Teen Vogue: Young Workers Fight Climate Change

By staff - Labor Network for Sustainability, August 2022

“Young Workers Are Bridging the Climate and Labor Movements” – that’s the title of an article by journalist Leanna First-Arai that just appeared in Teen Vogue and Truthout. It features the Labor Network for Sustainability’s Young Workers Listening Project.

The article reports that the LNS Young Workers Listening Project is analyzing 400 surveys and 70 in-depth interviews with young workers exploring “young people’s experiences dealing with the impacts of climate change on the job” and their opinion on “how the labor and climate movements could further strengthen one another.”

Joshua Dedmond, youth organizer with the Labor Network for Sustainability (LNS), told First-Arai that, based on preliminary survey results, “There is a sincere yearning” by young workers to “bridge these existing chasms between the labor movement and climate justice movement.”

Dedmond said, “Younger workers are quicker to see the connections between intersecting crises they’re dealing with.” They bring “a refreshing analysis” that “we don’t have to trade off good jobs for the environment and we don’t have to trade off the environment for good jobs — we can very much work in concert.”

Young people in the labor movement, he added, “want to bargain on climate issues in contract negotiations.”

First-Arai reports that, “The Labor Network for Sustainability is in the midst of planning a September Young Workers Climate Convergence in Los Angeles,”… “where they’ll bring together workers across professions who want labor to lead on climate.”

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.