Trade Unions in the Green Economy: Working for the Environment

ISBN-13: 9781849714648 / Angielski / Twarda / 2012 / 288 str.

Nora R. Thzel; David Uzzell

Opis

Combating climate change will increasingly impact on production industries and the workers they employ as production changes and consumption is targeted. Yet research has largely ignored labour and its responses. This book brings together sociologists, psychologists, political scientists, historians, economists, and representatives from international and local unions based in Australia, Brazil, South Africa, Taiwan, Spain, Sweden, the UK and the USA. Together they open up a new area of research: Environmental Labour Studies. The authors ask what kind of environmental policies are unions in different countries and sectors developing. How do they aim to reconcile the protection of jobs with the protection of the environment? What are the forms of cooperation developing between trade unions and environmental movements, especially the so-called Red-Green alliances? Under what conditions are unions striving to create climate change policies that transcend the economic system? Where are they trying to find solutions that they see as possible within the present socio-economic conditions? What are the theoretical and practical implications of trade unions' "Just Transition", and the problems and perspectives of "Green Jobs"? The authors also explore how food workers' rights would contribute to low carbon agriculture, the role workers' identities play in union climate change policies, and the difficulties of creating solidarity between unions across the global North and South. Trade Unions in the Green Economy opens the climate change debate to academics and trade unionists from a range of disciplines in the fields of labour studies, environmental politics, environmental management, and climate change policy. It will also be useful for environmental organisations, trade unions, business, and politicians.

Spis treści

Part 1: Intoduction  1. Mending the Breach between Labour and Nature: A Case for Environmental Labour Studies  Part 2: Trade Union Perspectives  2. Developing Global Environmental Union Policies through the ITUC  3. Making the Environment a Trade Union Issue  4. International Labour Organization and the Environment - The Way to a Socially Just Transition for Workers  5. Food Workers’ Rights as a Path to a Low-Carbon Agriculture  6. Moving Towards Eco-Unionism: Reflecting the Spanish Experience  7.Cars, Crisis, Climate Change and Class Struggle  Part 3: Analyses of Trade Union Environmental Policies across the Globe  8. The Neo-liberal Global Economy & Nature: Re-defining the Trade Union Role  9. Sustainable Development or Environmental Justice? Questions for Trade Unions on Land, Livelihoods and Jobs  10. Climate Change, Trade Unions and Rural Workers in Labour-Environmental Alliances in the Amazon Rainforest  11. From ‘Jobs Versus Environment’ to ‘Green-Collar Jobs’: Australian Trade Unions and the Climate Change Debate  12. Just Transition and Labour Environmentalism in Australia  13. Will they Tie the Knot? Labour and Environmental Trajectories in Taiwan and South Korea  14. Green Jobs? Good Jobs? Just Jobs? USA Labour Unions Confront Climate Change  15. U.S. Trade Unions and the Challenge of "Extreme Energy" The Case of the TransCanada Keystone XL Pipeline  16. From Blue to Green: A Comparative Study of Blue-Collar Unions’ Reactions to the Climate Change Threat in the United States and Sweden  17. Trade Unions and the Transition from ‘Actually Existing Unsustainability’: from Economic Crisis to a New Political Economy beyond Growth  18. Local Place and Global Space: Solidarity across Borders and the Question of the Environment

O autorze

Nora Räthzel is Professor of Sociology at the University of Umeå, Sweden. David Uzzell is Professor of Environmental Psychology at the University of Surrey, UK. Both are directing a research programme on trade unions and workers' involvement in climate change policies at the University of Umeå, Sweden and at the University of Surrey, UK. Tim Jackson is Professor of Sustainable Development at the University of Surrey and author of the bestselling Prosperity without Growth.