Book Review: Workers and Trade Unions for Climate Solidarity Tackling Climate Change in a Neoliberal World by Paul Hampton

Abstract

Paul Hampton Workers and Trade Unions for Climate Solidarity Tackling Climate Change in a Neoliberal World, London: Routledge, 2015; 212 pp.: ISBN 9781138841420, 90 [pounds sterling] (hbk) This excellent book comes at a difficult time for the 'climate movement' in the United Kingdom (and elsewhere). Those paying attention to the science could be forgiven for despairing, while those who only see the headlines proclaiming the 'success' of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change's Paris Agreement could be forgiven for thinking that matters are in hand. In addition, UK unions are largely on the back foot, and have had to cut back on environmental work. For example, the University and College Union announced in its May 2016 Annual Environmental Report that it had been unable to recruit sufficient numbers for the day release courses for its environmental representative training. Meanwhile one of the biggest unions, the GMB, the union for energy workers, has resolutely defended fracking, time and again. In the unlikely event of Labour forming the next government, fireworks will ensue! Hampton is offering a rich empirical story, not a dense theoretical treatise. As often is the case with PhD theses turned into books, the 'theoretical' chapter ('Climate politics and the potential for climate solidarity') is pretty heavy-going, and could easily be skimmed or skipped by a non-academic reader, with no loss of comprehension in later chapters, which are all clearly written and argued with a dazzling level of detail and precision. Hampton adopts a (non-Stalinist) Marxist interpretation of climate change politics. For Hampton, working-class self-liberation is at the heart of Marxism' (p. 4). As such, the main aim of the book is 'to articulate the valence of organised workers for climate politics' (p. 8) by critically assessing the dominant social science framing of climate change, investigating workers' climate interests and capacities, and 'extend[ing] Hymans (2001) model of trade unions operating between the market, society and class to understand their role in climate change politics' (p. 8). He seeks to examine whether 'workers organised in trade unions have the interest and capacity to tackle dangerous climate change' (p. 9). Hampton's history, based on close documentary reading and more recent participant observation (in the United Kingdom), starts in the late 1980s, and moves seamlessly through to and beyond the 2009 occupation of the Vestas wind turbine factory on the Isle of Wight, which gets its own chapter. On the way, Hampton provides well-referenced scepticism about the more booster-ist notions of 'green jobs', often promulgated by people who will not be affected by a successful or unsuccessful 'transition'. For unions, the bread-and-butter of the coming months and years can never be hand-waved away with generalities. …