Climate Bargaining
Chapter 5. Part VII: collective bargaining around climate
Worker agency in the face of the climate crisis is a catalyst for society undertaking the specific actions required to safely work through the crisis. The policies, institutions and programs required to meet the scale of the crisis are already largely known, and to the extent that they require further research and fine-tuning this falls well outside of the scope of an organising strategy for the renaissance of organised labour.
One thing, however, that is required is that such policies and programs submit to the problem-solving rigour of an organised working-class. It is this more than anything else which will mould the theoretical solutions at hand to real world application.
Bringing climate into the bargaining process is one means through which to further working class sovereignty over the transition. For bargaining becomes both a way in which the agency cultivated in the face of ongoing climate breakdown via disaster organising can be distilled into a series of specific claims (itself a key step to shaping and building support for an ambitious climate policy agenda) and for members to exercise democratic power over such claims.
The Origins of Climate Bargaining
I first encountered the idea of climate bargaining in Ben Crawford and David Whyte’s 2023 paper entitled Working for Climate Justice: Trade unions in the front line against climate change. Crawford and Whyte contend that unions should bring climate justice into their core bargaining agenda as a material issue subject to class contest, and that the absence of this work is a contributing factor to the relative slowness of the transition in comparison with the pace of the crisis.
For Crawford and Whyte an ambitious trade union climate bargaining agenda has to date been frustrated by three factors – the increase in insecure work, the rise of enterprise-based bargaining, and restrictions on matters that workers may bargain about.
Worker precarity as a barrier to climate action
With respect to the first factor, Crawford and Whyte draw a direct link between the precarity of employment and the precarity of the climate. Those who must scrabble to get through the day are not afforded the luxury of thinking about tomorrow.
In my experience, relatively highly paid workers in the fossil fuel industry have been apprehensive about discussion of any change to energy systems as they see a broader society where their friends and family members struggle with low wages and uncertain hours. They worry about what will happen once they lose what little privilege they have within the system.
Fossil fuel corporations and their owners, in turn, weaponise the precarious wider labour market they have helped create in order to continue to extract as much profit from their existing assets as they can. They appropriate the victories of unionised fossil fuel workers and somehow relate this as an intrinsic property of the commodities fossil fuel workers create.
Meanwhile, those in insecure work must struggle with whether or not they can pay rent, and all the other complicated problems of poverty that can take up the full capacity of even the smartest of people. In some respects, therefore, climate bargaining will only reach its full potential as workers gain more power and confidence. The visible presence of climate bargaining could, therefore, be read as a sign that the renaissance of organised workers is underway even as workers can use climate bargaining to propel the movement forward.
The rise of enterprise bargaining
The rise of enterprise bargaining has frustrated bargaining for climate. This is because enterprise-by-enterprise bargaining framework is a structural barrier to worker ambition at a social scale, and the climate crisis requires action a social scale.
As an example, the struggle for reduced working hours largely ceased in the 1930s in America with the passage of the Wagner Act but it did not give away in Australia until the 1990s with the introduction of enterprise bargaining. This six decade gap has significance, especially considering the fact that the US union movement was lively through to the 1970s. Compare as well the two jurisdictions with respect to health care. The US has never developed any meaningful form of universal public health care, while a public system of sorts was not secured in Australia until the 1980s. The legal architecture influences what is possible - enterprise-by-enterprise bargaining has a tendency to limit workers taking up broader social struggles.
Of course, I posit this as a tendency not an iron law. It is why a considered strategy such as I outline in The Solidarity Wedge is a key part of pushing back against this tendency.
Climate is a social issue. It requires changes to the organisation of work at sectoral and social levels. If such adjustments like changes to the hours of work, the implementation of better cooling systems or new allowances are introduced on a patchwork enterprise-by-enterprise basis it opens up a competitive advantage for firms who do not take effective climate action.
A fight for a living wage is enmeshed with the fight for a liveable climate.
Solidarity bargaining as a strategy that goes beyond the enterprise horizon, even as workers remain formally within the existing system, makes it possible to realistically push sectoral and economy-wide demands. It tilts the playing field in the direction of pro-worker climate action.
In going beyond the substantive limits of the system while formally adhering to the system, workers can use solidarity bargaining to productively destabilise the neoliberal regulation of labour. This makes possible useful legal changes on the basis of actual worker power like sectoral and social bargaining, and the removal of the restrictions on bargaining content.
Solidarity bargaining as a class-wide framework has the intrinsic capacity to develop that solidarity not only across place but time — it can become inter-generational solidarity bargaining.
Restrictions on Agreement content
Even prior to such a possible outcome, creative thinking can circumvent the restrictions on agreement content. What is required is to ground climate action in either worker safety, job security, wages or conditions of employment (in the Australian jurisdiction at least).
CFMEU construction members, for instance, as militant outdoor workers have a long tradition of regulating how the weather and extreme temperatures impacts workers such as enforcing specific temperature triggers at which work shall cease without prejudice to workers. Victorian dairy workers as part of their industry wide strike in 2023 won paid emergency services leave. Dairy workers are generally based in regional areas, and being able to access paid time off work to help fight bushfires is an important community priority. It also helps to protect the farms and factories on which their livelihood depends. Moreover, in early 2024 hospitality workers at Adelaide Oval won the right to heavily subsidised public transport as part of their new agreement.
Each of these three examples while in of themselves limited would, if such rights became universal, contribute to a more resilient and sustainable society. Employers paying for extreme heat would make climate action more immediately urgent for the logic of profit. A form of paid climate disaster leave for every worker regardless of their employment status would ensure the availability of people to protect their communities, and giving workers an allowance to take a collective form of transport (either through public transport or car pooling) would contribute to better social relationships and less congestion.
This change in relations with respect to transport should be regarded as just as important as technological changes. Such rights, limited though they are, would materially improve the lives of workers. More ambitious claims such as reducing working hours for no loss of pay would also significantly contribute to a safer climate future while avoiding the limitation on bargaining matters.
The need to roll back managerial prerogative
There can, however, be no escaping the need to chip away at managerial prerogative if climate bargaining is to actually make the inroads necessary on energy and resource use to pull society out of the climate emergency. Workers intervening in the very production decisions of their employer have the most transformative potential.
This was the basis of the Builders Labourers Federation Green Bans in the 1970s. Arguably, this assault on managerial prerogative was the genesis of the contemporary environmental movement (one that now so often runs aground in the thrall of the siren song of philanthropy). The Lucas Plan (which I will come back to in Organising for Ownership) highlighted a worker vision in 1970s England that had workers building wind turbines, hybrid vehicles, energy efficient homes and heat pumps.
Worker confidence, however, moves in a non-linear fashion (for better and for worse). If the workplace strategies outlined on solidarity bargaining and climate work to engender some confidence then that which seems remote today becomes tomorrow’s norm.
The experience of living between and through climate disasters can be demotivational. In the absence of an intentional organising strategy much good work can be washed away in the face of crisis. Where cooperation is not seen as a readily available option, society will be reduced to some combination of the barbarity of escalating cycles of violence and retreat from facing the systemic crisis into the inane.
Standing for climate safety is necessary if there is to be a sustained revitalisation of the union movement.
This post is the seventh instalment of the fifth chapter within the second of three parts for the overall project. Part Two is Solidarity within Wage Labour and outlines a strategy to nurture solidarity between workers within the wage labour relation as it currently exists. Use the about page to locate where you are in this broader project.