Labor Network for Sustainability is dedicated to engaging trade unions, workers and their allies to support economic, social, and environmental sustainability. We are funded with the generous support of the Energy Foundation.

From our perspective, efforts to engage unions on environmental issues too often resemble a series of tactics in search of a strategy. The Labor Network For Sustainability aims to provide a strategic, self-interest based framework for educating unions about climate change and sustainability.  At the same time, the environmental movement has too often remained tone-deaf to the concerns and interests of working people. To address this shortcoming, LNS  works to educate environmental organizations about the concerns, interests, and culture of organized labor.

LNS believes that those who want to save our planet from climate destruction urgently need a strategy engaging the trade union movement and to maximize labor’s positive role.

A strategy to maximize labor’s positive role would be successful if it increased:

• labor support for effective climate legislation and treaties
• labor initiatives to change management practices
• member education on the reality of global warming and the need to combat it
• public support for climate protection
• active participation in coalitions promoting climate protection
• initiative in training for transformation to a low-carbon future
• labor involvement with the transition effort at every level

LNS has several characteristics that help define a specific role for it in helping bring about change in labor’s approach to climate change:

• A unique ability to build bridges between the labor and environmental movements based on our lifelong activism in both
• An understanding that the climate change crisis must be addressed as a devastating threat in its own right, not just as a vehicle that might be used to achieve some other objective (e.g. changes in trading system or green jobs)
• a simultaneous understanding of the interests that workers and unions currently perceive and ability to think through how these could evolve to fuller support of climate protection.
• knowledge of the different interests, traditions, and approaches in different parts of the labor movement that affect their approach to global warming.
• awareness that, while “green jobs” are a building block for labor commitment to climate protection, it is also necessary to reduce and eventually halt non-green production that destroys the planet.
• an organizing perspective that promotes change by connecting and encouraging change agents at all levels throughout the labor movement.
• a broad vision of sustainability as an orientation that can provide labor a way to reconstruct itself as a champion for an environmentally and climate friendly transformation of the national and global economy.
• primary commitments are to climate protection and protection of working people as a whole, not to any one organization or organized interest.

Here’s a video of Executive Director Joe Uehlein talking about why we started the LNS: