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Revitalizing our manufacturing sector, driving green building, promoting safer chemicals and realizing the economic benefits of global warming are all pieces of the just transition puzzle.
Ottawa (7 March 2008) - These concerns can be addresses and should be addressed as mitigation and adaptation measures to climate change are implemented.
Governments, in time will be forced by international commitments, public opinion, or their own consciences to implement regulations, taxes or other measures to limit carbon emissions. While this happens the transition to this low carbon economy will have to be fair for workers and their communities.
Carla Lipsig-Mummé, coordinator of the labour studies program at York University, has explored the impact global warming will have on “work” and asks some important questions to put us on the path to a just employment transition.
Adapting employment to fit a warming world
Carla Lipsig-Mummé
Global warming may be the topic on everyone's lips, but the silence about the future of work in a warming world is deafening. The social flow-on from global warming will shake up the nature of work and the availability of employment for people in every country. In an era of uneven globalization, the impact of global warming is affecting every region, but it is not affecting all regions in the same way.
In poorer countries, volatile weather is endangering low-lying and coastal communities, threatening life, health and food supplies, as well as employment. This may create a chilly climate for foreign investment and the introduction of energy-wise technologies, almost certainly weakening the struggle for workers' rights.
In the European Union, the "employment transitions" approach has triggered research and policy proposals, shop-floor action and creative energy auditing of workplaces by unions in the U.K., Spain, Belgium and elsewhere.
Everywhere, the growth of small and medium-sized businesses poses a threat to changing the culture of energy use. In prosperous, climate-extreme countries like Canada, global warming threatens job loss in transport and energy-intensive industries, but opens the possibility of employment in new and technologically reorganized sectors – if only we are able to plan an integrated strategy of training, investment and representation for these sectors.
Global warming is changing what we produce and where within Canada we are able to produce it, as well as the technologies, training and worker representation we need. But within the public awakening to climate change, there is also an odd silence: Where is the debate about the future of work and employment? Since the need for employment is not going to disappear, Canada has a lot of questions to address.
Among these are: What industries will continue to provide employment for Canadians, in what numbers and in what regions? Which environment-focused industries will make new kinds of work available? How will ongoing industries change domestic production and division of labour, as well as corporate responsibility in their overseas operations? What skills will no longer be needed? What new training will have to be developed? How will the newly and systemically vulnerable access training and employment in the new labour markets?
How should universities and colleges rethink their programs and accessibility? What legislation will be necessary to assert worker citizenship in the transformed workplace? Will new forms of voice and representation emerge? Will our minimalist tradition of government planning for industries be rethought to allow for a "climate turn" in incubating new companies and market niches? Will our minimalist tradition in labour market planning be sufficient to prepare Canadians for decent jobs in the warming world?
Important questions, but they are being asked only in fragmentary ways. It will, however, take more than fragments to put the future of work on the Canadian climate agenda. Who will ask the questions publicly? Who will create a common research language among climate scientists, social scientists and labour studies experts to crystallize strategic answers? Where will the public pressure come from to address these questions democratically?
Private sector corporations are hopping on the climate-concern bandwagon, but in ways that need to be expanded. To start with, universal shop-floor energy audits are needed, but they should not be controlled by the shop-floor's employers. And that's just a starting point.
To change the culture of energy use, full corporate auditing will need to extend to current corporate investment and training policies. We will need to audit corporate environmental practices in global production chains, exploring the links between workplace citizenship, collective voice and energy-wise productivity.
If we begin now to ask these questions and engage the public actively in finding answers, we have a fighting chance to construct a fairer work world in the near future.
It makes sense to bring climate scientists together with social scientists and workplace experts to define the questions and link research to action. It makes sense to broaden the analysis of energy use to all aspects of the productive sphere.
It makes sense to reconsider our passion for small and medium-size businesses and ask whether their economies of scale make them less able to deal with the challenges that global warming presents.
It makes sense to challenge government at all levels to play a more imaginative, interventionist and incubating role, to do what Germany is doing and enter actively into developing national and regional industrial strategies for developing new industries and technologies, while training people in new skills.
And it makes sense to involve the largest of membership-based public interest organizations in Canada, the trade unions, from the outset.
Together, these actors and the grassroots public that will respond to them may just be able to work through what needs to change and what has to emerge in transforming work for a warming world.
Carla Lipsig-Mummé is co-ordinator of the labour studies program and founding director of the Centre for Research on Work and Society at York University.