Climate Strikes

In a surprise victory, Brandon Johnson, formerly an organizer for the Chicago Teachers Union, has just won election as Chicago’s mayor. He ran in part on a program for a “Chicago Green New Deal” which includes…

According to a new study by the nonprofit Energy Futures Initiative, the Inflation Reduction Act passed last summer will create 1.5 million climate and energy security jobs by 2030 – seven years from now. Over 100,000 will be in manufacturing, with 60,000 coming from battery production alone.

Powershift is a network that mobilize the collective power of young people to mitigate climate change and create a just, clean energy future and resilient, thriving communities for all. In April a Powershift Convergence brought together thousands of climate and social justice activists in Bvlbancha/New Orleans.

Conventional wisdom often holds that the interest of workers in jobs and the interest of environmentalists in preserving nature are diametrically opposed, and that they inevitably lead to conflict between environmental advocates and organized labor. A small but growing Labor-Climate Movement, however, is challenging that frame. It is trying to draw the labor movement into the fight for climate protection while persuading the climate movement that it must take a stand for workers and social justice.

The Labor Network for Sustainability recently endorsed the call of Railroad Workers United for public ownership of American railroads. A video panel on railroad nationalization sponsored by Solutionary Rail included LNS Transit Organizer Bakari Height.

How are workers around the world viewing climate change and its impact on their jobs, their labor conditions, and their industries? For a quick, revealing glimpse at the answer, take a look at the 15-minute video Talking Union, Talking Climate. It provides a dialogue among workers in California, Norway, and Nigeria about labor conditions in the fossil fuel industry, the shift to a green economy, and what a just transition might be.

At a recent panel on Working Class Environmentalism at UMass Amherst, organizers from the building trades, education, and human service sectors discussed how the labor movement can organize workers around both immediate workplace issues and bigger-picture problems like the global climate crisis, and how unions can address those problems at the bargaining table and beyond.

True Transition, an organization composed of fossil fuel workers, recently released their “American Oil and Gas Workers Survey.” It provides the answers given by 1649 oil and gas workers to 38 questions about their jobs and work lives.

Workers are rising up and taking cities back from capitalists and corporations. Unions are negotiating for benefits for the community and not just members, emerging from behind the fortress. This moment of labor insurgency in the aftermath of the pandemic, which laid bare the disposability of the working class, has echoes in historical struggles to make cities more livable and democratic.

David Hughes is an anthropologist of the climate emergency and energy democracy. He works at Rutgers University, where he has served as president of the faculty and grad worker union.