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Title: Labor & the Climate Crisis Author: Jon Bekken Date: 2020 Language: en Topics: labor, climate change, Anarcho-Syndicalist Review Source: Retrieved on 28th January 2021 from https://syndicalist.us/2020/06/28/labor-the-climate-crisis/ Notes: From Anarcho-Syndicalist Review #78, Winter 2020
Global warming is big business. Twenty giant oil companies are directly
responsible for one-third of all carbon emissions since 1965. The U.S.’s
largest banks have financed $1.9 trillion in fossil fuel projects since
2016. Those who run the global economy are not ignoring climate change –
they are actively working to make it worse. Why? Because there are quick
profits to be made, and the long-term costs will fall to the rest of us.
It’s not that nothing is being done. Wind turbines, solar panels and
electric vehicles (the latter hardly harbingers of a green economy) are
spreading quickly. But this growth in clean energy isn’t nearly fast
enough to limit global warming according to the International Energy
Agency’s annual World Energy Outlook. Despite the growth of renewables,
the burning of fossil fuels is growing even faster and global greenhouse
gas emissions are on track to continue rising for the next 20 years.
Ultimately the climate crisis is a workers’ issue. It is workers the
whole world over who will pay the price if we allow the bosses to
destroy our planet, and at least as importantly it is workers who have
the ability to take decisive action to address the crisis.
Too often the business unions have bought into a false debate between
saving the environment and saving jobs, instead of asking what sort of
jobs we want and what sort of world we want to live in. It is true, of
course, that there are in the short term jobs to be had clear cutting
the world’s forests, strip mining the earth for coal, and burning fossil
fuels. But once the devastation is complete these jobs will be gone, and
only the profits will remain.
There could also be jobs in reforesting, converting to renewable energy,
retrofitting inefficient buildings and industrial practices, rebuilding
public transit systems, and cleaning up the industrial wastelands that
litter the world. Unlike the jobs to be had destroying the planet, these
jobs are not only useful – they have a future. (Of course, there would
also be new jobs if we allow the planet wreckers to proceed on their
merry way – jobs building dikes to hold the seas back, as mercenaries
protecting the fat cats trying to hold the desperate hordes at bay,
scavenging the submerged wreckage, fighting fires and cleaning up toxic
debris.)
The politicians hold fancy conventions around the world while the planet
burns. Meanwhile, the plutocrats plunder the planet as quickly as they
can, raking in the profits while the looting is good. What do they care
if they kill off millions and consign the rest of us to misery and
privation for generations to come, so long as they can keep accumulating
their blood-soaked money?
The question is not whether this vandalism of ecosystems across the
planet will eventually be brought to a halt. It will. The question is
how much destruction we will allow to be done in the meantime. There is
still time to limit the scope of global warming and rising sea levels.
Even if we are unsuccessful in winning the full decarbonization that is
so urgently needed, we could still mitigate the devastation. We can
afford neither to succumb to despair, nor to the hope (against the
evidence of decades of dithering) that our rulers will act before it is
too late.
What can workers do in the face of bosses and politicians determined to
speed climate change? On the one hand, they rely on us to carry out the
destruction from which they profit. They are only able to strip-mine the
mountains, lay pipelines across our waterways, replace vibrant
ecosystems with dying monocultures, and pollute our skies and water
because workers not only carry out this destructive labor at their
behest, but also supply a wide array of support services to make it
possible. Power workers could refuse not only to operate facilities that
worsen the climate emergency, they could refuse service to particularly
egregious polluters. Transport workers could refuse to haul the means of
mass destruction. Construction workers could refuse the demolition and
building activity that makes this destruction possible. Workers could
refuse to manufacture or service equipment that does not meet
environmental standards or is destined for those who are destroying our
future.
There are precedents for this sort of conscientious refusal of
planet-killing and anti-social work. Building laborers in Melbourne
implemented a series of Green Bans in the 1970s to prevent the
destruction of wilderness areas and affordable housing. For many years
Australian dockworkers refused to handle US warships that might be
carrying nuclear weapons. British mechanics refused to repair aircraft
engines for the Chilean military junta, grounding most of its air force.
Just this year furniture workers in the United States engaged in a short
strike to protest their employer’s sale of furniture to the ICE
concentration camps. In Europe, dockworkers have refused to handle
shipments of military equipment to Saudi Arabia for use in its brutal
war in Yemen. As workers, we have enormous power in our hands, should we
organize and resolve to use it.
We are told that we cannot address the climate crisis because it would
hurt coal workers. (It’s hard to drum up sympathy for the coal barons.)
But the coal miners have quite different interests than their bosses,
who have proven time and again that they do not care whether the miners
live or die.
In 1968, after a mine disaster that killed 78 coal miners, rank-and-file
miner Jock Yablonski decided to challenge United Mine Workers President
Tony Boyle. As Yablonski asked, “What good is a union that reduces coal
dust in the mines only to have miners and their families breathe
pollutants in the air, drink pollutants in the water, and eat
contaminated commodities?” Yablonski lost a close election, and was
murdered by Boyle’s hit men. A year later, tens of thousands of miners
joined wildcat strikes for better safety and marched to demand
protections against black lung disease.
Miners continue to be killed by coal mine collapses and explosions, and
new cases of Black Lung Disease have skyrocketed in recent years. As
coal consumption has declines, the mine owners have looted their
companies, abandoning their commitments to workers’ pensions and health
care (and, increasingly, even their wages). Coal miners have fought for
a host of measures to protect themselves and their communities from the
coal barons, and this is no time to be toadying to the bosses to keep
them afloat.
In the 1980s, Tony Mazzocchi, a leader in the Oil, Chemical and Atomic
Workers International Union, argued for winding down industries that
harmed workers, environment and society while taking steps to safeguard
their workers – proposing a revived GI Bill for atomic workers who would
be left unemployed by nuclear disarmament and a Superfund for fossil
fuel workers. The Labor Network for Sustainability and others are
pressing unions to take up these issues once again, but too many union
officials are so accustomed to accepting “managerial rights” in all
spheres of our existence that they can not even conceive of demanding a
different kind of economy – one in which we are no longer offered a
bitter choice between eating today or breathing tomorrow.
There have been countless examples over the years of workers honoring
picket lines in solidarity with workers on strike or who were being
denied the right to organize. Millions of workers have refused unsafe
work, individually and through their unions. Logging workers have
demanded sustainable forestry methods (which mean more jobs, as well as
protecting ecosystems), farmworkers have fought agains pesticides which
poison our food and the land (and the workers). Before pollution is
spewed into the environment it is poisoning workers on the job.
In recent years there has been an upsurge in unions raising demands that
not only benefit their own members, but also the broader public.
Teachers have demanded support systems, improved facilities, and
adequate school funding. Nurses have campaigned for safe staffing levels
in the face of speed-ups that endanger hospital staff and patients
alike. Public transit and other service workers have fought
privatization schemes and service cutbacks, pointing out that these are
an attack on the entire working class.
There is no reason that this approach could not be expanded. Coal miners
and steelworkers have been ill-served by alliances with the bosses to
preserve profits under the guise of protecting jobs. The jobs are
vanishing, the workers have been stiffed, the number of black lung
victims is rising, local communities are dying, and so are the rest of
us. Would it not make more sense to negotiate for a rapid transition –
one that would phase out coal production, secure and remediate the
mines, support retirees and black lung victims, and help workers and
their communities build sustainable local economies?
Instead of taking whatever work is on offer, no matter how destructive,
building trades unions could demand that new construction be more
sustainable and campaign for policies requiring environmental
retrofitting of existing facilities. They could actively campaign for
solar and other renewable energy projects, and organize those who are
doing this work, often for significantly lower wages.
Just as Lucas Aerospace workers developed plans in the 1970s and 1980s
to convert their facilities from manufacturing weapons to socially
useful production, so too could workers engaged in manufacturing gas
guzzling vehicles that destroy our planet while clogging our streets.
The Lucas workers developed their plans through their unions’
coordination committee, based on suggestions from the rank and file.
They were not implemented because the company was unwilling to negotiate
such matters, and the workers lacked the will (and likely the broader
public support that would have been needed) to seize their factories,
show the managers the door, and start running them themselves – working
to meet urgent social needs instead of quarterly earnings targets. And
so Lucas gradually disintegrated, some bits sold off to other companies,
and most of the operations simply shut down.
The bosses lack the imagination and the sense of urgency needed to
resolve this crisis. Leaving them in charge can only lead to mass
unemployment, ecological catastrophe, abandoned facilities, and a
landscape littered with toxic waste.
We need rapid action to slash greenhouse gases and remediate (to the
extent possible) the damage that has already been done. Climate action
shouldn’t mean lost jobs – done right, with unions and community
organizations in the lead, it can mean better work for most people than
what’s on offer today. A just transition to a sustainable economy would
transform work more broadly, increasing the power of all workers.
We would decide what work needs to be done, drawing upon our experience
and our knowledge of our workplaces and our communities to create
solutions that slash pollution and waste – enriching our lives and our
communities in the process.
But this will only happen if workers fight for it. The future that the
bosses and politicians are stumbling toward is bleak indeed.