Abstract
This essay builds on the contributions to this special issue to advance a historical relational approach to labour studies, industrial relations, and Environmental Labour Studies (ELS) while differentiating it from the interactional approaches currently dominant. Central to this choice is that relational approaches provide more empirically compelling explanations of the choices of labour, capital, and state because they take into account that the choices of these social entities are embedded within their mutual and uneven constitution. From that starting point I reflect upon the five articles in this special issue on climate change and industrial relations and examine how I see them contributing to such a relational approach even though it is not their explicit strategy. I close by briefly restating my view that a historical relational approach is empirically more complete while alerting us to our axiological and epistemological preferences.
A number of years ago, I interviewed a unionist who had been at the heart of Canadian labour environmentalism since the early 1980s. I wanted to learn more about the trajectory of labour environmentalism in the United States and Canada and, in particular, the rise and decline of the strategy of just transition in these two countries from the late 1980s to the early 2000s. Before we started the formal interview, he forewarned me that it is not possible to understand these developments without taking into account the decline of the regulatory state in these countries as a result of resurgent neoliberalism from the 1970s on. But if I recognized that this decline was not simply the product of conjunctural crises, whether financial or energy, but of the reorganization of world capitalism, he told me, a lot of developments would become clearer. For example, I would understand that the just transition strategy adopted by the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers Union (OCAW) in the late 1980s was the response to this neoliberal reordering after an intraunion shift in the balance of power. That the same dynamic, on the other hand, led to the reorientation of the United Automobile Workers (UAW), the paragon of early labour environmentalism and a proponent of just transition, away from both. Why the Canadian Automobile Workers (CAW), an example of social unionism, adopted an increasingly nationalist strategy and why the Steelworkers chose to promote a ‘jobs and environment’ strategy from the early 1990s on. He was nudging me, as it turns out, towards a relational approach to labour environmentalism and environmental labour studies (ELS), one that places actors within, rather than outside of history.
In the first part of this commentary, I clarify the differences between relational and interactional ontologies and suggest that labour studies, including ELS, should be profoundly relational for both theoretical and political reasons, an approach that is also consistent with that of Räthzel and Uzzell (2013) who proposed the term. 1 In the second part, I reflect upon the five articles in this special issue on climate change and industrial relations and examine how I see them contributing to such a relational approach even though it is not their explicit strategy. I close by briefly restating my view that a relational approach is empirically more complete while alerting us to our axiological and epistemological preferences.
Towards a relational (environmental) labour studies
Relations and interactions
Ontological assumptions are the most consequential ones in the social sciences because they carry in them significant epistemological, methodological and, for our purposes, axiological assumptions. Questions about what the social world is made of have been around for a long time and received additional attention during the 1970s, a period of contestation and change, particularly by historical materialists (e.g. Hyman, 1975). Bertell Ollman, one of a small but important number of US Marxists, took on the issue while a doctoral student in the UK and has spent his life exploring ‘internal’ and external relations (Ollman, 1976, 2015). In his view ‘the philosophy of external relations, which reigns supreme in both the common sense and learned discourse of our time, holds that there are both “things” (the social science jargon for which is “factors”) and relations but that they are logically independent of each other.’ (Ollman, 2015: 10). The philosophy of internal relations, in contrast, ‘holds that what others take to be a “thing” that may or may not undergo change and may or may not have relations with other things is itself both a “process” and a “relation”’ (2015: 10). He underscores that ‘the qualities that followers of the philosophy of external relations ascribe to a thing are not denied but transformed into aspects of moments that can serve as vantage points from which to view and study their relations (including indirect relations) and changes, understood as essential parts of what they are.’ (10) Along the same lines, Richard Hyman (1975:4) wrote ‘social relationships are essentially dynamic: what exists at any point of time is the product of past actions and relationships and contains in turn the potential for future development.’
More recently, in addressing the question of inequality, Erik Olin Wright (2016) distinguished between gradational and relational ontologies. Consistent with Ollman and Hyman, ‘The first approach [gradational] sees economic inequalities as primarily the result of the attributes and efforts of persons; the second emphasizes inequalities built into the structure of social positions.’ None denies that individual attributes and strategies are important and necessary to explain how particular people or groups act but, in their view, exclusive attention to them obscures the social divisions of labour – whether capitalism, patriarchy or racism – within which people are constituted and act (see also Fraser, 2017). My goal here is not to adjudicate the structure–agency debate nor the merits of Marxist/historical materialist views on relations, in general, or industrial relations, in particular. Rather, I am suggesting that the study of society, in general, and (environmental) labour studies, in particular, is well-served by relational approaches, rather than interactional ones. 2
As a scholar of the other international relations (IR) I have long studied the debates between relational analysts that place countries (and localities) within global divisions of labour, and interactional analysts who treat countries as like entities with variable resources and interests (for overviews of IR, see Dunne et al., 2020; Edkins, 2019; McGlinchey et al., 2017; for the relational/interactional divisions, see Jackson and Nexon, 1999). The interactional set of perspectives has held the upper hand in mainstream IR but the challengers have made serious inroads. While these ontological debates have been around for decades, they have become increasingly more central to the discipline (e.g. Kurki, 2019; Trownsell et al., 2019).
It would be surprising if relational and interactional views were not present in industrial relations which, like IR, seeks to examine relations, broadly construed, between different categories of actors (for overviews see Barry and Wilkinson, 2021; Doellgast et al., 2021; Kaufman, 2004; Lee and Tapia, 2021; Muller-Jentsch, 2004) 3 . Like in IR, there is a great deal that can be learned by studying the interactions of corporations and unions. But there is much that can be left out, as well. Why were unions in the United States not able to resist the rise of neoliberalism during the 1970s and why was job blackmail then, and now, so effective? At one level, this went back to the Treaty of Detroit when the most progressive and powerful union, the UAW, exchanged higher salaries and benefits for the right of management to automate and relocate (Loomis, 2018). That compromise, in turn, was embedded within a post-Second World War ‘settlement’ that tied workers to companies while narrowing their political horizons (for a history of the US industrial relations, see Hogler, 2004). The UAW and other social democratic unions, in fact, joined enthusiastically in the purging of the US labour movement from communists and other radicals. Can we make sense of these developments without recognizing that they took place within a liberal capitalist order that, moreover, was engaged in the geopolitics of the Cold War? And that these intersecting dynamics did not merely provide more opportunities for capital over labour but fostered a hegemonic order that reconstituted the union movement, more so than management, and was institutionalized in the social liberal industrial relations of the early post-Second World War era that were upended during the 1970s?
Any approach that recognizes that the interactions and transactions between capital and labour are emanating from and affected by their mutual constitution within these historical social, and not only technical, divisions of labour would fall into what I called relational. Its key characteristic, for me, is that actors are mutually constituted within social divisions of labour and that, when these historical relations are uneven so is the mutual constitution of the involved actors or social forces. 4 In IR, like industrial relations, that could well include Marxists, other historical materialists, some historical institutionalists, critical constructivists and those analysts that emphasize relations produced by social divisions of labour based on race, gender or coloniality. On the other hand, approaches that assume that the interactions and transactions amongst actors do not affect their mutual constitution, would not be relational in the sense described here. In IR that would include almost all realist and liberal lines of thought – including liberal gender, race or other identity analysts – rational and public choice approaches and liberal constructivists. In industrial relations, it would include many pluralists, non-historical institutionalists, and rational and public choice approaches, amongst others.
From unions to political economy
What would a relational and an interactional ELS look like? At the level of unions, an interactional ontology would privilege the preferences and strategies of unions towards environmental policies, including their decisions to support or oppose employers, recognizing that capital tends to have more capacities than labour. A relational ontology, on the other hand, would add that unions and capital are mutually constituted and that the kind of unionism, environmentalism or capitalism dominant in particular countries is the result of historical contestations that include the reorganization, marginalization or destruction of unions, environmentalists, parties, states and, often, capital that do not ‘fit’ (Cox, 1981; Hyman, 2001; Prezowrski, 2021).
A relational ontology does not mean homogeneity nor absence of agency at the micro level of workers or unions. The variability of views amongst and within unions has been present from the very beginning of the modern labour movement (Stevis, 1997) and central to this variability have been the views of unions about the political economy and the state. Historically, unions in the same sectors have chosen different paths and the same union has changed its priorities over time. The International Woodworkers of America in Western United States and Canada sought to advance conservation policies over many decades (Loomis, 2021). But after the split between and the United States and Canadian sections, the US section supported capital’s job blackmail strategy (Kazis and Grossman, 1982). Similarly, the OCAW chose, after intense internal debates, to accept the need for a just transition (Leopold, 2007). On the other hand, the UAW started out supporting environmental policies and a just transition (Gordon, 2004; Woodcock, 1972) but succumbed to corporate pressures and switched sides. Similarly, as reflected in some of the articles that contribute to this special issue, the changing contours of the world political economy are inscribed in the politics of the CAW as well as those of the Norwegian oil unions, as Allan and Robinson (2022) and Houeland and Jordhus-Lier (2022) indicate, respectively. All of that variability clearly militates in favour of paying close attention to politics within and across unions. Yet, this should not come at the expense of understanding that a great deal of that variability is the product of different views over the ways in which industrial relations and the political economy (re)constitute unions.
A number of decades ago Jonathan Zeitlin (1987) argued that the history of labour is intimately tied with the history of industrial relations, as an institution. One may retort, as I do, that we need to pay close attention to the emergence of unions as well as how worker agency and contestation have shaped the labour movement. But his argument is valuable in alerting us to the significance of industrial relations as institutions that shape labour by giving voice to some unions and kinds of workers and depriving it from others (see Houeland and Jordhus-Lier (2022) in this issue). In fact, the unions most supportive of fossil fuels in the United States are those participating in formalized bipartite institutional arrangements with capital.
The meso level of industrial relations anticipates the macro level of the political economy. At that level, we could well focus on varieties of capitalism or some similar approach to explain similarities and differences across the world (Hall and Soskice 2001). A relational approach, however, would also ask whether and how particular countries are embedded within the world political economy (Brand and Wissen, 2021; Stevis, 2013; also see in this issue Keil and Kreinin (2022); Allan and Robinson (2022); Houeland and Jordhus-Lier (2022). In fact, the desirability of green and hopefully just transitions makes it particularly important to place them within the world political economy because, like the social welfare state, desirable achievements may hide profound inequalities and ecological damage (Bhambra and Holmwood, 2018; Stevis, 2013).
Hegemonic orders operate through the exercise of structural power (used here to mean systemic power woven into the political economy) (Cox, 1981; Gill and Law, 1989; see Wright, Irwin, Nyberg and Bowden (2022) in this volume on how the fossil fuel alliance has sought to sustain its hegemony in Australia). This meaning of structural power differs from that used by the power resource approach which defines structural power as labour’s position within value chains and networks (and the economy, perhaps) rather than power emanating from one’s position in the overall political economy (more on the power resource approach in Kalt (2022) in this issue).
I would like to illustrate the differences between relational and interactional ontologies by commenting on a work that is referenced by most of the authors in this issue. Mildenberger’s (2020) argument of ‘double representation’ of the fossil fuel industry is an example of how a study that takes an interactional approach can be both rich and limiting. There is significant evidence that unions generally line up with capital in protecting fossil fuels but also green industrial policies. The articles in this issue, in fact, indicate that ‘double representation’ frequently involves ‘social’ unions (e.g. see Keil and Kreinin (2022) on German unions; Kalt (2022) on German and South African, Allan and Robinson on Canadian and Houeland and Jordhus-Lier (2022) on Norwegian). There is nothing surprising here. My sense, based on my research on Global Framework Agreements is that double representation, along with contestation, is to be found in all sectors (Stevis, 2010). From an interactional perspective this can be explained by the differential attributes and strategies of unions and corporations. From a relational perspective, their differential attributes and strategies are embedded within the industrial relations and the broader political economy in which unions and corporations are constituted. Whether from the vantage point of Gramscian hegemony – one that fuses material capabilities, institutions and ideas (Cox, 1981; Gramsci, 1971; see Keil and Kreinin (2022) and Wright, Irwin, Nyberg and Bowden (2022) in this issue) – or John Gaventa’s (1980) quiescence, leaving constitutive relations out of our explanations has both empirical and political implications.
Interactional research, so prominent in the study of sustainability transitions (e.g. Geels, 2019; Hess, 2018) can provide empirically rich, but also incomplete, answers because it does not interrogate the role of structural power relations in shaping both actors and their views. Relational research, on the other hand, interrogates the historical relations within which unequals agree or disagree. Is the agreement due to ideological affinities and are these due to weeding out more radical views? Is it due to the more or less discreet exercise of job blackmail by capital and state? Is it fear that support for renewables, whose labour practices leave much to be desired, involves abandoning hard-earned labour rights in the fossil fuel sector? Is it the absence of a public policy that treats the causes of unjust transitions? Do all of the above factors strengthen the hand of those forces within unions opposed to climate policy? (for an illustration, albeit in logging, see Loomis, 2021; also see Allan and Robinson (2022) with respect to the CAW and Kalt (2022) with respect to the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa in this issue).
Unions, industrial relations and political economy in environmental labour studies
While there is some variability, most of the articles within this special issue place workers and unions within industrial relations and the political economy. While they pay close attention to the agency and politics of labour, they do not deal with it in isolation. Moreover, they all recognize that the environmental politics of unions – like those of corporations, states or environmentalists – can vary in ambition. In this part, I would like to highlight how these articles contribute to enriching and advancing relational ELS. I am doing so by organizing the articles along the level of analysis they emphasize – workers and unions, industrial relations, political economy – fully recognizing that there can be differences regarding this order (Stevis, 2014).
Houeland and Jordhus-Lier (2022) focus on the micro level of shop stewards in Norway’s oil industry. However, this microanalysis reveals itself to be grounded in the meso-level institutional arrangements of the country’s industrial relations and in the role of oil in shaping modern Norway. Thus, their work adds to the literature on the role of individuals, but also highlights the contradictory and restrained position of shop stewards. Theoretically, shop stewards could become the vanguard of change within a union – given their workplace responsibilities and the potential for communication and collaboration with other shop stewards. That, however, may require changes within the union that will allow and legitimate different roles for shop stewards. Could that take place without changes in Norwegian industrial relations and Norway’s political economy? In the Spanish CCOO case, for instance, stewards took on environmental responsibilities with implications for the priorities and operation of the union but only after the union had internalized environmental priorities (Gil, 2013; Räthzel, 2021). Even there, however, the process has been one of contestation and tensions rather than an irreversible progress towards deeper labour environmentalism. Houeland and Jorghus-Lier (2022) further open the road for comparative studies of the role of labour environmentalist leaders but, also, of people holding particular positions within a union. Can shop stewards – the equivalent of forepersons in management – change their roles, and their union, or do they choose to, or are chosen, precisely to reproduce, rather than change their unions, industrial relations and the political economy?
Allan and Robinson (2022) draw on the views of workers in the auto manufacturing sector in Ontario, Canada, to investigate the formation of collective identities within unions and the implications for forming environmental identities. The authors properly highlight the need to recognize and integrate the views of workers, as they do, expanding the collective identities within unions and the world of work to include environmentalism. This is a challenging enterprise as views vary depending on the position of workers within the union as well as their demographic and ideological characteristics. While weak ecological modernization, in the form of Green New Dealism, seems to be the dominant narrative, it is worth noting that there are more, as well as less, environmental views within unions.
The focus of the article is on the positions of workers within the union but the variability in their views and concerns plays out against the broader political economy, starting with the break-up of the UAW as a binational union during the 1980s. This was due as much to ideology as to the delayed impact of neoliberal globalization on Canada. The impacts of the neoliberalization on workers and unions, such as the UAW, became apparent in the United States during the 1970s and was manifested in job blackmail (Kazis and Grossman, 1982; Woodcock, 1972). This turned labour environmentalist unions, like the UAW, against the environment, an approach that they have not been able to reverse. Other US unions, such as the United Steelworkers, saw and see an opportunity in renewable manufacturing and have called, largely unsuccessfully, for a green industrial policy, as do the Canadian autoworkers, now part of Unifor. As the authors suggest, the views of union leaders and members cannot be fully understood independent of changes in the place of the Canadian automotive sector in the world political economy and the implications of that for Unifor’s strategies. The different trajectories amongst manufacturing unions do reveal that politics at the level of unions is important but, also, that capital and the state play a central role in transforming union politics, more so than the other way around.
Through the public pronouncements of unions, Keil and Kreinin (2022) examine how the narratives of the ‘good life’ and the ‘imperial mode of living’ reinforce the environmentally damaging political economy of the ‘treadmill of production’. Based on the comparison of views of three German unions the authors record both the strength of these narratives but, also, the variability amongst unions at the micro level. Central to their analysis is sensitivity to the composition and ideological characteristics of unions as well as the systemic role of the ‘good life’ and the ‘imperial mode of living’ in producing and reproducing hegemonic social arrangements in Germany and globally (Wissen and Brand, 2021). They find that more social unions offer openings for a counterhegemonic ‘good sense’ that challenges the glorification of work in the direction of transforming if not overcoming work. This article, therefore, seeks to combine dynamics internal to unions with those of the overall political economy in order to ascertain whether unions are fully absorbed within the hegemonic order or whether there is evidence of counterhegemonic narratives. Overall, then, it highlights the need for a closer study of the promise and limitations of the ideological preferences of unions within capitalism.
Kalt (2022), in turn, seeks to explain the strategic choices of unions in Germany and South Africa, offering a welcome Global North–Global South comparison of two countries in which labour plays a central role. The author argues that the power resource approach can be useful as an intermediate variable between a set of internal and external contextual conditions and the strategies or approaches chosen by unions. He finds that the responses of unions in Germany and South Africa are not fully oppositional nor transformative but, rather reactive or affirmative towards capitalism. Thus, Kalt combines the characteristics of the unions involved, the impact of collaborative industrial relations, such as those in Germany, and the broader political economy to highlight the significance of the political and socio-economic environment, including the role of the state. Comparative research along the lines here will allow us to learn more about which factors play a more dominant role with respect to particular countries and unions – whether across varieties of capitalism or business systems or across global production networks and divisions of labour.
Finally, the article by Wright, Irwin, Nyberg and Bowden (2022) focuses on how the Australian fossil fuel industry and related elites have sought to frame a narrative that justifies the continued primacy of fossil fuels. In that sense, they offer a welcome contribution to the study of corporate climate politics and the role of the broader political economy. In particular, they examine how fossil capital seeks to establish a ‘hegemonic temporal narrative’ by arguing that fossil fuels have contributed and continue to contribute to collective well-being, by casting decarbonization and its supporters as the common enemy, and by highlighting the future promise of fossil fuels. While unions in fossil fuels play a role, this particular case study suggests that their role is supportive rather than leading. Equally significantly one can imagine similar studies unpacking the ‘counterhegemonic’ efforts of the renewables sector when it highlights its environmental benefits but not its environmental and social risks. While such studies can be commandeered by those opposed to climate policy and renewables, they are evidently necessary if the green transition is to be socially and environmental effective. As Ougaard (2016) has suggested, we may be currently experiencing a power struggle over the reconfiguration of capital’s hegemonic alliance. Unions may, in fact, be torn apart as some support fossil fuels while others support renewables.
Closing comments
Individually and collectively, these articles combine their systematic empirical research with attention to the broader order in which their cases operate. While only two of them (Keil and Kreinin (2022) and Wright, Irwin, Nyberg and Bowden (2022)) draw explicitly on the concept of Gramscian hegemony, a relational concept grounded in historical materialist thought, it is mentioned by others and is present throughout all of them to the degree that they all draw upon some historical configuration of ideas, institutions or material capabilities. While not explicitly developing an internal relations ontology, it is to my understanding that these articles point to an internal relations approach in ELS.
A relational approach to ELS does not require an examination of all aspects of an issue. It does require, however, that our research place the interactions and transactions between actors within the social divisions of labour that constitute them mutually and unequally. Yet it would be an error, in my view, to employ a relational approach to obscure or dismiss the agency and choices of unions or workers supporting fossil fuels as the product of false consciousness (which they may be). It would be a double error, however, to equate the views of labour and capital, even when they are formally the same. The meanings and impacts of policy choices are intimately related to the positions of actors within social divisions of labour, manifested as they are in industrial relations. That elements of capital and labour share the same views on fossil fuels, climate policy and other policy issues does not negate the fact that these policy preferences refract their differential positions within the political economy. Empirically, we need to study both the variability of agential voices and the positionality of those voices. The latter, in fact, is a necessary consideration if we are to fully understand the former.
A relational approach, in my view, is particularly well suited to prevent intentional or unintentional silences in ELS. At the level of society, it forces us to identify the social divisions of labour underpinning the relations that mutually and unevenly constitute actors and their strategies. An interactional approach, on the other hand, does not require the interrogation of whether the constitution of a particular actor involves the super or subaltern position of another. This is all the more important in ELS. When unions and workers deal with nature as something external that they can use as they see fit, they are actually legitimating the power of those who see both nature and labour as subaltern and, thus, amenable to the same kind of treatment.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.