Climate Strikes
Chapter 5. Part II. Building up the climate strike muscle during disasters
When the fire alarms are going off everywhere, what we do as unionists depends on prior organisation and education. The capacity of workers to stop work depends, partly, on prior experience of walking off the job.
The right to cease work for safety becomes a critical expression of social cooperation in the midst of a climate disaster. It supports ongoing resistance to capital shifting the risk of climate breakdown onto workers. Cease works make employers bear more of the costs of such dangerous events. In so doing, it creates a bottom up pressure for actual climate action as opposed to merely further enriching the already rich in the hope that maybe, just maybe, it will avoid an existential threat as a by-product of the right market privileges.
If the safety cease work is deployed as a mean through which to protect workers from bushfire-fuelled air pollution or to disrupt vectors of infection from the next pandemic born from ecological destruction, what must be further explored is the patient organising between disasters that can create an environment and culture of cooperation between workers when an emergency hits hard and fast. This is disaster organising.
Alongside solidarity bargaining, the struggle for climate safety is the other key component universally relevant for creating sufficient power at work to break through the capitalist dam wall limiting human possibility. The two universal modes of workplace action could be pursued separately but they are capable of reinforcing each and converging like two threads in a rope.
The strategic importance of safety rights
The first characteristic to note about safety rights more generally is that they apply to every worker. For instance in Australia, and its various Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) regulatory regimes, workers no matter their legal employer, whether they are casual, permanent or contractors are entitled to a safe working environment from the entity which runs and manages their workplace or controls their work.
Organising around safety in the face of a common threat, therefore, shares a universality in common with solidarity bargaining. It sets up a way of relating with and between workers that is not just relevant to those who occupy a position of relative and always temporary privilege in the workplace and economy. It does not matter whether a union agreement is in place to get started on safety organising – though an agreement that includes union recognition eases the process. Workers who are independent contractors, work for minimum wage or on a union contract share the same statutory safety rights.
Every employer has a duty to provide a safe work environment, and this includes mitigating risks which they reasonably cannot eliminate themselves. Take the COVID-19 spread in Victoria in 2020, as an example. Many United Workers’ Union members in a range of industries, including call centres, laundries and warehouses, took action to get their employers to institute a range of control measures from working from home, deep cleans, and changed shift patterns to name but a few. Notably many of these workers struck for the first time.
These actions were successful insofar as they got employers generally to take more effective action to control the spread. They also shifted the public discourse from one restricted to bio-policing marginalised populations, notably public housing tenants in early July 2020, to one where workers were regarded as effective agents of solidarity. This was especially so when Spotless laundry workers walked off the job later in July.
COVID-19 further highlighted the organising limits of managerial prerogative – one manager (or even a small group of them) could not possibly know better than the sum total of the entire workplace when it comes to potential and actual vectors of infection. This is true of other climate disasters - each disaster is itself challenges the limits of managerial direction. Each challenge is resolved with either a hardening of capital’s rule or a pushing back.
These Victorian actions were informed by the example of MUA Port Botany members walking off the job in late 2019 at the height of bushfire-fuelled air pollution – a term woefully inadequate to describe a continent on fire for three months. The inspiration for the cease work for environmental risk may have come from a highly organised and militant workforce, but the example of laundry and call centre workers walking off the job for the first time in their lives mere months later highlights both the universal applicability of this approach and how unorganised workers can learn from militant workers.
Any union official who categorises workers into those who can and cannot strike both denies the subjectivity and humanity of workers and misses opportunities for workers to build power.
A risk, therefore, that is not able to be eliminated by any single employer is an issue that workers can nonetheless cooperate together around to win meaningful control measures. Workers can work to force engineering controls such as improved ventilation systems at work, administrative control such as alternative hours of work or location of work or even improved PPE. This very possibility of change opens up the possibility of action. It’s why employers will tend to claim matters from insecure work to bushfires are just forces of nature or market forces that they have no way of managing.
In Australia, every worker has the right to be consulted on safety. To put this another way, an employer has a duty to not only provide a healthy and safe working environment but also to consult with the workforce about it. This intrinsically carves health and safety out from a master-servant relationship where workers are treated as objects – a factor of production – to agents who are ascribed some degree of subjectivity within a regulatory regime. It also differentiates, at an ideological level, a free market relation from slavery.
A free actor in a labour market should have at least the right to withdraw their labour as a matter of individual choice and this cannot be disentangled with the right to maintain one’s basic state of health. Individuals as market actors should, therefore, be able to get information as it pertains to their health and safety and have a voice in how that relates to their care and treatment. Of course, such principles are generally ignored in practice.
Safety rights are central to the operation of the system. To deny workers these rights is equivalent to the system regressing to a direct form of despotism that is less regulated by the logic of the market.1 It is certainly a foreseeable outcome that either the escalation of the climate crisis, the enhanced use of these rights or some combination of the two creates an entirely new, more ideologically brittle strategic context. This, of course, is not an argument against the exercise of such rights but to note that this might develop into a more radical struggle for a just system to guarantee them.
This post is the second 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.
There are signs that this is context is beginning to develop across 2025 and into 2026 but even then this has served to underscore the importance of disaster organising.