Public and Commercial Services Union: Action is Needed Now on Climate Change

By Staff - Public and Commercial Services Union, November 26, 2021

Addressing climate change and environmental damage should be used as an opportunity to improve the lives of all workers and communities.

The government still lacks a plan for how it will implement its net zero carbon targets, including ensuring we have a fully resourced civil service that is set up to deliver on this. PCS members are critical to a Just Transition, for example in DWP ensuring the temporary work coaches hired to deal with the Covid crisis are made permanent to deal with the climate crisis and help workers transition into jobs in the so called green economy.

PCS ‘s climate change sub committee has written the following statement:

COP26 – no time for tears, we need action

PCS stands with the chorus of voices angry at the outcome of the COP26 climate negotiations but determined to ensure that the era of injustice is over. As UK COP President Alok Sharmer’s banged his gavel to signal agreement on the Glasgow Climate Pact his call for unity rang hollow, just as his tears.

There can be no question this is a pact for elite nations and the powerful fossil fuel lobby against workers and peoples across the world. The shameless disregard for the nations and peoples on the frontline of climate change pleading to be listened to, was paralleled by the voices of workers outside the negotiating rooms on strike in Glasgow throughout the COP. A recognition that climate justice is workers justice, and workers justice is climate justice.

As part of the COP26 coalition, PCS has been proud to be part of mobilising our movement around the COP alongside the wider climate justice movement. But this mobilisation does not stop here. As we set out in our briefing to members ahead of the COP, market forces won’t save our jobs and what we have been witnessing is a reconfiguring of the economy to ensure the greening of profits.

Whilst financiers at the COP set out the new net zero finance architecture, the business-as -usual tax avoidance and evasion remains in place. We need a new pro-public architecture for a decarbonised economy with assets such as energy, water, transport and communications returned to full public ownership with democratic controls.

There will be no just transition if left to the bankers, and we cannot be fooled by our politicians greenwashing their so called climate ambition in the language of the climate movement. Alok Sharmer and Mark Carney are not part of our movement, they are against our class and we need to ensure we build a wall of solidarity against their next onslaught.

For example, telling us that the transition is too expensive, when not doing the things we urgently need to do now is an irreversible cost. This includes ensuring we have a fully resourced and well paid civil service that can help deliver a whole economy decarbonisation plan for workers and their communities. As we learnt from the Covid crisis, there is money, and will not be able to deliver on climate action with a pared down civil service as proposed in the last budget announcement.

PCS members are at the heart of the Just Transition. Our members have a vital role to play in the work of collecting taxes, delivering social protections such as real living wage benefits, and supporting workers into new green jobs; looking after green spaces and public facilities such as in the Royal Parks or getting fossil fuel funders out of our museums and galleries; growing the trees for reforestation.

With the UK a signatory to the Just Transition statement announced at the COP, PCS will be seeking a discussion on how this will be taken forward within the UK Civil Service, and other of our employers. We will also be stepping up our efforts across the union to put demands for action on climate.

Climate change is already here, impacting our sisters and brothers at home and around the world. There is no time to waste. We need to build on the alliances we have made mobilising for the COP, strengthening our power to win on climate and to win for workers.

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author.