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Chico Mendes

The Scottish Greens must embed trade union representation into its major decision making bodies

By Jen Bell and Guy Ingerson - Bright Green, October 9, 2022

The impacts of climate breakdown are becoming more apparent every year. In the last few months alone we have witnessed heatwaves, drought, and floods. These extreme weather events have devastated communities, directly in places such as Pakistan, and indirectly closer to home, with rising food prices. Bold action is needed for our species to survive and thrive beyond this century.

We know what needs to be done, but too often vested interests seek to delay or subvert the action required. If we allow politicians, focused on their own ambitions, and corporations, concerned only with their profits, to control the transition, we’ll end up with more of the same. Luckily, Greens have an ally on our journey: the trade union movement. If we’re serious about achieving social justice for all, we need to stand shoulder to shoulder with the workers who’ve been fighting for it.

For over 150 years, trade unionists have known that corporations and bosses don’t care one bit about the value of our lives or our environment. We’re all just numbers on a balance sheet to them. But when we organise, or withdraw our labour, we smack them upside the head with reality. As RMT’s senior assistant general secretary, Eddie Dempsey, said: “There isn’t a train that moves in this country, not a bin gets emptied, or a shelf that gets stacked without the kind, generous permission of the working class.”

Whether it be a living wage, health and safety regulations, limits on working hours, paid holidays, parental leave, and much more – trade unionists have written the text book on how to fight for the core Green values of social, economic and environmental justice. They understand that our lives and our work should have value and dignity.

Women and Nature: Towards an Ecosocialist Feminism

Workers and Environmentalists of the World, Unite!

By Stefania Barca - RoarMag.org, June 3, 2014

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’s.

The conflict between labor and the environment is a neoliberal construct. What we need is a broad coalition that can fundamentally transform production.

Nowadays it sounds so familiar, almost natural: the mutually exclusive demands and apparently opposing agendas of labor and the environmentalist movement. But in fact, this artificial division is nothing more than a crucial neoliberal strategy to divide two of the most powerful social movements of the industrial era, whose alliance could be a dangerous liaison with the capacity to call into question the very essence of the capitalist “treadmill of production.” It is thus essential that labor and environmental/public health organizations gain a historical perspective on their current state of conflict and become aware of the revolutionary potential of a common political project.

One place where this fact has become much clearer in recent years is the Italian city of Taranto, Apulia, where a number of citizens’ organizations and “committees” emerged in response to one of the most serious occupational, environmental and public health crises of the last decade. These organizations and committees have now begun mobilizing different resources and forms of action — from cyber-activism and film-making to street demonstrations and campaigning — to fight against the occupational blackmail of a local employer. At the last May Day celebrations, they managed to gather more than 100,000 people for a self-organized, crowd-sourced mass concert, held in open competition with the one traditionally organized in Rome by the trade unions confederation and RAI, the national public television.

Green Unionists: for Jobs and the Environment

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