Safe Landing

By Gareth Dale - Green European Journal, June 12, 2024

Inspiration for decarbonising industry and creating green jobs is within the hands of those already facing precarity in today’s economically unstable times. A resilient history of workers’ initiatives overcoming redundancies, alongside recent activist, trade-union, and workforce collaborations, provides concrete examples for empowered transitioning.

In 2023, when Europe was blasted by a record-breaking heatwave named after Cerberus (the three-headed hound of Hades), workers organised to demand protection from the extreme heat. In Athens, employees at the Acropolis and other historical sites went on strike for four hours each day. In Rome, refuse collectors threatened to strike if they were forced to work during periods of peak heat. Elsewhere in Italy, public transport workers demanded air-conditioned vehicles, and workers at a battery plant in Abruzzo issued a strike threat in protest at the imposition of working in “asphyxiating heat”. 

One could almost say that the Ancient Greeks foretold today’s climate crisis when they euphemistically referred to Hades, god of the dead, as “Plouton” (giver of wealth). The reference is to the materials – in their day, silver, in ours, fossil fuels and critical minerals – that, after extraction from the Underworld, line the pockets of plutocrats. Modern society’s plutocratic structure explains the astonishingly sluggish response to climate breakdown. The much-touted green transition is barely taking place, at least if the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases is taken as a yardstick. These continue to rise, even accelerate, and likewise the rate of global heating. The transition remains in the grip of powerful and wealthy institutions that – even if we leave aside motivations of avarice or greed for status – are systemically constrained to put the accumulation of capital above the habitability of the planet.

Against this backdrop, the politics of transition is class struggle beyond that of workers defending themselves and their communities against weather emergencies. That is part of the picture, of course. But class struggle is, above all, evident in the liberal establishment seeking to displace transition costs onto the masses, even as it presides over ever crasser wealth polarisation. From this, resistance inevitably flows. The question is, what form will it take? 

Some takes the form of an anti-environmental backlash, instigated or colonised by conservative and far-right forces. While posing as allies of “working families”, they denigrate the most fundamental of workers’ needs: for a habitable planet. Some takes a progressive form, the classic case being the gilets jaunes in France. When Emmanuel Macron’s government hiked “green taxes” on fossil fuels as a signal for consumers to buy more fuel-efficient cars, the rural working poor and lower-middle classes, unable to afford the switch, donned yellow safety vests and rose in revolt. Although France’s labour-movement radicals joined the cause, they were unable to cohere into a political force capable of offering alternative solutions to the social and environmental crises.

By Caroline Drischel, Todd Smith, Nidhi Pant, Rachael Ross, and Hannah Boomgaarden - Safe Landing, May 20, 2024

By Finlay Asher - Safe Landing, May 9, 2024

By staff - Safe Landing, April 16, 2024

Safe Landing recently attended the “Keep Grangemouth Working” event organised by Unite the Union at the Scottish Trade Union Congress (STUC) conference in Dundee, Scotland. Grangemouth refinery is a classic case of an ‘unjust’ transition where poor industrial planning for the shift to low-carbon operations has led to major impacts for the livelihoods of workers and communities in the area. 

There are definitely lessons to be learned for the aviation industry – particularly as a sustainable future for the fuels sector is so intertwined with sustainable aviation!

Grangemouth Refinery: Scotland’s only refinery facing imminent closure

Grangemouth Refinery is one of the six remaining refineries in the UK and the only refinery in Scotland. It produces jet fuel which supplies airports at Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen and Newcastle. It also produces a significant proportion of Scotland’s petrol and diesel. It’s estimated to account for approximately 8% of Scotland’s manufacturing base. 

In November 2023, the refinery owners, Petroineos, announced that the refinery could cease operations as soon as 2025 following an 18 month process to convert the facility to a fuel import/export terminal only. This could mean up to 500 jobs are lost at the site. 

This event was focused on the fight to maintain those jobs. 

This is a real life example of potential job losses from high-carbon infrastructure as the low-carbon transition (e.g. from petrol/diesel to electric vehicles) takes place. This could equally occur at an airport or aviation production facility unless transition plans are developed early, and future-proof investments are made. As Grangemouth produces jet fuel, there’s also an obvious overlap with the necessary transition required in aviation.

By Finlay Asher, et. al - Safe Landing, February 6, 2024

By Todd Smith - Safe Landing, January 28, 2024

By Finlay Asher, Kieran, and Marius - Aerospace Ambition, December 22, 2023

By Njigina - Safe Landing, August 8, 2023

By Tahir Latif, et. al. - Public and Commercial Services Union, July 2023

PCS has always argued that protecting the long term job security of our members in aviation means recognising the impact of flying on the environment, and vice versa.

Technical fixes – new fuels, better engines, more efficient aircraft – will help but not solve the challenge of climate change. To meet the UK’s climate targets will involve managing down.

As a trade union we want to ensure a reduction in flying does not lead to an accompanying loss of jobs but to a planned transition of workers to the jobs required in a greener aviation industry that is part of a broader integrated transport system, owned by and run for the public, and that meets its climate commitments.

Download a copy of this publication here (PDF).

By Finlay Asher - Safe Landing, May 4, 2023

Finlay Asher of Safe Landing gave this talk on 4th May 2023 as part of the "Aero Lectures" series organised by the HAW University in Hamburg in cooperation with DGLR, Royal Aeronautical Society (RAeS), ZAL and VDI. He covered the need for aviation decarbonisation, the issues with various technological and policy options, what Safe Landing's positive view of the future for air travel is, and how we think we can achieve it (worker-led movements and Aviation Workers' Assemblies.)