Earth Strike

By Franziska Heinisch and Julia Kaiser - Progressive International, March 31, 2023

On 3 March 2023, on the occasion of the global climate strike, a special political alliance took to the streets in Germany: side-by-side, climate activists and public transport workers went on strike. In at least 30 cities, climate activists visited workers’ pickets and brought them along for joint demonstrations. According to Fridays for Future, a total of 200,000 people participated in the nation-wide protests.

The way employers reacted showed that this alliance of workers and climate activists is a potential threat to the ruling class. Steffen Kampeter, CEO of the Confederation of German Employers (BDA), publicly denounced them on the morning of the joint strike day as “a dangerous crossing of the line”. He said that the German service union ver.di was blurring the lines between strikes for collective bargaining and general political concerns, thereby entering the terrain of political strikes. To the delight of campaigners, this accusation contributed to the fact that the joint strike dominated the news that day.

This unity between the labour and climate movement was long overdue: a wider and more affordable public transport system is one of the central measures to achieve socially just climate protection. However, the mobility transition in Germany has so far been made impossible: many employees in local transport work in shifts under terrible conditions and barely make ends meet — with salaries just above the minimum wage. Many therefore decide to quit their jobs. There is already a shortage of tens of thousands of drivers. And this problem will only get worse in the coming years. At the same time, ticket prices are rising steadily and the passenger transport systems, especially in rural areas, are thinned out.

By staff - Free Our Unions, October 12, 2022

Around 80 activists from a range of campaign groups and unions protested outside the Department for Business, Energy, and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) on 10 October, as part of an action called by Free Our Unions and Earth Strike UK’s Empower the Unions initiative. As far as we know, this is the first piece of direct action called specifically to protest the Truss government’s plans for new anti-union laws since Truss revealed the policy.

BEIS was chosen because it will likely be central to developing the legislation for new restrictions on strikes, and because it is a key department in terms of climate policy. Free Our Unions has sought active coordination with activists from the climate movement, and Earth Strike UK’s Empower the Unions initiative seeks to highlight the specific ways in which anti-union laws constrain workers’ ability to take action in defence of the climate.

Speakers at the protest included Mark Boothroyd (A&E nurse and Unite activist); Sab (Earth Strike UK activist and Industrial Workers of the World organier); Ruth Cashman (Lambeth Unison); Jared Wood (RMT London Transport Regional Organiser); Ria Patel (Green Party Equality and Diversity spokesperson); EC (PCS rep); Andy Warren (firefighter and local rep for the FBU); Hamish (Exctinction Rebellion Trade Unionists); and Benedict Flexen (Earth Strike UK: Empower the Unions).

Speeches were punctuated by chanting, accompanied by drumming from the Extinction Rebellion samba band.

Following the protest, an assembly took place in a venue nearby, discussing various aspects of the politics of anti-union laws, and proposals for campaigning on the issue forward in our workplaces and unions.

By Staff - Earth Strike UK, May 8, 2022

A joint statement initiated by Earth Strike UK, IWW Environmental Committee and the Pan-Hellenic Energy Federation (PEF).

Διαβάστε τη δήλωση στα ελληνικά: www.earth-strike.co.uk/kavala-solidarity-greek

Kavala Oil, owned by London based Energean, owns and operates the only oil field in Greece. In April 2021, Energean announced a unilateral restructuring program which in mass layoffs with the intention to replacing highly skilled and experienced permanent workers with unskilled contract workers. Energean also announced €6 million cuts in workers’ salaries and allowances. All of this is despite company received €100 million of Covid relief funding from the European Union specifically to maintain employment during the pandemic.

In December 2021 the Greek State chose to side with the employer and sent riot police to attack the union workers, who remained at the facility to defend their jobs and ensure the safe operation of the site. Police dangerously used flash grenades at an oil facility – one of the grenades hit a power supply and caused a power cut at the site. Seventeen workers were arrested.

In January 2022, the workers went on work retention (a form of strike) against the insufficient safety measures taken by the company and against the mass layoffs. Despite the incredible effort of the union workers, the layoffs have continued and all 185 workers at the plant have now been dismissed, leaving the facility unstaffed.

The Union of Workers of Kavala Oil have continuously pointed out the dangers arising from the unacceptable decisions of Energean’s management, which lead to unsafe operation of the Facilities with impacts on employees and the local community as well as on the environment. Energean refused to listen.

The workers’ fears about safety proved to be well founded. On Saturday the 9th of April 2022, an explosion occurred, and a large fire broke out in a tank of the Kavala Oil facilities, which contained water and residues of oils and petroleum products. It took the firefighters more than 5 hours to extinguish the fire. The facility was not in operation and fortunately there were no injuries. The fire confirms the union’s concerns that without the necessary and qualified workforce; the safe operation of the facility cannot be achieved, risking not only the safety of the staff but also the environmental contamination.

Transitioning away from fossil fuels is necessary if we are to halt the climate crisis. But it must be a just transition, based on fundamental principles of justice and prosperity for workers and communities, maintaining jobs through education and retraining where required. A Just Transition must be lead and carried out by the Unions and the workers themselves. The sacking of 185 workers is not a just transition! Energean themselves admit they will only end oil extraction once it stops being profitable.

The sacking of 185 highly skilled and experienced workers is not a just transition. It does nothing to protect the environment and in fact only creates further danger. These layoffs only serve the interests of the bosses, whose goal is to boost profit and break the power of the union. It is against the interests of all for these workers to be dismissed and their experience wasted.

We stand in solidarity with the workers of Kavala Oil and call on all workers and environmental activists to support their struggle! We demand the re-employment of the 185 skilled workers with many years of experience who were illegally dismissed, to ensure the safe operation of the facilities at Kavala Oil. An injury to one is an injury to all!

By staff - Earth Strike UK, March 30, 2022

We are pleased to announce that the Bristol branch of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) has become the first union branch to affiliate with Earth Strike UK. The IWW organises workers of all types along industrial lines. One of its stated aims is to “live in harmony with the Earth”. We look forward to working with them to bring the struggle against the climate crisis to their members’ workplaces. We anticipate this will be the first of many branches and unions to join our cause.

The climate crisis will hit the global working class the hardest. By withdrawing our labour and taking other actions we can change the catastrophic course we are currently on. Our individual efforts to reduce emissions will not be enough to avert disaster, and typical protests can be easily ignored by politicians and the capitalist class – those most responsible for the crisis we find ourselves in. We must revive worker and union power and hit those who control the economy where it hurts by disrupting their ability to make profits. Together, we aim to free unions from restrictive anti-union laws through our Empower the Unions campaign, whilst also winning environmental improvements in our workplaces. Step by step we will create the solidarity and organisation necessary to carry out a global general strike against the climate crisis. Bristol IWW has brought us one step closer to achieving these aims by affiliating with us.

If you would like your union or union branch to affiliate with Earth Strike UK please follow this link where you can find a model motion to use https://earth-strike.co.uk/action/union-affiliation/

We need unions of all types, in all industries, to join the cause!

By Earth Strike UK - Earth Strike, February 18, 2022

In November last year, representatives and leaders of most of the world’s governments met in Glasgow to discuss how to respond to the climate crisis, and hopefully make a deal that would save us from the worst effects of climate change. They failed. While the conference did end with an agreement, it was not sufficient to keep global temperature rises below 1.5°C.

COP26 was supported by a wide variety of major multinational corporations, whose involvement, if not directly responsible for the failure of the conference, at least gives an insight into the deeply flawed approach of those in power that did ultimately result in COP26 (and every other climate conference before it) ending so disastrously.

Twenty three corporations are listed as supporting the conference in some capacity, either as Principal Partners, Partners, or Providers. These corporate sponsors provided financial support as well as services in kind. While it’s difficult to know how much each of these corporations paid, we know that their contributions did not go unrewarded.

In exchange, they received a variety of perks in the form of publicity, networking and marketing opportunities. This is most apparent for the eleven Principal Partners, whose logos feature on the COP26 website, appearing at the bottom of almost every page. This is all in addition to the marketing and promotional material they created for themselves.

The Principal Partners were given exhibition space inside the ‘green zone’, the part of the conference that was accessible to the public, as well as the opportunity to hold events as part of the official green zone program.

The business case for being a COP sponsor is clear, and has little to do with effecting genuine, meaningful change. Sponsorship of COP26 was an opportunity for corporations to present themselves as environmentally conscious (softening their image and maybe gaining an edge with environmentally minded consumers), while also allowing them to guide climate and environmental policy in a way that is profitable to them.

Despite their involvement in COP26, and their apparent desire to address the climate crisis, these corporations continue to produce enormous amounts of carbon dioxide. A recent investigation by the Ferret, an independent non-profit media cooperative in Scotland, found that the eleven Principal Partners alone were responsible for 350 million tonnes of C02 emissions in 2020, more than the total produced within the UK that year — although the companies claim that some of these emissions may have been counted more than once.

The sponsors claim to have bold plans for decarbonisation. They also point towards reductions in CO2 emissions they have already made, however these reductions are not always what they seem.

Take the case of Scottish Power. It proudly claims that all the energy it generates comes from wind power, however it achieved this by selling its fossil fuel investments to Drax, which runs the highly polluting biomass power station in Yorkshire, for £702 million in 2018. In effect, not only did Scottish Power fail to reduce the total amount of carbon emissions being produced, but profited from its continuation.

The fact that environmental destruction can be obscured by the sale of fossil fuel assets from one corporation to another proves that the corporate sponsors cannot be viewed in isolation. They are all part of a self-sustaining and self-reinforcing network of capitalism. Even if we were to accept Scottish Power’s claim of only producing renewable energy, we should remember that it is a subsidiary of the Spanish company Iberdrola, which has built four new gas power plants in Mexico since 2019.

Likewise, Microsoft has committed to go “carbon negative” by 2030, meaning that it would pull more carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere than it emits. This pledge is significantly undermined by the services it provides to the oil and gas industry. In 2019, Microsoft partnered with the oil giant ExxonMobil to provide software to improve the efficiency of its operations in the Permian Basin oil field. It is estimated that Microsoft services could allow ExxonMobil to extract 50,000 more barrels of oil per day by 2025 than it otherwise would have.

DLA Piper, a multinational legal firm and COP26 provider, likes to boast its support for corporate environmental initiatives, decarbonisation and the renewable energy industry. But it also provides direct practical support for the oil, gas and mining industries through legal representation and consultancy. DLA Piper enables oil and gas exploration, extraction and transportation by supporting licensing bids, financing, asset acquisition, arbitration, and dispute resolution within the industry.

Multinational corporations operate in a complex network of capital, tied together by ownership, commerce and consultancy. Even if at first glance a corporation doesn’t seem to be harmful, it still plays its part in keeping the process going.