Norway

By Union Jake, Daniel Swedin, and Adam Keller - Valley Labor Report, December 26, 2023

By Union Jake and Adam Keller - Valley Labor Report, December 12, 2023

By Union Jake and Adam Keller - Valley Labor Report, November 21, 2023

By Ryan Cooper - The Prospect, November 21, 2023

Electric-vehicle manufacturer Tesla has been involved in an escalating dispute with IF Metall, the trade union representing its mechanics in Sweden. After several years of the union trying to get the company to sign a collective-bargaining agreement, the mechanics went on strike on October 27—and now Tesla is facing a full-blown campaign of sympathy strikes. Dockworkers are refusing to unload Tesla shipments, electricians will not repair Tesla chargers, cleaning companies will not service Tesla buildings, and now as of Monday, the Swedish postal union is refusing to deliver Tesla mail and packages.

As my colleague Harold Meyerson noted last week, these kind of strikes are largely illegal in the United States thanks to the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act (though the exact legal details, as usual in the American context, are hideously complicated). Carry out a sympathy strike in the States and you might be fired, see your union decertified, or even be sued for damages.

In theory, Tesla could just abandon the Swedish market, but it is quite large relative to its size—nearly 45 percent of auto sales there this year have been EVs, and the Tesla Model Y has been the best-selling vehicle by a big margin. So it’s worth examining the Tesla situation for some lessons.

This is far from the first time an arrogant foreign business, convinced that it can impose U.S.-style hyper-exploitative labor relations at will, has tangled with Nordic union power and been unceremoniously crushed. Probably the most famous previous example was when McDonald’s tried to bigfoot the Danish labor movement in the 1980s by refusing to sign any union contracts.

By staff - Labor Network for Sustainability, April 30, 2023

How are workers around the world viewing climate change and its impact on their jobs, their labor conditions, and their industries? For a quick, revealing glimpse at the answer, take a look at the 15-minute video Talking Union, Talking Climate. It provides a dialogue among workers in California, Norway, and Nigeria about labor conditions in the fossil fuel industry, the shift to a green economy, and what a just transition might be.

The video was made by Vivian Price, a former union electrician, now professor and researcher on labor and climate change and a co-author of the LNS report Workers and Communities in Transition: Report of the Just Transition Listening Project. The three workers are Charlie Sandoval, United Steelworkers, California, Kristian Enoksen,Industri Energi, Norway, Orike Didi, PENGASSAN, Nigeria.

By Peder Ressem Østring - Just Transition Research Collaborative, February 24, 2023

The recycling of oil rigs can provide new jobs within the circular economy, particularly beneficial for oil-dependent regions. If we get it right, the process of cleaning up after the fossil economy can itself serve as a bridge from fossil dependency towards a just transition.

Globally, there are over 7000 offshore oil and gas platforms. Together with other structures and pipelines, these form an impressive built environment. If we are to have a fighting chance of keeping global warming well below 2°C however, virtually all of these installations would have to be shut down, dismantled and recycled. This process — known as offshore decommissioning — is already taking place, but will see a dramatic increase in the coming decade. It will be increasingly necessary to confront the ways in which decommissioned infrastructure is handled, both with regards to the environment and labour conditions.

A case study of the decommissioning of oil and gas infrastructure in the North Sea shows some of both the possibilities and challenges decommissioning presents in terms of a just transition.

While some oil companies would like to leave the oil platforms in the sea, eagerly promoting the idea of repurposing old rigs as artificial reefs, this is not allowed under current regulation. After the plans of Royal Dutch Shell of dumping the oil storage tanker Brent Spar in the North Sea in the 1990s was met with massive public scrutiny and campaigns from environmental organizations, regulations came in place that effectively banned the practice of abandoning manufactured structures in the North-East Atlantic.

Companies have since sought other ways of disposing of the problem with structures put out of commission. Another approach for cutting costs for the oil supermajors has been to send old floating rigs for breaking in the global South. This has taken place under horrendous conditions for both workers and the environment, as has been uncovered by the BBC.

Both these false solutions are in reality ways of externalizing costs of cleaning up after the fossil companies. Both approaches should be rejected, while insisting on the principle that the polluter should pay.

By Our Changing Climate - Our Changing Climate, February 10, 2023

By various - Bergen Global CMI/UiB, February 8, 2023

By John Foran - Sierra Club, December 1, 2021

As COP 26 began, Greta Thunberg summed up the whole thing quite succinctly using just one word, three times:  Blah blah blah.

And as it ended two weeks later, she tweeted:

The #COP26 is over. Here’s a brief summary: Blah, blah, blah. But the real work continues outside these halls. And we will never give up, ever [emphasis added].

And indeed, COP 26 was an epic fail, even by the dismal standards of the 25 COPs that preceded it, but at the same time, the global climate justice movement made some much needed forward progress.

Mirko Nikolic, Editor, et. al. - Yes to Life, No to Mining, September 2021

This report from Yes to Life, No to Mining Network (YLNM) explores how and why many nations – and the mining industry – are re-framing mining as a solution to climate change in order to facilitate domestic extraction of so-called ‘strategic’, ‘critical’ and ‘transition’ minerals required for renewable energy, military and digital technologies. 

Finnish, Norwegian and Swedish authorities have granted concessions for tens of thousands of hectares of land, with mining pressure increasing particularly dramatically in Sápmi – the home territory of the Indigenous Sámi Peoples. 

YLNM’s new research examines state and corporate claims that mining in Europe represents a gold standard of regulation and corporate practice that justifies creating new mining sacrifice zones in the name of climate action.

Without exception, the authors – in all nations – report a vast gap between this rhetoric and the realities of mining at Europe’s new extractive frontiers, highlighting systemic rights violations and ecological harm.

Read the text (PDF).