The Nuts and Bolts of “Climate Jobs” Transitions
Conveners: Associate Professor Andreas Ytterstad (HiOA) and Jonathan Neale, One Million Jobs Campaign (UK)
Campaigns highlighting the demand for “Climate Jobs” has emerged in ten countries over the last decade, including South Africa, Canada, the UK, Norway, Portugal and France. Although different in scope and size, these campaigns have some distinct features, already noted within the field of environmental labour studies (Räthzel and Uzzell 2012). Climate jobs campaigns is less of an “ecological modernization” approach than green jobs. Although not against greening existing workplaces, the key demand is for new jobs; the sort of jobs with the greatest prospects of reducing national emissions enough to avoid runaway climate change (Neale 2009, Ytterstad 2013). They are class based (Hampton 2015), and they put demands on the state to finance new jobs. The climate jobs model assumes massive government action to create jobs. That means funding for almost 100 % renewable energy, but also jobs in construction, transport and many other areas.
Notwithstanding the general features of a Climate Jobs approach, there are a number of conceptual, financial, technical, educational and political challenges. What are the similarities and differences between climate jobs and green jobs? How can efforts to green existing workplaces be linked to campaign for new climate jobs? How do jobs in different sectors (and across sectors) translate into emission cuts? How can the estimates by made more reliable? How can jobs leading to emission cuts replace rather than add onto jobs that leads to more emissions, thus reducing “rebound effects”? How can demands for jobs directing at the state be reconciled with local efforts to increase democratization of the workplace? How much jobs creation can be guaranteed through existing regulatory frameworks? What new systems need to be developed in order to roll out the climate jobs rapidly enough? How do you commission (new) reports on climate jobs? And how do you coproduce reports that are both scientifically sound AND related to actually existing trade union policies?
This panel invites papers on a broad array of nuts and bolts necessary for “Climate Jobs” Transitions, not limited to the questions above, from academics and activists alike. We especially welcome papers on how a climate jobs program would be different in poorer countries of the global South compared to richer ones. We want this panel to begin a process of building a global body of expertise which could strengthen and build climate jobs campaign on a scientific footing, thus assisting the realization of such climate jobs programs worldwide.
We invite contributions to this session. Please send a 250 word abstract to Andreas.ytterstad@hioa.no by December 15th, 2017.
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