Just Transition: Learning From the Tactics of Past Labor Movements
It is time to take a lesson from the early pioneers of the just transition and recognize the power that organized labor can wield to fight for environmental, economic and social justice.
As climate-driven wildfires burn the world over, democratic countries across the globe creep towards fascism, and the COVID-19 pandemic tops one million fatalities, it is clear that the planet is in crisis. The Global North’s long and loathsome history of colonialism and capitalism have led us to this untenable moment in history in which our society hangs in the balance. While technocrats continue with their refrain that only through incremental tweaks to the status quo can we address the many emergencies facing the United States and the planet, it is becoming clear that what is needed is a full scale transformation of our global economy. Only through a massive movement—made up of a broad coalition of activists, immigrants and organized labor—can we amass the power necessary to undo the wrongs at the core of our society and bring to birth a new world from the (often literal) ashes of the old.
The term “just transition” is often thrown around when discussing the role that workers and marginalized peoples must play in shaping the newly popularized Green New Deal, yet the idea is nothing new to the environmental or labor movements. Reinvigorated by the climate justice movement of the past ten years and brought into the mainstream by the Sunrise Movement in the United States, the concept has a much longer and more radical history than is often discussed. New movements in labor politics, including the "Bargaining for the Common Good" strategy, must reclaim this radical history to win the fight for climate justice, working families, and communities.
First coined in the early 1990s by Tommy Mazzocchi, a leader with the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers Union (OCAW), just transition emerged from Mazzocchi’s work in the anti-nuclear movement of the 1970s. As a nuclear worker himself, Mazzocchi identified the inherent contradiction in advocating for the abolition of an industry that currently employed him and his colleagues, and came up with a solution drawing from both the GI bill that he benefited from in the 1940s and 50s, as well as the recently passed Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (known as CERCLA or Superfund). Mazzocchi described a “Superfund for workers,” in which federal funds went to pay for financial support and higher education for workers displaced by a changing society. The concept was initially focused narrowly on the need for disarmament and the resulting impacts on employees of OCAW. As time went on, this broadened to include all workers in extractive industries, as concerns about environmental degradation and climate change gained traction and created economic uncertainty for millions of Americans, and the “just transition” was born.
Mazzocchi is far from the only individual to have promoted the role of organized labor in conservation, however. The International Woodworkers of America (IWA) fought for and won the Redwood Employee Protection Program (REPP) in response to the expansion of the Redwood National Park, and its subsequent impacts on the timber industry in Northern California during the late 1970s. Despite the Reagan administration’s attacks on the legislation in the early 1980s, the Program brought over $40 million dollars in benefits into Humboldt County before its termination in 1984.
The REPP offers a clear blueprint for just transition, as the IWA both led the fight to increase environmental regulations through supporting the Park’s expansion and the fight to provide an economic lifeline to workers economically impacted by the loss of harvestable timber. Flying in the face of the dominant narrative of “jobs vs. the environment” and the AFL-CIO’s complicated history with reactionary politics, Mazzocchi’s just transition and the IWA’s REPP provide a window into not only what a global economic transformation could look like today in the face of increasingly dire environmental and climate issues, but also the role that unions have in catalyzing huge paradigmatic shifts in society and building the kinds of alliances that are necessary to steer us away from the crises ahead.
As organized labor reemerges as an ascendent political force in the United States, globally, these potential alliances are coming into focus. From 2019’s Global Climate Strike which gained support from trade unions representing hundreds of millions of workers the world over, to the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) shutting down West Coast ports this Juneteenth in support of the Black Lives Matter Movement, the potential for collaboration between labor and the varied movements for social and environmental justice is only growing. But to understand the role that union organizing can play in winning a just transition, we must look broadly at the part that it has played in progressive movements throughout history.
Unions and collective action at the workplace are such effective tools of power because, in a successful general strike for example, it is social life as usual that is shut down—not just production. This is why they are indispensable in the broader fight for justice, beyond the crucial workplace fights for better wages and benefits. This is also why unions can and must play a constructive role in shaping a just transition away from environmentally and socially destructive forms of production to constructive ways of living and working together.
This possibility has not been lost on the most exploited section of the working class in the United States: working class African-Americans. Throughout the 19th century the (also disenfranchised and unfree) white working class built power through their racially exclusive access to the vote, state power, and social organizations. In contrast, even the small number of African-Americans who were not enslaved—some of whom worked as skilled laborers—were “linked to their enslaved brothers and sisters” through both legal and extralegal practices of racial domination. African-Americans dealt this system of hyperexploitation a fatal blow during the Civil War when they launched a massive and decisive “general strike” that withdrew labor from the Confederacy at a pivotal moment in the war, dooming it to defeat and securing the abolition of slavery.
Though chattel slavery was defeated, racialized barriers in employment were not. In Workers on Arrival: Black Labor in the Making of America, historian Joe William Trotter Jr. chronicles both the widening racial injustices in the decades following the conclusion of the civil war, and the decisive response of Black people and labor organizations to them. In the first half of the 20th century, interracial organized labor had made headway into mass production industries, helped along by the wartime mobilization of the Second World War. But after the war ended, job markets were starkly racially divided: Trotter reports that Black unemployment was consistently three times the white rate, and 41% of Black women worked domestic labor jobs without any of the benefits or protections of unionized labor.
In response, networks of local resistance rose up against both racist labor practices and broader social structures alike. Veteran trade union activists, Trotter reports, understood that labor organizations could be “vehicles for social change beyond the workplace,” and acted accordingly: the CIO worked alongside the NAACP, the Urban League, and the Pittsburgh Interracial Action Council to wage a two-year campaign that eventually forced the city’s Retail Merchants Association to employ and promote Black workers. But the CIO was more often conservative in its approach to race, prompting challenges by radical Black workers’ organizations like Claudia Jones and Louise Thompson Patterson’s Sojourners for Truth and Justice, and William Hood’s National Negro Labor Council. While both of these fell under intense McCarthyist suppression attacks from the FBI, the genie could not go back in the bottle: organized Black labor continued to form a major part of the wider “Black freedom struggle,” which Trotter claims “dismantled the segregationist system.”
The history of the triumph of Black workers over slavery and Jim Crow shows how labor politics have won much broader changes to society than negotiations over wages and benefits. Since a transition from a fossil-fuel based economy will not just threaten certain workers’ livelihoods but reshape and reorganize whole ways of life, a wide focus on targets for negotiating well beyond the shop floor will be necessary if we are to prevent big business from making these changes at our expense, and in response to their bottom line. The fight for climate justice depends on winning battles over the shape of the new world we will have to build, not just over contracts in the old one.
One possible strategy for this is the “Bargaining for the Common Good” model. The key idea, as Sarah Jaffe explains, is that “unions make demands that extend beyond ‘bread and butter’ concerns and involve the broader community in their struggles.” Following this ethos, thousands of members representing unions, activist groups, and community organizations gathered in Minnesota in 2015 to “establish a collective vision for social, racial and economic justice.” Since then, the Chicago Teachers’ Union waged a wildly successful campaign in 2019 using the Bargaining for the Common Good model. They struck for “a substantial down payment” on Chicago schools in defiance of state law restricting them to bargain only over wages and benefits.
It is a short step from the basic realization that workers’ organizations can partner with community organizations and use their collective power for the broader social good to the realization that this power can be part of the broader struggle for environmental, economic, and social justice. Again, the actual practice of unions and community groups is instructive: earlier this year, in Minnesota, SEIU Local 26 engaged in what writers at LaborNotes are calling the US’s “first union climate strike.” While the negotiations were contentious, the rank-and-file of workers (largely immigrants from Nepal, Somalia, Mexico, and Ecuador) eventually won their demands both for greener cleaning materials, along with wage increases, reduced health insurance costs, meaningful changes to sexual harassment policies, and increase in paid sick days.
The lesson, says Labor Notes, is simple: “thinking big, alongside the communities most impacted by climate change and workplace inequities, works.”
And at this tenuous moment in human history, we desperately need to be thinking big. As our planet careens ever closer to runaway climate catastrophe, and fascism rears its ugly head, the stakes have never been higher. It is time to take a lesson from the early pioneers of the just transition, and the recent wins of the Chicago Teachers Union and SEIU Local 26, and recognize the power that organized labor can wield to fight for environmental, economic and social justice. Every single contract renegotiation must be turned into a battlefield, with working people leading the fight for the common good.
Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò is an assistant professor of philosophy at Georgetown University. He is currently writing a book entitled Reconsidering Reparations, and also engages in public philosophy, including articles exploring intersections of climate justice and colonialism.
Dylan Plummer is a writer and organizer in the climate and forest defense movements, and is a co-founder of the worker-run climate justice organization Breach Collective.
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