Thinking Ecologically About the Global Political Economy by Ryan Katz-Rosene & Matthew Paterson

Author:Ryan Katz-Rosene & Matthew Paterson [Katz-Rosene, Ryan & Paterson, Matthew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: International Relations, History & Theory, Political Ideologies, Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781317389361
Google: d8JKDwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 38504742
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-10-08T00:00:00+00:00

Worker resistance and the environment

Another prominent force resisting capitalism is the labour movement. Class politics are integral to how capitalism has been conceptualized, from Marx onwards. Since the rise of industrialization, and with the ideological support provided by emergent modern discourses of human and workers’ rights and equality, labourers of all stripes have come together, mobilizing to improve working conditions and contest capitalist exploitation. However, the ecological dimensions of such movements, while profound, are seldom acknowledged, perhaps because there often exists an uneasy tension between the environment and movements which have often indirectly bolstered the process of capital accumulation by virtue of consolidating the centrality of a range of high-impact industries (such as resource extraction or manufacturing, etc.) to the economy as a whole. More broadly, one of the important effects of union activity was the generation of forms of economic management and organization that accelerated economic growth: the ‘great acceleration’ discussed in Chapter 1 was in large part the result of a ‘compromise’ between capital and labour in the 1940s in the industrialized world. There certainly have been instances in which workers’ legitimate efforts to improve working conditions or job security have had the unintended outcome of supporting a polluting industry such as fossil fuel or automobile industries. Yet as the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) has argued, it does not have to be inevitably so:

Workers and their trade unions can make a significant and positive difference to the sustainable management of the environment and ecosystems. Workers are social agents directly associated with the production chain. Meanwhile, workers are all too often among the first victims of environmental damage.

(2007, vi)

In this view, there is a synergy between the protection of workers’ rights and the environment, which conjures up the notions of ‘green growth’ and ‘green jobs’ (which as we argue in Chapter 6 are sometimes contradictory concepts).

This synergy (or ‘red-green alliance’) has been increasingly promoted as organized labour groups have taken up the challenge of sustainable development in their broader contestation of exploitative relations of production. Specific campaigns have been fought especially where workers are heavily affected by environmental degradation in their own workplaces, as in campaigns over pesticide use in agriculture (Ferriss and Sandoval 1997), or the problem of overfishing, as well as in other campaigns where workers and environmentalists saw common ground in their activism (as in the case of the Alliance for Sustainable Jobs and the Environment, which was formed after the first WTO conference in Seattle in 1999; see Obach 2004).

More broadly, in OECD nations labour groups have called for the creation of a green economy through the creation of stable, secure and high-paying jobs in green tech sectors, which includes innovative technologies in green energy or sustainable transport – essentially new technologies which help to shift energy consumption away from fossil fuels (Jackson 2009; Thompson 2009). Yet this relationship remains contentious. It may be an easy sell in the context of creating jobs through investment in various infrastructures or technologies which support climate change

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