm workers’ right to organize and learn about and engage with unions with integrity and authenticity. In fact, venture capitalist Roy Bahat and management scholar Thomas Kochan argue that “one of the most critical CEO skills of the future will be leading the organized workforce.”
3. The capital pools of pension funds are the joint creation of workers and their employers and should be increasingly allocated to the green economy. Employee representatives on pension fund boards and networks can work with their business peers to strengthen investment policies and performance metrics that are both pro-climate and pro-worker.
Next year’s COP 29 may be held in Germany, a nation with strong labour laws and practices. A fitting theme for the conference would be “Workers creating the just transition”. It would be about time.
Edward Jackson is a university professor, management consultant and editor, and a co-founder of the McLeod Group. Image: International Trade Union Confederation.