Environmentalism put to work: Ideologies of green recruitment in Toronto

Abstract

Market-driven green economies are premised upon the exploitation and ongoing commodification of both labour and nature. Yet their concrete incarnations experiment with new strategies to “secure and obscure” such processes. These strategies include the formulation and dissemination of an ideological representation of green labour in which environmentalism is “put to work.” In this paper I focus on worker recruitment in Toronto and analyze its role in constructing green jobs as a venue for environmentalist politics, and therefore as “good” and “meaningful” work. My empirical material consists of green job announcements posted on GoodWork.ca, the main platform for green worker recruitment in Canada. Building on a Gramscian understanding of ideology, I query the concrete and symbolic functions performed by job ads and discuss them in relation to the structural processes that characterize Toronto’s contemporary labour market. I suggest that an ideological representation of green work is used to select motivated and productive workers, justify the offer of non-specialized, precarious, or unpaid positions, and ultimately extend the reach of labour subsumption into spheres traditionally considered outside the employment relation, such as environmentalist activism. In turn, such a representation conceals the extent to which green economies rely on the exploitation of labour while it circumscribes environmentalist critiques within market-driven and economic growth-centered initiatives.