Going Green—Turning Labor: A Qualitative Analysis of the Approaches of Union Officials Working with Environmental Issues in Sweden and the United Kingdom

Introduction

Because of their position, trade unions understand how climate change legislation affects the livelihood of their members and their environment, and they are also often aware of the ways in which production impacts the climate as well as the workers. In processes of developing sustainable climate change policies—and environmentally sound, low carbon societies and forms of production—trade unions can therefore be actors of significant importance (Räthzel and Uzzell 2013; Stevis and Felli 2015). But, mobilizing support for climate change policies in trade union organizations is not easy. Difficulties are often described as related to the jobs versus environment dilemma (Räthzel and Uzzell 2011), in terms of a conflict between protecting jobs on the one hand and protecting the environment on the other. While environmentalists have chosen to protect nature at the expense of workers’ jobs and livelihoods, unions have often chosen to protect jobs at the expense of nature. On a more general level, it could be argued that the “metabolic rift” that marks the capitalist mode of production—that does not acknowledge the interdependent relationship between work and nature, and through which nature’s resources are allowed to be used in production without being restored (Foster 1999)—also marks the environmental perspectives of many trade unions (see also Lundström, Räthzel, and Uzzell 2015). Analyzing how environmental agendas are articulated in trade unions, researchers have pointed out that unions are commonly limited to discourses of ecological modernization—similar to those advanced by employers and governments, and often relying on “technological fix” arguments—and not fundamentally challenging capitalism and the processes causing climate change (see, for example, Felli 2014; Hrynyshyn and Ross 2011; Nugent 2011; Snell and Fairbrother 2010, 2011).

It has furthermore been pointed out that class-based and cultural differences between the labor movement and the environmental movement introduce further obstacles for alliances to form between the two (Obach 2002; Rose 2003), and it has also often proven difficult to organize sustainable alliances between the union movement and the environmental movement. Research has nevertheless shown that some individuals, so-called “bridge-brokers,” who are connected to both the environmental and the labor movement, are sometimes able to bridge divisions and improve the conditions for developing relationships (Mayer 2009). It has been suggested that a general familiarity with the cultures of both the environmental movement and the labor movement, and high degrees of legitimacy across the coalition, provides certain individuals with abilities for broadening the mind-set of organizations and establishing sustainable alliances.

Taking the research showing the importance of committed individuals for putting climate change issues on the agenda of unions (Räthzel and Uzzell 2011, 2013) as a point of departure, the analysis presented in this paper directs attention to the experiences and strategies of such individuals. The analysis compares life-history interviews with two union organization leaders working with climate issues in two different national contexts—the coordinated market economy (CME) of Sweden and the liberal market economy (LME) of the United Kingdom. I discuss how the individual background of the two leaders—the ways in which they have become politically and environmentally aware and engaged—as well as contextual circumstances relate not only to different ways of conceptualizing the relationship between work and nature but also to different practical strategies for engaging with climate change in their organizations. The aim of the paper is to develop an understanding of how the life histories of individual leaders are related to institutional circumstances—at the organizational as well as the national level—in processes of transforming union organizations.

The analysis was conducted in the context of a research project investigating the role of individuals in changing organizations, looking specifically at the case of trade union officials working with environmental issues. Aiming to compare experiences in different national contexts, the project conducted biographical interviews with unionists in, among other countries, Sweden and the United Kingdom. In relation to these interviews, the project observed a number of striking differences between the two countries. In British unions, it was often the case that informants had been given this area to work with because of their personal engagement, or that they had established it as a work task for themselves for similar reasons. In general, the U.K. informants also had quite extensive experience from working in union organizations, and they had also identified themselves strongly with the labor movement since early on in life. In Sweden, on the other hand, most respondents did not have union backgrounds, nor any particularly strong ties to the labor movement prior to their current union positions. People working with environmental issues in Swedish unions were predominantly recruited from other kinds of organizations—such as political parties, government authorities, and academia—into unions, specifically to work with green issues, and they often had experience of this subject from their previous workplaces. In both countries, however, only a very limited number of respondents claimed to have had any affiliations with the environmental movement or any experiences of climate activism. The U.K. respondents could thus be identified primarily as unionists, who had developed their environmental engagements through and in relation to their union work, while the Swedish respondents largely had been introduced to labor movement perspectives through their environmental work in unions, and their previous experiences of environmental work had developed in contexts external to the trade union world. These observations suggest, first, that the processes of recruiting people to work with green issues in unions have been different, but, second, and perhaps more importantly, that the general processes through which environmental perspectives and policies have been introduced into the union world have been organized differently, in the two countries. As will be argued in further detail below, such differences must be understood as being conditioned in part by the historical circumstances through which trade unionism developed and was institutionalized in the two countries.

With these observations in mind, this paper presents an analysis of life-history interviews with two individuals working with environmental issues in union organizations from leadership positions. One of them, Maria, ¹ is based in Sweden and is the leader of an organization within the Scandinavian Landsorganisationen (LO) ² confederation structure. The other, Chris Baugh, is based in the United Kingdom and is the Assistant General Secretary of Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS), a white-collar, civil service, union. ³ These respondents were chosen for this analysis in part because they represent—in relation to the observations made in the research project briefly described above—typical examples of union officials working with green issues in Sweden and the United Kingdom as regards their respective union backgrounds and previous experiences of environmental work. But furthermore, they were also chosen because they are leaders who have established climate change and sustainability issues successfully into their organizations. First, the selection enables a comparison of the ways in which green issues have been handled in Swedish and British union contexts, respectively. Second, as Bill and Maria represent leaders of two different kinds of union organizations, the selection enables a comparison of experiences of green union work in two different kinds of union leadership positions.

In other words, the selection creates conditions for analyzing how different individual trajectories and backgrounds are experienced from similar positions in two different organizational, as well as two different national, union contexts. While the poor conditions for connecting environmental engagement at shop-floor level to that of union officials working at headquarters in the context of Sweden have been discussed previously (see Lundström, Räthzel, and Uzzell 2015), this article explores experiences from headquarters and from leadership positions specifically, directing attention to how different individual backgrounds of leaders in union organizations impact their abilities to introduce change in two different organizational and national contexts.

In the analysis, I focus primarily on three different topics that were discussed in the interviews with Maria and Chris. First, I look at how they talk about becoming introduced to and engaged with labor issues and environmental issues, respectively, and how their awareness regarding the role of unions in developing climate change policies came to develop. In relation to this topic, I also direct a specific focus to how the respondents relate their work to their political orientation. Second, I investigate how they talk about their own position in the union: how do they relate themselves and their strategies to other roles, practices, and structures in the organization and the union world? Third, I look at how they talk about the conditions for changing a union organization and how they relate this to their practical experiences of working with environmental issues in their organization: what have been the main obstacles to their work? Through which strategies, and at what moments in time, have they been able to work successfully with environmental issues?

Analytical Framework and Method

In Western economies—linked to a declining industrial sector, in which union mobilization traditionally have been strong (Munck 2002), and increasing labor market fragmentation and deregulation (Gray 2004)—it has been acknowledged over the last couple of decades that the labor movement is in a state of crisis (Silver 2003) and that trade unions are “fading away” (Castells 2000). Consequently, processes of integrating climate change into the agenda of unions have often been related to the notion that unions are in need of renewal and revitalization (Fairbrother 2015; Frege and Kelly 2003). While union decline has characterized both Swedish and British labor market relations (Gourevitch et al. 2016), there are some important differences that should be kept in mind when analyzing the conditions for climate work in unions in these two particular contexts.

Comparing labor market relations and the conditions for developing a green union agenda in Sweden and the United Kingdom could also be described, in line with the varieties of capitalism framework (Hall and Soskice 2001), in terms of comparing LME of the United Kingdom with CME of Sweden. One of the key differences between these two economies is that employer-worker relations and decision-making processes are understood as generally characterized by cooperation in CMEs, and more adversarial in LMEs, with employers being the primary decision makers. In Scandinavia and Sweden, labor market relationships are furthermore—in accordance with the so-called “Swedish model”—shaped by a generous and extensive welfare state, centralized and collective negotiations between employer and union federations, and an emphasis on political consensus rather than conflict (Thullberg and Östberg 1994). In Britain, union and employer relations are defined rather by decentralized sectionalism and shop-floor activism (Edwards et al. 1998; Fulcher 1988, 1991). In Sweden, workers have traditionally been fairly unified in their democratic support for the Social Democratic Party while bourgeois interests have been weakened politically by fragmentation across different parties. In Britain, it is the democratic support of workers that has been fragmented, while the political right has been unified. The Swedish government has consequently been social democratic, while the British has been conservative, for large parts over the last hundred years. In relation to unions and employers, the state has come to play different roles in the two countries. Whereas the state in general has not interfered in negotiations between employers and unions in Sweden, British state regulation has been extensive in. Following the influence of the new right on government, the 1980s and 1990s in particular, state interventions have impacted significantly the conditions for unionism in the United Kingdom. Dropping sharply from a peak at about 50 percent in 1980, union membership rates in Britain have been relatively stable at about 30 percent since the mid-1990s (Schnabel 2013).

While commonly argued to have been conditioned by the political power resources of the labor movement and class solidarity (Korpi 1983), the Swedish model has also been described as a neo-corporatist, or state corporatist, and primarily maintaining order on a labor market dominated by employers (Lewin 1994). Marked by a highly centralized and monolithic organizational structure, Swedish unions have also been criticized for being democratically weak. Increased mobilization of employers (Ryner 1999) have undermined the political strength of unions in Sweden over the last couple of decades, and rising public support for a politically more unified neoliberal right have also weakened the decommodifying powers of the social democratic welfare state. In recent times, union membership levels have decreased in Sweden as well, although less sharply and from higher levels than in the United Kingdom, peaking at about 85 percent in the mid-1980s to averaging at about 70 percent today (Kjellberg 2011).

In previous research, the role of individuals in changing organizations has been discussed as a leadership issue (Bass 1999; Caldwell 2003) focusing on individual performance, but without taking into account the broader societal contexts within which organizations act and individuals develop their capabilities. As unions become engaged with business unionism (Hyman 2001), they specialize on the quantitative and technical aspects of work, such as salaries and working hours. To include climate change into the agenda of their organizations, moving beyond such specialization is precisely what environmentally engaged unionists need to do, and take into account the broader context in which salaried labor is executed.

The integration of climate change into the agenda of trade unions in other words relates to a shift toward community unionism (Lipsig-Mumme 2003; Wills 2001), or social movement unionism, and the organization of worker alliances beyond specific sectors and workplaces (Hrynyshyn and Ross 2011; Snell and Fairbrother 2010). Such shifts by which links are established between different social actors—for instance, between groups struggling for cultural recognition and those fighting for economic redistribution—have been called for and theorized in different ways by a number of critical theorists: for instance, by Nira Yuval-Davis (1999) in terms of “transversal politics,” and by Laclau and Mouffe (1985; see also Mouffe 1999) in terms of “agonistic pluralism.” However, as such theories often remain “hazy about the ways in which commonality can be fostered in a world in which difference is real” (Wills 2001), empirical research looking at such processes are still very much needed.

Drawing on observations from literature about union leadership (see, for instance, Frege and Kelly 2003; Greene, Black, and Ackers 2000), a key concept for the analysis presented here is Gramsci’s (1999) concept of “organic intellectual.” Describing something more specific than the more generally used concept of “change agents” (Caldwell 2003), an organic intellectual—who “actively takes part in practical life, as a constructor, organizer, ‘permanent persuader,’ and not just a simple orator” (Gramsci 1999, 141-42)—is able to challenge the established consensus of a class or group, by articulating the experiences of that group in such a way that change can happen. To understand the relationship between individual and organizational trajectories, and the societal contexts within which they develop, this project has employed life-history interviews. By analyzing the trajectory and context of the organization and individual in relation to each other—drawing on the critical-psychological concept of “societal capability to act” (Holzkamp and Boreham 2013) with the concept of “affordances” from developmental psychology (Gibson 1979)—I aim to understand the situations in which individuals are able to change their organizations.

The research presented here was conducted, as briefly mentioned above, in relation to a project investigating the role of individuals in changing organizations, looking specifically at the case of trade union officials working with environmental issues. ⁴ The project carried out 118 biographical interviews with trade union officials working with environmental issues in South Africa, Sweden, India, Spain, Brazil, and the United Kingdom. ⁵ The interviews were conducted as semistructured interviews, asking the respondents to describe their life histories in relation to how they came to be involved with both union work and the environment. In addition to the interviews, the project has also included official trade union documents on climate change policies, literature about the trade union histories in the specific countries, as well as information about the climate change politics of the respective countries.

Sweden: Greening from the Top

At the time of the interview, Maria was the leader of an organization in the Scandinavian LO confederation structure, focused on coordinating activities and establishing cooperation between Nordic unions. The organization works mainly with union leaders by organizing committees, working groups, and conferences. In many of the interviews conducted with Swedish unionists working with environmental issues in the project, respondents talked about Maria’s work as very important not only for them but also for the advancement of climate issues in the Scandinavian union context on a more general level.

In the interview, Maria describes how she, after becoming the organization’s leader, started working determinately with integrating sustainability and climate issues into the organization’s agenda. As a direct result of these efforts, sustainable development was taken up as one of the organization’s basic values in the organization’s bylaws:

§1 Basic values

The UN Declaration of human rights is fundamental for trade unionism . . . The equality of all humans, gender equality, solidarity, democracy and sustainable development are essential values for the activities of [the organization].

§2 Vision

[The organization] will promote a sustainable, inclusive and fair working life, for the benefit of individual wage earners, socially, economically and ecologically, in the Nordic countries, in Europe, and globally. ⁶

As the quote from the bylaws shows, the first paragraph states sustainable development as an essential value for the organization, comparable with those of human rights, gender equality, and democracy. The second paragraph further emphasizes the status of the environmental perspective, stating that the organization will promote not only social and economic but also ecological benefits for wage earners through its work for a sustainable working life. In addition to these changes of the bylaws, the member organizations have also signed a Declaration to work for an economically, socially, and ecologically sustainable working life. The Declaration explicitly states the need for unions to take active part in developing a sustainable working life, through formulations that acknowledge the interdependent relationship between work and nature:

[T]he global environment and climate are also under pressure from increasing emissions and ruthless exploitation of natural resources. Climate change and environmental problems challenge our notions about and hopes for continued growth and welfare. Future economic growth and development must take place in symbiosis with nature, and take greater advantage than in the past of the business and development potential of environmental technology.

The intertwined challenges we face require new ways of thinking. It is the task of the politicians, the social partners and all the other stakeholders in society to do what we can to transform these challenges into opportunities. We can do this by being future-oriented and dynamic, and by working together to adapt our societies, making them economically, socially and ecologically sustainable.

The Nordic trade unions can play a key role in developing a sustainable, and value-creating working life based on both know-how and solidarity. Future solutions in society must be characterized by a combination of robust resistance and an inherent ability to restore, develop and renew—referred to as resilience.

As the quotes above show, both the bylaws and the Declaration advance fairly strong formulations. In particular, the documents clearly articulate sustainability as a core issue for trade unions to work with—interdependently linked to other more traditional areas of union action—and they also position unions as key actors concerning climate change prevention. At the same time, it can also be argued that the formulations in the Declaration, while describing the impact of production on the climate in terms of “ruthless exploitation,” do not explicitly link the climate crisis to the general organization of the economy and to capitalism. Furthermore, it also frames the capacities of “business” and “environmental technology,” rather than the collectively mobilized interests of workers, as providing solutions that will not only solve the climate crisis but simultaneously also enable further economic growth. It could in other words be argued that the Declaration remains at the level of technological fixes, as opposed to a discourse articulating the need for societal transformation and providing visions for a just transition and alternatives for workers (Räthzel and Uzzell 2011).

However, as the formulations are uncommonly progressive for the context of Scandinavian union organizations, they also show the significance of Maria’s work, and on a more general level the role of engaged individuals for advancing the status of the climate change issue in a context where the traditions for such work are limited. More specifically, however, and in regard to the questions of the role of individuals in transforming unions, a closer analysis of Maria’s work and experiences enables us to understand the affordances for people with outsider backgrounds to introduce new perspectives into union organizations. Prior to her position in the union, Maria worked as a civil servant for an intergovernmental trade organization in Brussels, and her previous union background was that of a passive member only. Although she has always identified herself as being to the left politically, she has never been actively organized in the labor movement. In the interview, when I asked Maria about how she felt that her nonunion background affected her work, she said that not identifying with the union movement, and not being a member of the Social Democratic Party, had been important factors for her ability to introduce new ideas and perspectives into the union agenda:

Maria: I’m not LO, and that has been difficult for some LO organizations. Because all previous [leaders] came from LO organizations . . . But I have worked very closely with [their leaders] to build trust . . .

I think it makes me more fearless, I’m not afraid . . . I don’t socialize privately with all these people that I work with . . . Within the social democratic movement . . . if you . . . leave the movement . . ., you lose your social network . . . you become dependent in a different way.

In the quote above, Maria describes her outsider position as related to both her professional background and the social network of relationships in which her private life is situated. She also claims that her outsider position has provided her with a certain degree of fearlessness, and independence, both in relation to the people she interacts with through her work and the social democratic movement on a more general level. This way of describing how an outsider background relates to union work is very similar to that of several other respondents interviewed by the research project in Sweden. These experiences illustrate the ties between the Social Democratic Party and the union movement in the Scandinavian context, and that having an outsider position is understood as important for someone with a different background. They furthermore illustrate that the mainstream of the union world is perceived as distrustful, and reluctant to accept changes, by someone who is engaged with introducing climate issues into the movement. More importantly, however, it also shows that being positioned with a certain distance to the mainstream and establishment of the union movement and that having a certain degree of independence in relation to the movement can be experienced as a source of political strength and agency for an individual with an agenda of transformation.

It could in other words be argued that it is precisely her experiences outside of the union world that have provided Maria with an alternative vision of how unions can engage actively in preventing climate change. In the interview with Maria, there is an interesting relationship between how she relates to her outsider position and how she describes the development of her own environmental awareness. In the quote below, Maria describes this process as linked to a specific moment in her life, which was also important for her entering the union world:

Maria: I know exactly when my environmental engagement started, that was when [my son] was born. Even if it always was a part of who I am, this thing with the natural environment and [being outdoors] and so on . . . I have never felt it [as strong] as when he was born . . . So, I started to read up. Because we were getting all these clothes for him, and they needed to be washed before he could use them, like three times. And I was going, why? . . . And then I realized how . . . much chemicals there are . . . in clothes . . . To me this was a real awakening . . . Then someone suggested I should apply for this job . . . and I just felt: Now I’m really going to . . . use my engagement . . . and I really wanted to work in the union, because I could see that . . . this is the opportunity to engage myself.

Here, Maria describes the process of becoming aware of climate issues as a turning point in her life, and her understanding of the ways in which production impacts on life, as crucial not only for realizing the need to change things but also for realizing the role of unions in such processes. She furthermore describes her engagement as having developed predominantly in relation to experiences made in the private domain and also from a consumer’s perspective rather than that of a worker’s. This shows that new ideas and visions for expanding the spaces within which union engagement with climate politics, to include issues and questions that are not exclusively linked to the working place and the experiences of wage earners, can be envisioned from positions external to the established union world. At the practical level, the interview with Maria also shows that the ways in which she has engaged herself with climate politics from her position actually also in some ways reflect her outsider background and how her environmental awareness came to develop. When she talks about how she has organized her work with climate issues, Maria describes the writing of sustainability into the bylaws as an important first step of the process. In the following quote, it can also be seen that she relates this process more specifically to introducing the environmental issue to the leaders of the member organizations:

As the quote above shows, Maria describes the organization’s work as directed exclusively toward union leaders, and in the interview, she also explains her ability to introduce new ideas and policies to union leaders successfully as being linked to her experiences from working as a civil servant with negotiations between political leaders. But it could also be argued that it is because of her outsider background that Maria has developed both a vision for developing new areas for unions to engage themselves in politically, and also engaged herself with transforming the organization she works in, as well as challenging the dominant discourse of the Scandinavian union world. In a context where the environmental engagement is limited, Maria’s experiences from the outside means that she brings new capabilities into her organization and it also means that her vision about why and how the organization needs to change is not confined by the existing traditions and practices of the organization. However, while the focus of Maria and her organization’s environmental work on union leaders in part reflects the institutional position of the organization, it also illustrates on a more general level the hierarchical organization, and the role of union leaders in the Scandinavian context. While it is clearly an important task for the labor movement to coordinate international climate policy development, and to create better conditions for unions to cooperate in relation to such processes, it is not clear how this will follow from efforts directed at leaders, who sometimes apparently also have a very limited interest.

The quote above also shows that Maria’s work to a large part has been focused on a fairly basic level of raising awareness and policy development—more concretely, on making union leaders understand whether climate issues should engage union at all—rather than developing strategies for unions to actually prevent climate change. While these observations show the need for engaging precisely in the kind of work that Maria has been developing—and also for recruiting individuals with nonunion backgrounds for such tasks in a context such as the Swedish—they also reflect a more general lack of engagement with the interests of members in the coordinated Scandinavian context. In Maria’s description of her work in the quote above, she articulates environmental policy development in unions as relating exclusively to influencing the union leadership. When I asked Maria about the relationship between her work, and environmental work at headquarters of unions, on the one hand, and the role of the membership on the other, her response pointed to the fact that her organization does not have any routines for connecting to members:

Maria: Well . . . that’s something we can’t do that much about unfortunately, since we never work in direct relation to members . . . We have talked a lot about it though, that it is important to also get members to engage themselves. I believe that first you have to . . . the organizations have to work with this issue politically, to make members understand that this is an organization that works with environmental and climate issues. But . . . Yes, good question . . .

I think this is very much about people feeling, something . . . personal, before one starts to engage oneself. So it’s not enough to say something like: We’re going to create a green economy. People can’t relate to that. What is that? What does it mean to me? . . . I don’t know how [to raise awareness among members], really.

Although Maria’s answer does acknowledge the importance of members for advancing climate issues within the union movement—and also reflects the fact that her organization does not engage with mobilizing the interests of members—it also illustrates that in the context of climate work in Scandinavian unions, members are often constructed as being in need of education, or in need of being made aware, rather than a group whose interests are to be represented, or from which something can be learned. The quote recognizes that top-down policy work is not enough, and that the interests of members also have to be a part of the process, but it does not relate the necessity of connecting these interests to policy development at headquarters. It should also be noted that the Declaration discussed above does not discuss how the environmental interests and perspectives of members relate to the ways in which unions should work with these issues either. Although this is not necessarily something that needs to be developed by this organization specifically, the quotes discussed above illustrate the unclear role of membership for climate policy development in the Scandinavian context. As this research project has shown before (Lundström, Räthzel, and Uzzell 2015), there is a lack in Scandinavia as regards routines and conditions for connecting climate engagement and interests between union headquarters and members. Even though Maria describes her own environmental awareness as having grown out of personal experiences made in the private domain, the observations made here show that the processes through which union leaders in Scandinavia organize climate policy development, and articulate political strategies and aims for environmental work in unions are in many ways disconnected from the interests and needs of the membership.

It could also be argued that what environmental work in Scandinavian trade unions needs, is a more developed theoretical understanding of how the current forms of production has impacted on climate over time. As mentioned in the “Introduction” section, the concept of “metabolic rift” refers to the ways in which capitalist production does not acknowledge the interdependent, or “metabolic,” relationship between work and nature, allowing for the use of nature’s resources in production without restoring it (Foster 1999). Being institutionally embedded on the labor market, trade unions are embedded in a mode of production marked by the metabolic rift. Viewing nature primarily in terms of a privately owned “means of production”, nature has become workers’ Other, and unions have come to care primarily for work (see also Lundström, Räthzel, and Uzzell 2015). In the following sections, looking more closely at the U.K. context, I will focus more specifically on how the leader in that case directs attention primarily to the interests of members, and how this creates different conditions for integrating climate change into the agenda of unions.

The United Kingdom: Greening from the Bottom Up

Chris Baugh is the Assistant General Secretary of PCS, a larger white-collar, civil service, trade union in the United Kingdom. Chris has worked for quite a long time in this organization, but before that he worked as a civil servant. He has identified himself strongly with the labor movement, and as a socialist since very early on in life, and in the union he has always been positioned to the left politically. In the interviews conducted with unionists working with climate issues in the United Kingdom, Chris is often mentioned as a very important person for pushing climate issues not only in his union but also in the British union context more generally. PCS is also often mentioned by our respondents as an inspiring and progressive union as regards their climate work. Notably, PCS has taken part in and supported several both international and national climate campaigns over the last decade, and engaged in collaborations both with other unions and the Trades Union Congress (TUC), ⁷ as well as environmental organizations. PCS has furthermore been successful with the process of engaging green reps in the organization, and providing them with a support network, and thereby establishing positions and routines through which environmental engagement among members can be organized in the working place.

A key difference between the stories of Chris and Maria is that he describes his engagement with climate change as having developed first through his work and position as a unionist, but second also theoretically as a socialist:

In the quote above Chris describes that the climate question for him is inextricably linked to the project of challenging capitalism as a socialist, and that this simultaneously strengthens both his theoretical conception of society and politics, and shapes the ways in which he understands his role as a unionist. In relation to the Scandinavian case discussed above, Chris’s perspective articulates the climate crisis as a result of the mode of production, that is, the profit-oriented capitalist production, as its primary cause. As we will discuss in the following sections, this understanding provides Chris with a clear vision for climate strategies in his union.

Like Maria—and almost all of the unionists working with climate issues we have talked to in both the United Kingdom and Sweden—Chris does not have a background personally in the environmental movement. However, as mentioned above, Chris and PCS have been engaged in several climate campaigns together with environmental groups. In the interview, Chris talks about his early experiences from these collaborations as crucial for the ways in which he has developed climate work in his union, and he can be described as having affordances similar to those of a “bridge-broker” (Mayer 2009). More specifically, what Chris talks about as important in this regard—and this represents another important difference between him and Maria—is that he explains his environmental strategies as having developed through his experiences of talking about climate issues with workers. In the quote below, Chris describes one of his first experiences of taking part in climate campaign work, together with environmentalists, leafleting at a nuclear plant:

Chris: One of the first examples of me getting involved [was] the nuclear issue . . . we leafleted one of the shifts [at a nuclear plant]. And I’ve never forgotten the deep hostility of the workers to us . . . They were utterly contemptuous, hostile, regarded us as outsiders threatening their livelihood . . . And what I . . . realized . . . it is not enough for the Environmental movement . . . to simply proclaim the science and . . . expose the claims of the industry in caring about the health and safety of the workers and the local environment . . . You’ve got to put an alternative . . . you’ve got to be able to provide protection.

In other words, Chris frames practical experiences of introducing and talking about climate issues with workers and members as crucial for providing him with capabilities for conducting climate work in unions. For Chris, taking the considerations and interests of workers as a starting point is key for developing useful and successful environmental strategies as a unionist, and he acknowledges that you are sometimes met with hostility and fear, and sometimes perceived as an outsider, when approaching workers with the issue of climate change. A particularly important insight here is, as Chris says in the quote above, that as a general strategy for solving such conflicts, unions need to provide workers with “an alternative” and “protection.” In other words, the climate policies of unions need to be connected also to policies ensuring the social and economic safety of workers. This way in which Chris understands his role in the unions strongly resembles how Gramsci (1999) conceptualizes that of the “organic intellectual,” as someone who challenges the consensus of their organization by engaging actively, or “organically,” with members, aiming to articulate union climate politics from the standpoint of workers. It could also be described as a practical example of how to engage with “antagonistic pluralism” (Laclau and Mouffe 1985; Mouffe 1999) in a trade union context.

In relation to this line of reasoning, Chris often says in the interview that it is necessary for unions to connect their climate work specifically to the working place. I will return to these observations in further detail below after looking more closely at the following quote, in which Chris details the environmental agenda of his union in terms of three interrelated strands:

Chris: We developed our own [environmental] agenda within the union: First, if you’re going to talk Environment, you’ve got to try and get your house in order. So . . . in this building, we have an “Environmental Committee” . . . All the energy for this building is good energy from renewables . . . We’ve got recycling arrangements, energy efficiency, a number of measures as an organization.

The second strand, which again comes back to the fact that it’s only relevant to members if it relates to their working environment: it’s not about people superimposing an issue, coming in to members when they’re worried about their jobs and conditions, going: “Can I now give you a talk about the imminent threat of climate change?” How does the environment relate to workers? . . . And it’s also about . . . convincing reps and members that there is an interest out there amongst our membership. And rather than it being a distraction activity, it’s one further way of engaging members, . . . particularly amongst . . . the younger sections of our union membership.

And that’s part of the third strand, being we must put an alternative to the Government’s cuts agenda. It isn’t enough to just say we oppose the cuts; we’ve got to say what we’re in favor of . . . So, we can say in winning the hearts and minds of members and trade unionists, part of it is counterposing a viable alternative.

In relation to the first strand—the environmental program of the union headquarters offices—it is interesting to note that Chris is one of the few respondents participating in the research project that mentions this aspect of union climate work. In the interview, Chris talks about the implementation of this strand as an important learning experience for understanding what you need to think about when introducing green policies in the working places of members. Once again, these experiences point to the need for learning about how workers are affected by greening processes, and engaging yourself in discussions with workers about such matters. As the quote shows, Chris links this first strand to the legitimacy of his union for advancing green issues in relation to other workplaces. While perhaps trivial, these are nevertheless important observations because they show that a practical internal engagement in a union may actually have a significant impact on its capabilities for advancing green thinking in other organizations. Of course, it should also be mentioned here that PCS, being a civil service union, does have certain advantages to other unions in this regard. Their processes of internal greening are likely to have many similarities to the greening of the organizations that their members work in, and they do not have to be afraid of losing jobs through climate change measures.

The second strand articulates the importance of connecting the environmental work of the union to the experiences and interests of members, and to do so specifically by relating it to their working places. In relation to the Swedish case discussed above, Chris’s framework calls for unions to frame and situate their environmental agenda primarily with attention to the standpoint of workers. Although a focus on conflicts with members could limit the abilities of an environmentally engaged union to recognize environmental engagement and concerns among members as a resource for developing their work climate issues—and also limit the possibilities for engaged members to find their way into the union—that is not the case here. In part, this shows through how Chris describes the second strand not only as connecting to more general environmental concerns of members but also as a way of recruiting new members. In part, and more importantly however, this is also because of the way in which Chris links climate change to capitalism on a more general level, and his conviction that the climate engagement of unions is “intrinsic to the whole question of how we raise socialist ideas and challenge capitalism.”

When Chris describes the third strand, he develops this in terms of a need for unions to provide members with new visions, new ideas, and new ways of thinking, and moving beyond the experiences and views that are already established among members. Here, Chris makes a connection between union strategies for preventing climate change and the project of challenging capitalism by, as mentioned above, claiming that unions need to connect climate policies also to policies that provide social and economic safety for workers. In the quote above, Chris talks about providing members with alternative visions of a different society than the ones advanced by the dominant neoliberal political discourse of the government. Here, there is another important difference in relation to the Scandinavian case: whereas the strategies employed in the Scandinavian case are based on the general assumption that sustainable forms of production can and should be deployed and integrated into the dominant economical structure—in accordance with a social democratic logic of consensus—Chris’s strategies clearly draw on a politically more radical vision for transforming of the economy.

Concluding Discussion

As mentioned when discussing the interview with Maria, the environmental engagement in her organization is not representative for the Scandinavian union context. In fact, it could be argued that there is a significant discrepancy between the work of Maria’s organization and that of other Scandinavian union organizations. This raises the question of why the ambitions of Maria and her organization have not translated into a broader and more developed climate engagement in Scandinavian unions. One reason could be that the formulations of climate politics they advance do not provide unions with a clearly defined role for preventing climate change, nor do they provide unions with clear strategies for how to integrate their environmental work with their other work areas. It could also be the case that the environmental engagement among the individual leaders of the member unions is still too limited, and that this explains why they have not started to translate the Declaration’s principles into their agendas.

Since I conducted the interview with Maria she has left the organization, and following this, the organization no longer actively works with sustainability. This, once again, illustrates the importance of engaged individuals for establishing climate work, but it also suggests that however important they may be, organizational changes exclusively or primarily directed at policy development do not necessarily create conditions for maintaining environmental engagement over time in trade unions. As pointed out above, Maria’s engagement is highlighted as important by other Swedish unionists working with climate change in interviews conducted by the research project. While this shows the importance of her efforts, and that they have been meaningful for individuals in other organizations, Maria’s work has not generated conditions for continued engagement with climate change in her organization after she left it.

When compared with the U.K. case, these observations direct attention to the significance of elected positions—that are more grounded in the interests and concerns of members, and also more accountable—for organic intellectuals and for processes of transforming union organizations. Here, it should also be mentioned that the establishment of green reps is also a strategy that significantly strengthens the environmental engagement in union beyond that of engaged individuals. Thus, the analysis shows the fragility of union strategies that do not take the environmental interests and needs of workers as their point of departure, and integrate member engagement in processes of policy development.

The experiences analyzed in this paper suggest that when processes of greening unions are organized without the support from engaged officials or leaders, and if they do not provide routines and structures for integrating the needs of members, they may not provide opportunities for challenging the established ways of conceptualizing the relationship between work and nature, and for moving beyond perspectives that allow for the protection of jobs at the expense of the environment. However, the analysis also suggests that this disinterest in the role of members is contextual. While it is slightly paradoxical—the fact that very high union density rates in the Scandinavian CME seem to correlate with a very modest union interest in the experiences and engagement of workers—it could perhaps be argued that it is precisely because of high membership levels that trade unions in Scandinavia are able to develop policies and strategies without engaging themselves with their members. In one of the quotes from the interview with Chris discussed above, he says that environmental work is important because it constitutes a strategy for recruiting new members. Interestingly, this argument is put forth by several of our U.K. respondents, but it only rarely comes up in the interviews with Swedish union officials.

The interviews analyzed in this paper show that the conditions for introducing climate change into the agenda of trade unions are linked to both individual characteristics and abilities, as well as different organizational circumstances. However, the differences between the Scandinavian and U.K. cases compared in this paper also need to be analyzed in relation to different theoretical perspectives on the relationship between production and climate change as well as different political visions. As previously discussed, the policies and strategies of our Scandinavian case are not necessarily linked to an ambition to transform society, but aim rather to combat climate change by way of reforms that do not radically alter the established labor market relations. In other words, they do not challenge the consensus tradition of Scandinavian social democracy. However, in the LME context of the United Kingdom—in which relationships between employers and workers are more explicitly adversarial and where unions traditionally have not been as involved in coordinated negotiations with employers as they have been in Sweden—unions may find other conditions for mobilizing pluralistic alliances between the sometimes agonistic fights against climate change and capitalism. Based on comparing the interviews with Maria and Chris, it could be argued that two crucial challenges for the future climate engagement of Scandinavian trade unions are, first, engaging with a critical discussion regarding how climate change is related to the ways in which the economy and production are organized. Second, there is also a need to engage with the climate engagement and interests of members. For unionists looking to challenge capitalism, environmental agenda also need to incorporate a political vision of future social justice.

The observations made here thus support arguments suggested in previous research that the conditions for integrating visions of both social and environmental justice in unions may in other words be created through a shift away from business unionism, and toward social movement unionism (Hrynyshyn and Ross 2011; Snell and Fairbrother 2010), but these also suggest that the conditions for doing so depend on the political economy in which they are situated. Through such processes, unions are required to reinterpret their purpose and move beyond interest group politics, to develop policies that acknowledge the interdependent relationship between work and nature, and also to open up for alliances with other social forces, such as environmentalist groups. My analysis also supports Felli (2014) who identifies three different and partially conflicting forms of environmentalist agendas articulated by trade unions—namely, “deliberative,” “collaborative growth,” and “socialist”—and argues that “only the socialist strategy seriously implies a union renewal towards social movement unionism.” (Felli 2014, 392). Among green union officials with a union background, like Chris, whose environmental awareness has grown out of their union work and from a socialist perspective, there is a clear understanding of the need to organize the environmental interests of members and to relate union strategies to their workplace experiences. They conceptualize their environmental effort as a way to organize members and as a strategy for fighting capitalism. For them, processes of greening unions are linked to strategies that are bottom-up, taking the interests and experiences of workers as their point of departure.