green unionism

By Eleanor Penny - Red Pepper, February 1, 2019

Whenever the government fumbles around desperately for the story they can sell as success, they often reach for the following statistic: that since the Conservatives took power in 2010, unemployment has dropped, and more people than ever are in work. But this simple story conceals a much more worrying truth – that work simply doesn’t guarantee a decent standard of living any more. Official statistics gloss over the effects of semi-employment, self-employment, self-unemployment, zero-hours contracts and a shrinking in real wages, leaving four million people in in-work poverty. The sluggish growth of the apparent recovery is distorted by financial markets, and concentrated largely in the hands of the wealthy – particularly in the South of England. What growth does trickle down to the average worker is eaten up by inflation and falling wages. In other words, UK workers are in dire need of radical change to deliver a more just economy. And with automation promising to turf more jobs onto the scrapheap, maybe it’s time to stop thinking about how to “Get Britain working” – but how to share out labour more fairly across the workforce.

The think tank Autonomy have published a report detailing how shortening the working week from five days to four could be beneficial for the UK’s exhausted workforce, for employers and for the economy as a whole. Our current model of work relies on a toxic mix of over-work and under employment – where many are slogging through eighty hour work weeks, with others on precarious zero-hours contracts. And this is without counting the millions of hours of unpaid domestic and care work – performed largely by women – on which the economy depends. Politicians have reliably responded to crises of employment by slashing wages and putting more power in the hands of bosses to hire and fire at will. But in reality, this offers little hope of returning a better quality of life to working people, the country’s real wealth-creators. And absolutely no hope of responding to the larger structural crises our economy is facing; from climate crisis to  .

Instead, Autonomy’s report advocates a package of pragmatic steps to ensure the rollout of a shorter working week, without a reduction of pay. Such steps include six extra bank holidays, and an adoption of a four-day work structure across the public sector – which would act as an innovator and benchmark for best practise. This would be coupled with a ‘UK Working Time Directive’ to set a limit on the maximum of weekly hours worked, aiming for a cap of 32 hours by 2025. The legal approach needs to be bolstered by worker power to hold bosses and stakeholders to account; the report prescribes sectoral collective bargaining structures, expanding worker representation to “increase equality and security in the years to come”

By Nancy Romer - New Politics, Winter 2019

To me the role of eco-socialists is to raise transitional demands, demands that bring a broader understanding of the role of capital in creating climate change and the ways that capitalism can be challenged by working people and people most affected by the vast inequality it has created.

Two criteria seem pertinent to me:

1) How do we articulate what it will actually take to save our planet for the humans and other species? That will require a deep transformation that will include locking out at least the fossil fuel and auxiliary corporations and economy, ending wars and militarization of society, taking up a race- and gender-based liberation politics, and creating a thoroughly transforming social-service safety net that expands human development and allows people to look at the whole of society and our planet and make responsible decisions. Without that transformation, certain sectors—by job, by race, by gender, by class, by region—will continue to exert uneven and inadequate pressure on climate-based decisions.

2) How do we create mass movements, often united fronts of a wide range of people and social-political sectors, that can join together to exert power to make real change? How do we articulate demands that can bring the movements together while keeping those demands just a bit beyond the consensus, prodding the movement forward? How do we engage people in a mass-based struggle so that we begin the process of gaining the kind of power needed for the transformation described above?

I have spent much of my political life working in united fronts, organizational expressions of movements, coalitions, and so on, that put forward mass demands that raise consciousness, build power through the movements, and actually create some of the changes we need, not-quite-adequate as they may often be due to movements’ weakness. I have also been a leftist without too much of a “brand” or group of socialists that I have formally joined. Right now I am in Democratic Socialists of America and feel the broad politics of the organization is what keeps it active, muscular, and pushing. They are good comrades to the rest of the climate movement—willing to show up, picket, petition, study, strategize, and to be kind and generous comrades. They are well-respected as a relatively new activist organization in New York. DSA existed for many years before Trump, but after Trump was elected the numbers have exploded—presently up to 50,000 nationally and 5,000 in New York City. Yes, DSA pushes for publically owned and operated, 100 percent renewable, energy now or as soon as possible. Yes, they call for an end to the fossil fuel regime and for a polluters tax. Outside of the “publically owned and operated” part of the demand, these are the demands that our local climate movement has adopted. It is our job as eco-socialists to support the demands of the united front—in this case the Peoples Climate Movement and New York Renews—and push the demands further, specifically toward public power or public ownership of the new renewable energy grid. We need to articulate a fuller politics than can the united front coalitions due to their organizational support and membership, especially in the unions. That “prod” is essential for direction of the coalitions and movement.

By Stefania Barca - Geoforum, January 2019

The article offers an intellectual critique of Marxist political ecology as developed in western Europe between the 1970s and 2000s, focusing on the labour/ecology nexus. My critique is based on the intersection of two levels of analysis: 1) the historical evolution of labour environmentalism, focusing on what I will call the eco-modernist dilemma of labour; 2) the meaning of class politics in relation to the politics of the environment, with a special focus on the production/reproduction dialectic.

Focusing on the work of four Marxist intellectuals whose ideas resonated with various social movements across the Left spectrum (labour, environmentalism, feminism and degrowth), the article shows how the current entrenchment of labour within the politics of eco-modernization hides a number of internal fractures and alternative visions of ecology that need to be spelled out in order to open the terrain for a rethinking of ecological politics in class terms today.

Read the text (PDF).