Trade unions fight for urgent climate action

Abstract

UK trade unions made a giant leap forward in September this year supporting the most radical climate politics agenda to date. At TUC Congress, delegates voted overwhelmingly to support the school student climate strikes. Extinction Rebellion mobilisations have brought workplaces and cities to a standstill. Then at Labour Party conference, where affiliated trade unions make up half of the votes, a socialist Green New Deal motion was carried after an enthusiastic debate. The most eye-catching commitment was for the Labour Party, in collaboration with the trade unions and the scientific community, to ‘work towards a path to net zero carbon emissions by 2030, guaranteeing an increase in good unionised jobs in the UK, and the cost of which would be borne by the wealthiest not the majority; and implementing this target into law if it achieves a just-transition for workers’. Matt Wrack – general secretary of the Fire Brigades Union (FBU) – moved the motion on behalf of most unions and more than 100 Constituency Labour Party branches that had submitted the text, committing the Labour Party to ‘a state-led programme of investment and regulation, based on public ownership and democratic control, for the decarbonisation and transformation of our economy that reduces inequality and pursues efforts to keep global average temperature rises below 1.5°C’. Perhaps the most significant demand concerned the ability of trade unions to take collective action over climate matters. The resolution stated: ‘Repeal all anti-union laws, facilitating worker-led activism over social and political issues, including climate change.’ Labour’s manifesto for the December 2019 general election committed the party in government ‘to achieve the substantial majority of our emission reductions by 2030’, ban fracking and take energy firms and railways into public ownership. It also committed to ‘repeal anti-trade union legislation including the Trade Union Act 2016 and create new rights and freedoms for trade unions to help them win a better deal for working people’. Origins of green stewards Although many commentators saw this as a new development, trade unionists in the UK have been campaigning for climate action at work for three decades. In 1988 a TUC memorandum submitted to the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, demanded ‘the need to involve trade union representatives in decision making at the workplace about environmental protection policies’. 1988 was of course the year that climate science hit mainstream politics. At TUC Congress 1989 and 1990 speakers referred to ‘green shop stewards’ and ‘green strikes’. The TUC’s Charter for the Environment (1989) stated that trade unions needed to be more active around the issue of global warming. Congress 1991 called for union reps to have the statutory rights for inspection, information and training on environmental issues. Labour’s policy statement, An Earthly Chance (1990) stated that ‘trade unions should have the right for time off to receive training in environmental matters’. Labour’s statement, In Trust for Tomorrow (1994) pledged that a Labour government would ‘introduce a statutory obligation for companies to consult their workforce over environmental issues, in just the same way as they currently have to consult on health and safety matters’. Trade unionists kept the flame of union climate action alive during the gloom of the Blair and Brown years (1997-2010), when the prime minister boasted that the UK had ‘the most restrictive union laws in the Western World’ and when the union voice was marginalised within the Labour Party. Let’s not forget it was Margaret Thatcher who blazed the trail for anti-union legislation. Successive Employment Acts, starting in 1980, restricted lawful picketing to one’s ‘own’ place of work, removed the closed shop, restricted the right to take secondary action (eventually to one’s ‘own’ employer) and imposed only six pickets on a picket line. By 1990 all secondary action was unlawful. Solidarity – the guiding principle of the trade union movement for decades – was denied by legal diktat, imposed by the police and enforced by the courts. These laws are a dagger in the heart of our movement. Only with the election of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader have unions been restored to the centre of policy making in the party and new opportunities have...