His most recent publications on the topic are: Just transitions in global economies? Union and worker understandings of justice in Germany and South Africa compared; and Who wants to work in the green economy? The importance of climate concern, skill confidence and national context.
What made you interested in workers in the context of the transition?
Reducing emissions and reaching our net-zero goals are not just about abstract targets and numbers. Achieving them has massive implications for how we produce and consume – and therefore for the nature of work and the lives of workers.
Think about what the transition actually entails: moving from fossil fuels to renewable energy; from airplanes and petrol cars towards trains and electric vehicles; or from monoculture farming and meat-heavy diets towards more sustainable agriculture and plant-based diets. All of these changes require workers to make them happen. Put simply, without workers, there is no decarbonisation.
Yet we still know too little about what workers and their representatives think about these changes, what makes them support or resist them, and what enables them to become active participants in the transformation. This is where our research comes in, approaching these questions from different angles.
What are the most interesting findings in your research so far?
One of the main messages from our research (a collaboration with scholars from the University of Leeds) is that workers need to be supported and enabled to navigate these changes successfully. We cannot simply expect people to embrace major transformations of their jobs, sectors and livelihoods without giving them the resources and opportunities to do so.
At the individual level, our findings show that workers who are confident in their ability to learn new skills, and who believe their existing skills will be useful in a greener economy, are more open to changing jobs. By contrast, workers who feel less able to participate in this transformation are less willing to change jobs and less supportive of the transition. So, giving workers a sense that they have a place in the future economy really matters.
Our comparison of Germany and South Africa points to a similar dynamic, but at the national level. In South Africa, some unions and workers perceive climate policy and the just transition as a project imposed by the Global North – one that allows richer countries to export their technologies while potentially making South Africa more, rather than less, economically dependent. Under these conditions, there can be considerable skepticism towards the transition, particularly in the energy sector.
The contrast with Germany is important. Germany has substantially greater financial and institutional capacity to support affected workers and invest in the transformation of former coal regions. South African unions fear that their workers and communities will not be afforded the same luxury. For them, moving away from coal without credible economic alternatives could mean very real economic and social hardship.
Our findings therefore speak to both labour actors and policymakers. They help identify some of the bottlenecks that generate resistance to climate policies, but also show what can be done differently to give workers the confidence, security and agency to participate in transformative change.
When you talk about workers, who exactly do you mean?
One thing I should clarify is that when we talk about workers, we do not just mean “blue-collar” manual workers in traditional industries. Our research considers workers across industries and occupational groups.
Of course, workers in sectors such as manufacturing, energy or transport are often particularly directly affected by decarbonisation. But the transformation will ultimately change jobs and skill requirements across much of the economy. That is precisely why we think it is important to understand workers as a much broader group when discussing the just transition.
What do you want to see happen to create a just transition?
Within countries, workers need much stronger political support to navigate the transition. Training programmes are one important tool. Workers should, for example, be able to take paid time off to learn new skills that allow them to remain within their organisation or sector as it transforms.
But training alone is not enough. Workers also need a perspective: a credible vision of how the economy, and their particular sector, is expected to change as we move towards our climate goals. This is an area where politics has too often fallen short. If people are asked to support fundamental economic changes without knowing whether there will be a place for them in the economy that emerges, resistance should hardly come as a surprise.
We also need to talk much more seriously about converting existing businesses and industries rather than simply shutting them down. We should be asking how we can use the skills, knowledge, infrastructure and machinery that already exist for new purposes.
We are currently seeing discussions in Germany about converting parts of the automotive industry towards defense production. That raises an obvious question: why have we not had an equally serious political debate about converting automotive plants and suppliers to produce technologies needed for the green transition? The idea is hardly new. The Lucas Plan in the UK was already exploring similar questions of socially useful production in the 1970s.
In South Africa, the challenge looks somewhat different. A just transition must include the opportunity to build up domestic industrial capacity rather than simply replacing imported fossil technologies with imported green technologies from the Global North. That means thinking seriously about technology transfer, intellectual property and the conditions attached to foreign direct investment.
And then there is an international dimension that I think we sometimes neglect. We need much stronger collaboration between labour movements across countries. Trade unions cannot only fight to protect their own members within national borders if doing so simply shifts the social and environmental costs of the transition elsewhere.
We in the Global North cannot build our own “green” economies by extracting lithium, nickel, cobalt, copper and other resources from countries in the Global South under socially and environmentally destructive conditions, simply so that we can drive electric cars while protecting jobs at home. That would reproduce precisely the kinds of unequal and neo-colonial relationships that South African unionists raised in our research.
Workers around the world are confronting different sides of the same transformation. We are not going to address climate change successfully by focusing on one country and its workers at a time. What is needed is much greater international labour solidarity and a stronger collective challenge to the interests of large corporations, particularly fossil capital. Only then can a just transition live up to its name and contribute to building an economy that works for both people and the planet.
Can you lift a quote or reflection from your research that you think illustrates your findings?
“Such an agenda highlights the potential to redefine just transition as a labour-led movement, part of a global, class-based labour advocacy that connects local, national, and international justice-in-transition efforts, which are mutually reliant and inseparable. While delaying the move to lower-emission technologies offers no benefit, especially given the urgent speed of global warming, international unions should openly discuss the timing of these transitions and recognise that true global justice requires solidarity and collective action.”
