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The need for a large-scale Just Transition for workers and communities has never been more urgent as more than 30 million workers have applied for unemployment in the past month. Many face the likelihood that they will never go back to their previous jobs. The Coronavirus pandemic and the economic crisis developing as a result offer an important barometer of whether and how we are prepared socially, politically and economically for massive changes to our economy. The shift to the green economy we need in order to confront the climate crisis will require economic shifts on a similar scale.
On May 27, the Labor Network for Sustainability launched its Just Transition Listening Project with an online panel on “The Pandemic, The Economic Crisis and Just Transition.” The panel will feature renowned linguist, historian and philosopher Noam Chomsky and economic experts Thea Lee, President of the Economic Policy Institute, and Robert Pollin, Co-Director of the Political Economy Research Institute. The panelists will offer their perspectives and projections of how the economic crisis will unfold in the months and years to come and what we must do about it.
The Just Transition Listening Project will offer us important lessons, shared through the experience of workers and community members who have been through such transitions, are going through them now and who face them in the near future. Watch “The Pandemic, The Economic Crisis and Just Transition.”