Climate Solidarity at Work
Chapter 5. Part I. The fire alarm goes off everywhere.
This post is the first in a series of climate organising at work.
Workers live in a world capitalists have plunged into a state of climate breakdown. It is an already present reality of disasters like floods, bushfires, and extreme temperatures. It is a state of frustrated and disrupted supply chains. A society, moreover, where an elite dependent on an illusion of consumer plenty becomes destabilised as that illusion grows harder to sustain.
In such a state of social and climate breakdown, Rosa Luxemburg’s insight is as urgent today as it was during the heat of the First World War. In her 1915 Junius Pamphlet, Luxemburg wrote that “[b]ourgeois society stands at the crosswords, either transition to socialism or regression into barbarism.”1 More than a century on since Luxemburg was writing and organising for a socialist peace in the context of the cataclysmic Great War, we are forced to confront the crossroads once again. Except this time there is not one singular crossroad of an inter-imperialist war but rather hundreds of crossroads, of which war in its various guises remains present, but so too is famine, drought, flooding, storm surges, bushfires and many other climate disasters.
The choice between socialism or barbarism might indeed be answered in a single global catastrophe but before then it will be answered over and over again at local, state, national and regional levels.
No unionist should labour under the false hope that the experience of climate breakdown works to automatically create a world beyond capitalism. The social impact of the climate emergency is not just a physical or technological matter. It is a question whose final resolution depends on human agency. The capitalist class and the reactionary right will not hesitate to take advantage of climate disaster and breakdown.
It is entirely conceivable that a miserable form of capitalism persists within barbarism – somewhere on a continuum from Judge Dredd’s Mega-City One to Mad Max’s Bartertown. Naomi Klein’s 2007 book The Shock Doctrine: the rise of disaster capitalism outlines precisely the ways in which capital uses natural and social disasters, from Hurricane Katrina in 2005 to Pinnochet’s coup in 1973, to heighten its level of control and extraction.
Dr. Hidayat Greenfield, Asia/Pacific Regional Secretary of the International Union of Food Workers, has written about the link between climate disasters and creeping authoritarianism in the Asia-Pacific region, noting that like “every emergency in response to an external threat to the nation, the climate crisis will be used by the far right to justify the suspension of democracy”.2
Greenfield speculates whether the experience of climate whiplash, as populations lurch from one crisis to another, may see a continuous state of emergency and with that a permanent suspension of democracy. This may set in motion a negative social-ecological feedback loop where authoritarian right-wing governments use climate disasters to consolidate their control while not taking meaningful climate action. The image of Palestinians imprisoned in flooded camps in Gaza is the archetypal image of the barbaric future we all face.
To avoid this future, we must disrupt this negative loop. This requires the social cooperation of workers through and beyond disasters. The prospect of any sort of meaningful transition, and any effective strategy for union revitalisation must take this emergent dynamic into account. Workers need a just transition, and only workers can make it happen.
Disaster Organising in response to Disaster Capitalism
Disaster organising, therefore, to ensure basic worker and social safety in the midst of a climate breakdown is a necessity if a decent society is to be secured. The social norm is no longer a state of non-disaster but rather the experience of shifting between disasters with the time in between merely a state of pre-disaster, post-disaster, or some combination of the two. Disaster organising becomes a way of building worker power within and between disasters. As depressing as this discourse may be, there is hope. It is a myth of the current social order that in the face of an immediate or crushing disaster, the human condition is limited to the fight, flight or freeze responses. The idea that in such circumstances humans respond only with their lizard brains is nothing but the nonsense of common sense.
Humans are not angry lizards only kept in check by the genius of the market or the authority of a sovereign. We are social creatures. Humanity’s evolutionary advantage is cooperation and worker-to-worker cooperation is an expression of our humanity. Human rationality is relational – a way of working things out beyond simple violence, brute force or physical displays. We live in atomised times, however, where such rationality appears almost like a mental illness to those in charge.
As social creatures, we have an additional stress response – one that draws on our advantage as a species – to tend and befriend. In response to a stress or disaster people do not simply degenerate into a mindless violent horde but rather attempt to find ways to help each other, to cooperate and engage in mutual solidarity. Only where there is no hope of connection in a situation do we revert back to the pre-mammalian coding. Where such behaviour occurs it reveals the ways in which capitalism zombifies people.
What this means is that in an emergency people will act together, and build power with each other if they see such an option. Building that option within and beyond the workplace is an urgent and necessary task.
Every worker has the right to cease work where there is an immediate threat to their health and safety.3 This may not be the same as a strike but this form of stop work in the context of ongoing climate breakdown will be an increasingly relevant way to foster social cooperation between workers.
To understand the difference between a stop work for safety purposes and a strike, think of a fire in an office building. When a fire alarm has gone off in an office building, workers have the right to stop their work (even if a team leader gives a direction to wait momentarily and complete a work task), and follow the evacuation plan to rally at the designated evacuation point. The impacted workers in taking their action are not pursuing any claim other than what is necessary to secure their own safety.
In a stable environment, this right to cease work can be easily overlooked as a matter of strategic relevance for workers outside industries at higher risk of workplace fatalities. In a context of climate breakdown, however, this basic right – one of the fundamental markers that differentiates employment from slavery – becomes the difference between life and death.
The question becomes, what do we do as unionists when the fire alarms are going off everywhere?
This post is the first 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.
The fact that this inherent right is such a threat to capital in the context of climate breakdown that we will see more and more examples like the LNP Queensland government attempting to take it away.
I'm reading *The Shock Doctrine* at the moment; had to give it a rest for a couple of weeks because it was making me so angry. It's such an important book, and it really helps to contextualise so much going on in the world.
This piece was great. Almost everyone works, so workplaces can be such a powerful space for organisation when it comes to environmental issues, especially climate.
This is strong. The fire alarm framing is the right move.
What I see in my workplace, though, is that people don’t respond collectively even when the threat is immediate and local. Years of competitive individualism have trained them to treat risk as something to manage privately. Optimise yourself. Keep your head down. Get through it. They’re content for a few of us to stand our ground for everyone’s rights, but less keen to join us on the line.
The problem isn’t information. It’s atomisation.
So the organising task may be less about persuading people the building is on fire, and more about rebuilding the reflex to walk to the assembly point together.
How do we rehearse that in ordinary workplaces, before the smoke is visible?