Eco-Unions · Transitioning to a Low Carbon Economy: Trade Unions and the Jobs Versus Environment Dilemma

Transitioning to a Low Carbon Economy: Trade Unions and the Jobs Versus Environment Dilemma

Tackling the global crisis of human-induced climate change is the most urgent challenge of the 21st century. To help surmount this challenge the European Union has subscribed to the Paris Agreement and the seventeen goals of the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Transitioning to a low carbon economy requires a broad coalition of government’s, supranational institutions, corporations, and civil society actors. Among these, trade unions have a crucial role to play because the most significant path to decarbonization will be through a transformation of industrial production. While trade unions have a demonstrated capacity to help make industrial processes more sustainable, their action is limited by a constant “jobs versus environment’ dilemma between protecting the environment and protecting jobs in polluting industries. ‘Transitioning to a Low Carbon Economy: Trade Unions and the Jobs versus Environment Dilemma’ (EcoUnions) is a project aimed at producing much-needed new knowledge on how trade unions are navigating the “jobs versus environment” dilemma. More specifically, it focuses on two new labour-environmental coalitions comprising trade unions, environmental organisations, and social justice organisations. Theoretically, the goal of Eco-Unions is to develop a multi-level analytical framework that can help guide future enquiry and allow for a holistic understanding of the interconnected arenas in which trade unions are navigating the “jobs versus environment” dilemma: internal union strategizing, climate policy-making, and public debate. Empirically, Eco-Unions is conceived as a comparative, interdisciplinary, and multi-method project that a) examines and compares the approach of labour-environmental coalitions in Denmark and the United Kingdom, b) explores how internal and external dynamics shape trade union action, and c) determines what role trade unions play in public debate on the green transition. The first part of the research programme involved the semi-systematic and interdisciplinary review of the existing literature according to the three levels of the research design and drawing on the fields of employment relations, environmental sociology, and environmental labour studies. The empirical part focused on the organizational questions of union strategy, institutional questions of union involvement in climate-policy-making, and societal questions of union involvement in public debates. The review of the literature and the empirical work were then deployed to develop an analytical framework centered on the concept of discursive power that can guide future research in this flourishing new area of scholarship.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union