The case for an environmental labor geography: The role of organized labor in the climate crisis

1 First steps toward a new multi-disciplinary field

In 2013, Nora Räthzel and David Uzzell proposed with their edited work Trade Unions in the Green Economy to bridge two fields that had remained historically separated. Both scholars suggested connecting environmental and labor studies to a new framework under the name of environmental labor studies. The new field would research the effects of climate change on workers, working conditions, and unions’ policies and responses to those challenges. Most of the contributors to that first edited work were sociologists that came “from labor studies in one way or another” (Uzzell and Räthzel, 2013: 11). As the editors point out, the publication mostly focused on industrial unions leaving a research gap on workers in the service sectors. As a publication that sought to launch the first intentional debate around labor and the environment, the contributors’ themes varied greatly. For instance, Rosemberg (2013) examined the International Trade Unions Confederation’s role in developing an international labor response to the crisis and how its effort has shaped national trade unions’ views and policies. Rossman (2013) explored the need for agricultural workers to organize into trade unions to coalesce their fights for carbon-neutral agriculture. Burgman (2013) presented efforts and lessons from the alliance between the Australian environmental movement and trade unions to overcome the common dilemma between jobs and the environment. The edited work, however, remained short in contributions from geography. Only Stevis (2013) mentioned the scalar and spatial unevenness of labor activities when analyzing the heterogenous strategy and policy landscapes of labor environmentalism in the US.

Since then, more scholars from different fields have taken the task of researching the effects of climate change on labor. Among some of the most noticeable published work in the Anglophone literature, Hampton’s (2015) book on the UK labor movement’s stance on the climate crisis stands out. He offered a comprehensive overview of the different discourses and approaches embodied by the Trade Union Congress (TUC), extending from ecomodernization to more neoliberal propositions. Hampton (2015) also explored some common contradictions and difficulties in the labor-environment nexus. For instance, he exemplified the common contraposition of secure jobs versus environmental measures in the TUC’s support of Heathrow’s third runway expansion. During the early 2000s, the TUC decided to support the airport expansion with the argument that it would provide thousands of new jobs, and emissions could be mitigated through market mechanisms like the EU ETS. However, other individual unions such as PCS, Unison, and the RMT challenged the new jobs prognosis and proposed a more climate-friendly high-speed train alternative. Most notably, Hampton (2015) contributed to the emerging field by emphasizing the class character of the climate crisis. For him, capital exploits labor through, for example, “a longer working day, reorganization... of the labor process” (39) and those same mechanisms degrade nature. Thus, he derived that by struggling against “their own exploitation” (39) workers also have a “stake in abolishing the processes that give rise to the degradation of the natural environment” (39). Ultimately through his Marxist lens and considering the class dimension, he foregrounded the two ways in which working people have the most to lose in the climate crisis. First, workers are the most vulnerable to global warming’s direct impacts due to their sparing access to resources; and second, the costs of any measures to tackle the crisis will most probably be borne by workers.

Finally, a sequel to Räthzel and Uzzell’s first edited work came in 2021 with The Palgrave Handbook of Environmental Labour Studies (Räthzel et al., 2021b). Departing somewhat from the former publication which had a strong focus on organized labor in the form of trade unions, this newly edited work brings forward a broader analysis encompassing “workers in any kind of workplace and community” (Räthzel et al., 2021b:2). Thus, the editors sought to include additions from the “environmentalism of the poor” literature which centers cases from the Global South “concerned with environmental struggles of workers in rural areas” (Räthzel et al., 2021b:3). Similarly to the 2013 work and with only a couple of contributions, this publication also saw underwhelming input from geographers. This initial observation hints towards a deficiency in our field which I will specify next.

2 Advancing the labor-environment nexus in geography

In geography, contributions to the nexus have been rich and diverse albeit scattered in different works of literature. In the geographies of making and repair work literature, Carr has brought forward thought-provoking arguments counter to common ideas that consider industrial jobs outdated in lieu of decarbonization. Carr and Gibson (2016) claim that in narratives about solutions to climate change the idea that industrial workers “are positioned as part of the problem” (299) still lingers. Thus, certain jobs and skills are discarded as possible solutions. Both authors reject those propositions and defend that current industrial skills can be implemented for a sustainable future. They even assert that industrial regions of the Global North could become “repositories of skill for other kinds of material repurposing, repairing cultures” (308). Along similar lines, Carr (2022) foregrounds more explicit insights into repair and care work in relation to climate risks. Carr (2022) poses important questions about the subjects that will perform “the work of climate” (2) to mitigate and adapt to the crisis. Among other insights, she points to how energy-intensive industrial workers’ current repair and maintenance skills can prove helpful in future “materially uncertain conditions” (Carr, 2022: 11).

Within the so-called migration-adaptation nexus, geographers have also contributed to the broad intersection between labor and climate change. An important debate within the literature has been the counterposing views on climate change-induced migration as an adaptability failure or as a form of adaptation itself (Piguet et al., 2011). Many geographers have agreed that migration is a form of adaptation (see Barnett and McMichael (2018), Gemenne and Blocher (2022), and Piguet et al. (2011)) because migrants can, for example, help their former communities with remittances, relieve population pressures in vulnerable regions (Gemenne and Blocher, 2022), increase social networking, and “boost human capital” (Barnett and McMichael, 2018: 349). For instance, Barnett and McMichael (2018) affirm that migration “gives people choices about whether, when and how to adapt” (349) and even claim it is the more “agency-based” (351) reaction to climate change. Others approached these views on adaptation early on with more skepticism. For example, Felli and Castree (2012) criticized a report by the UK’s Government Office for Science which they opine represented an example of the “neoliberal view in…environmental governance circles” (1). The report presented climate change-induced migration policy as a positive step towards benefiting communities left behind (e.g., through remittances) and introducing a new “younger and more entrepreneurial” (2) workforce into the country of destination. For both scholars, the neoliberal view lied in the report’s lack of a socio-environmental analysis of the climate crisis and a shift in adaptive responsibility towards the individual. Ultimately, both scholars claimed that such an interpretation of migration as adaptation serves to create a “new global reserve army of labor” (3) and an influx of migrant labor in industrial countries. Turhan (2021) similarly criticizes mainstream strategies for adaptation. He sees them as diminishing the gravity of the situation because power relations and capital accumulation are not challenged. Turhan (2021) exemplifies his criticisms through the incongruency of a UNDP adaptation project with seasonal agricultural migrant workers in Turkey. Instead of considering the actual working conditions of said workers (and how they would worsen under climatic risks), the project had the narrow aim of preventing the surge of tropical diseases by fomenting hygiene. Thus, adaptation policies were consigned to individual actions instead of addressing structural issues.

Finally, in the subfield of labor geography, some scholars have underscored the largely neglected effects of climate change on the geographies of labor (see Coe (2021), Parsons and Natarajan (2021b), and Strauss (2020)). As Coe (2021) has correctly diagnosed, oddly enough, climate change, the “biggest issue on the horizon seems to have barely registered attention” (450). I agree with Coe (2021) that labor geographers are well equipped to explore “the intersections between work and climate change” (452), especially due to the subfield’s rich examinations of labor agency. Nevertheless, some recent publications might indicate that this gap is slowly being remedied albeit not under an explicit field. For example, Parsons and Natarajan’s (2021a; 2021b) efforts draw from labor geography’s tradition by bringing worker agency to the center of labor-environment research. As editors, Natarajan and Parsons (2021) promise to dive deeper into “the decisions made by workers in a changing climate” (9) with a narrower focus on adaptation cases and forms of resistance. The inputs in their latest edited work promise to “look beyond traditional spaces of labor unionism” (Parsons and Natarajan, 2021a: 193). For example, Parsons (2021) explores how agricultural workers in Cambodia migrate to the brick sector fleeing “climate precarity” (21) and heat even though they also endure heat stress when building bricks. Moreover, Houeland et al. (2020) and Jordhus-Lier et al. (2022) also write about the labor-environment nexus from a labor geography tradition. The former analyze the role confederations play in the environmental politics of unions in Norway and how unions defend diverse climate change positions depending on their industry and geographical concentration. Jordhus-Lier et al. (2022) examine how two groups of oil industry workers, embedded in their specific contexts (Nigeria and Norway) and within a “global carbonscape” (7), relate to issues of industry transformation and climate change. They point to the geographical dilemmas arising from a possible phase-out in the context of the two regions’ uneven development of oil extraction. Lastly, the authors also discuss an issue of scale, that is, how global labor federations can bridge dialogues between fossil energy workers from different locations to work out solutions based on international climate solidarity.

This short summary of some of the important research conducted by geographers and other social scientists shows that a broad umbrella encompassing a labor-environment nexus exists. However, what other social scientists have so far successfully achieved by establishing an interdisciplinary field that brings research and analyses into dialogue is currently lacking in our field. As I will more explicitly argue in the next sections, geographers who have contributed to different bodies of literature can benefit from bringing their arguments together under a common field.

1 Labor geography—some shortcomings

Labor geographers have initiated several self-critical reflections on some of the subfield’s shortcomings. For instance, Coe and Jordhus-Lier (2010) have emphasized a strong focus on “success stories of workers with strong capacity to act” (213), and on “manufacturing sectors in developed countries” (213). Peck (2016) has underlined labor geographers’ “whiff of idealism” (15) that romanticizes stories of union renewal. Smith (2016) even branded a preference for the “sphere of economic production” (2085) while neglecting other spheres like social reproduction as “Fordist Marxism.” She also stressed how labor geographers assume that labor agency “arise [s] overwhelmingly from class exploitation” (2085). Likewise, Coe (2012) has mentioned a narrow union-led and class-based understanding of labor agency which ignores other subjective positions by which workers can act, like gender and race. Another important criticism contends that labor agency remains undertheorized as an analytical tool (Castree, 2007; Coe and Jordhus-Lier, 2010). As Castree (2007) identified early on, the labor agency concept turned into a “catch-all for any instance in which some group of workers undertake any sort of action on behalf of themselves or others” (858). Similarly, Das (2012) has called attention to how labor agency’s varied outcomes, such as “agency in opposition to capital…agency in collaboration with capital, and agency involved in gaining concessions” (21), all fall under the same term. In search of a solution, some labor geographers turned to Katz’s (2004) categories of resilience, reworking, and resistance for a more defined concept. While Cumbers et al. (2010) have correctly emphasized that these three forms mostly represent a “response to capital’s strategies” (60, emphasis added), Coe and Jordhus-Lier (2010) proposed an understanding of agency as also constrained by “the state, the community and labor market intermediaries” (221). For Coe and Jordhus-Lier (2010), labor agency is “relational,” embedded in, and thus responding to, “webs of wider relations” (221).

With the purpose of including labor agency as an important analytical tool in environmental labor geography, I wish to argue one specific issue. I believe it to be very relevant to the political implications of researching labor and climate change. Some scholars in the subfield have defended encompassing individual workers’ acts as a form of labor agency (Coe and Jordhus-Lier, 2010). Thus, labor agency is often interchangeably used to either describe individual workers’ acts or collectively organized agency. Such interpretations of labor agency become especially clear in research about migration (Coe and Jordhus-Lier, 2010). For instance, Rogaly (2009) researched Indian workers’ decisions to search for temporary work away from their own towns to avoid “locally embedded patronage” (1981) that often refused them payment. Thus, he considered individual and non-organized choices a form of labor agency. In a more recent example, Hastings and MacKinnon (2017) analyzed “autonomous labor practices and behaviors” (106) of call center workers in Glasgow like “shouting, swearing and impersonating (typically upper-class) customers” (112) as forms of labor agency. The tendency of equating individual worker agency with collective and organized agency has also persisted within the labor-environment nexus. For instance, Natarajan and Parsons (2021) defend in the introduction to their edited collection a framing of agency not only as “activism and protest but also in the everyday oppositions and refusals through which shifting labor relations are constituted in a changing climate” (9). In his call for a political ecology of labor, Coe (2021) highlights the “need to zoom out beyond the environmental interventions of organized labor” (451) and research the myriad of ways in which individuals confront the effects of climate change on livelihoods and work. Finally, some of the adaptation-migration scholars reviewed at the beginning have expressed that individual acts to migrate represent adaptation.

2 Redefining labor agency under a changing climate and getting one’s hands “dirty”

My objection to blending individual and organized agency under the same concept is of course not to oppose research on individual worker agencies. Clearly scholars bring important insights forward on adaptative measures and climate change-induced labor migration. My argument is inspired by two contributions. First, by an article Castree (2007) published some years ago. He made an observation about labor geography that proves especially significant in view of the climate crisis. He framed labor geography as a subfield that produces research not only “about working people…but is in some sense for them” (856). Therefore, labor geographers can, on the one hand, present workers’ actions in academic settings and on the other, also deliver a political stance and get involved in labor issues, or as he claimed get one’s hands “dirty” (857). He further connected the idea of political implications to labor agency. He suggested that labor geographers should choose “well justified” (Castree, 2007: 858) empirical studies with a “discriminating grasp of worker agency” (858) to best develop “our understanding of agency” (858). He added that a failure to “distinguish kinds of agency” (858) has political meaning. It hinders the possibility to compare cases and derive generalizations in a way that allows labor geographers to generate conclusions about worker strategy, that is, getting our hands “dirty” (857). However, Castree (2007) left unspecified how he imagined discriminating between labor agencies and what kind of political involvement labor geographers should pursue. In this section, I attempt to answer these two questions which I believe are fundamental for environmental labor geographers in lieu of the climate crisis.

The sort of political involvement I defend environmental labor geography should incorporate draws upon Huber’s (2022) work. He defends that organized workers and collective action are key to facing the climate crisis. For him, the climate crisis is a class issue, fundamentally caused by the lack of democratic control over production (and thus, energy systems), and therefore, needs to be resolved in class struggle. He reminds us not only of the centrality of workers in the climate struggle but also of the need to build and hold power to win. He argues that to bring about the urgent changes needed, for example, confront the interests of “the fossil fuel industry and other carbon-intensive sectors of capital” (Huber, 2019: 8), countries will need well-organized mass movements rooted in the working-class, and I would add in other working people around the globe. Following Marxist tradition, Huber (2022) stresses that a working-class majority has “strategic leverage [through its potential] to shut down capital” (Huber, 2019: 9) and due to its “material interest in transform [ing] the relations of production” (Huber, 2022: 7). Consequently, working people (especially those in heavily emitting industrial sectors) need to connect the climate crisis to their workplace (and social reproduction) and scale-up material demands to consolidate them around an organized mass movement, for example, demanding a just transition.

I propose that environmental labor geographers researching not only about workers but also for workers (Castree, 2007) under a changing climate should agree that organized workers are key actors in overcoming (or at least fairly navigating) the climate crisis. Individual agencies with no connection or goal to contribute to collective demands cannot by themselves impose change. This is not to negate their importance in informing policies. But policies without the power to implement them are ineffective. Moreover, considering the just transition literature mentioned above, centering organized labor as a strategic choice can be rather controversial. It is an explicitly political stance that would have repercussions not only on the cases we choose to prioritize but also on our analytical tools. I defend that the climate crisis poses a situation that forces us to think about which cases and research are most helpful to bring us closer to a just transition and ultimately a class-less ecological future. As geographers, our conclusions, generalizations, and insights can help practices on the ground seeking to build mass movements capable of bringing emancipatory change. Thus, it becomes reasonable to delimit and develop an analytical tool that can best encompass lessons and comparisons from collective and organized agency vis-à-vis the climate crisis. In that sense, I propose that an environmental labor geography should clearly distinguish between individual forms of worker agency and organized (i.e., collective and intentional) forms of labor agency. A distinction between both forms of agencies does not posit a return to only research trade unions or specific workers, nor would it imply a blind eye to other identities and subjectivities that clearly shape agency (Coe and Jordhus-Lier, 2010; McDowell, 2008; Smith, 2016). Organized forms of agency are not consigned to unions but can also include, for example, campaigns, parties, community unionism (Coe and Jordhus-Lier, 2010), worker centers (see Milkman and Ott (2014) and Peck and Theodore (2012)), and other forms of occupational organizing (see James and Vira (2010)). Carr (2022) presents an excellent example of non-traditional forms of labor organization in relation to the crisis. Faced with the destruction of houses by bushfires, an Australian carpenter sought to help those affected through social media. Eventually, he organized a broad network of skilled workers to act as volunteers in rebuilding damaged infrastructure.

Some of the ideas laid out here inform and set some initial boundaries for an environmental labor geography. On the one hand, socioeconomically mediated direct effects (such as droughts, fires, and floods) will unevenly transform the habitability of regions and therefore, the labor activities embedded in the landscape and its interlinkages to other sectors or locations. On the other hand, policy changes, social protest, and capital’s own attempts to adapt, mitigate, and implement a transition drastically contest productive and social reproductive activities in spatial, scalar, and geopolitical terms. A new field could research how green capitalism is reshaping and restructuring economic landscapes, how these new transition imaginaries are contested and negotiated, what limitations and opportunities arise for labor agency, what new forms of agency unfold in this new terrain, how just transition demands develop across scales and contexts and how they materialize, among other questions.

The analytical and research possibilities for an environmental labor geography are vast and this article argues for one political direction. One important takeaway lies in the strategic priority granted to organized workers. Their material interests, structural position within society, and struggles for power can shape the climate crisis as part of a broader emancipatory project. Consequently, a second consideration is the use of labor agency as a reflection of collective and organized worker agencies. It remains a useful tool because it coalesces under one concept varied but not dispersed experiences, and allows for generalizations and conclusions that aid ongoing struggles on the ground.

1 Examples from the past and present

Considering the strategic outline above, environmental labor geographers could examine environmental labor militancy in those sectors that have disproportionately contributed to the climate crisis and, if transformed, could not only mitigate global warming but radically change the geography of labor. For instance, over the past years, similar phenomena have emerged in the context of industrial plant closures. Workers facing redundancy have organized and rallied around climate-friendly conversion demands. Some examples include the closure of the Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast. The threat of redundancy prompted workers to occupy the docks demanding to save jobs by producing more wind turbines and tidal energy (Gurley, 2019). In 2018, another similar case transpired at the GM Oshawa auto assembly plant in Ontario. The company announced its closure with the possible loss of 15,000 jobs (Christianson, 2019). To counteract the loss of jobs in the area, workers came up with an innovative plan to take over the Oshawa plant under public ownership and retool and repurpose it to produce electric vehicles and other socially useful products. The green jobs for Oshawa initiative formed with the specific purpose to tackle the environmental crisis. In another example, the automobile supplier Bosch decided in 2021 to close a plant near Munich claiming overcapacity in the transition to electric vehicle production. In a rare move, climate movements, workers, and the German union IG Metall came together to demand a “conversion from below” to produce environmentally friendly products arguing that the company actually intended to relocate the same production of combustion engine parts to low-wage countries (Heinisch, 2022; Klimaschutz und Klassenkampf, 2022). In Germany, such cases could become more prevalent due to the automobile industry’s commitment to electric vehicle production, which is estimated to shrink jobs by at least 114,000 in the coming decades (Mönnig et al., 2018). Finally, a similar case transpired near Florence, Italy. The automobile parts supplier GKN in Campi Bisenzio decided to abruptly lay off approximately 500 workers during the summer of 2021 (Ferrari and Kaiser, 2022). Workers occupied the plant, organized marches across their town and Florence, built an alliance with the Italian Fridays for Future branch, and contacted scientists at Tuscany’s universities to devise a plan for plant conversion—all to keep jobs in the region (Ferrari and Kaiser, 2022; Keil, 2022). An ambitious goal was the workers’ and the plant’s very own collective—collettivo di fabbrica GKN—plan to transform the factory into a lab for sustainable transportation (Ferrari and Kaiser, 2022). Even though the ex-GKN plant now holds a new owner, the fate of its installations and workers remains undecided. The mobilizing force behind the incentives—the collettivo di fabbrica—has recently even considered continuing production as a cooperative (Franchi, 2022).

Although conversion debates within the labor movement are not new and often touched on environmental questions, an explicit link to the climate crisis is novel. The Lucas Aerospace corporate plan in the mid-seventies in the UK embodies the most known attempt by workers to convert to socially useful production. Like the cases above, the company planned to dismiss a significant number of workers given that their defense production demands fluctuated highly (Weingarten et al., 2015). Several unions represented workers, hence to facilitate negotiations all shop stewards organized under a so-called Combined Shop Stewards’ Committee (The Lucas Aerospace Combine Committee, no date). The Committee developed a long catalog of alternative products and brought forward a debate about the democratization of the labor process, that is, not only what was produced but also how (Röttger, 2017). Eventually, the plan was unsuccessful mostly because of management’s, the unions’, and politicians’ reluctance to consider alternative production (Röttger, 2017). Nevertheless, it triggered a debate about socially useful production which at the time even resonated with German trade unions. In Germany during the eighties, the union IG Metall was actively supportive of the worker-led “alternative production” working groups in the defense industry. Incentivized by the peace movement, these working groups spread across the German defense industry and lasted for ten years (Weingarten et al., 2015). Similarly, they developed alternative product proposals and deeply influenced the union’s policies on defense production. One group even managed to succeed by conceptualizing the conversion of the tank-producing MaK enterprise in Kiel to a locomotive-producing plant (Weingarten et al., 2015).

2 Conversion—from destructive to socially useful production

Melman (1985) defined conversion as the “economic conversion from military to civilian economy” (11) and all the “organizational, technical, occupational, and economic changes” (11) such an endeavor entails. Past conversion attempts have mostly emerged during disarmament periods, for example, after WWII and the Cold War (Cronberg, 1994; Gonchar and Wulf, 1998; Melman, 1985; Perani, 2000; Silverberg, 1994; Weingarten et al., 2015). In that sense, scholars have pointed to the difficulties inherent in conversion strategies (Cronberg, 1994; Horton, 1994; Perani, 2000). For example, defense companies possess a privileged position in that they can easily access finance capital and “skilled occupations, equipment and materials” (Melman, 1985: 11) in a manner that ordinary companies cannot. A strict conversion, that is, the complete re-use of plants, has been rare and most cases involved regional structural changes with new job markets (Gonchar and Wulf, 1998; Weingarten et al., 2015). Röttger (2017) identifies conversion processes inherent to capital’s own historical dynamism. He distinguishes between state-induced conversions, for example, the fascist arms programs in the 1930s; and market-induced conversions, which occur through the development of new global consumer markets. For example, the conversion processes at Nokia, a company that started in the paper industry and later diversified to telecommunications. Additionally, Cronberg (1994), who compared the US’ and Russia’s changes in technological R&D after the Cold War, differentiated between “conversion by command” and “conversion by community.” The first category encompasses a top-down imposition and “decision-making by those in power” (Cronberg, 1994: 209). The second case represents the efforts by “local citizens groups, local authorities, trade unions and/or peace groups” (Cronberg, 1994: 209). The cases presented above fall under the latter category as a form of labor agency for climate-friendly conversion.

Clearly, conversion debates in the past have occurred under different circumstances (from military to civilian production) than in our current moment (from fossil dependent to decarbonized production). However, some commonalities prevail. For instance, as in the past, working people will face the challenges of a restructured economic landscape either by capital or the impacts of climate change. Also, many regional, local, and governmental conversion efforts in the past emerged to prevent the loss of jobs and increased unemployment, and due to broad societal pressures (e.g., the peace movement) (Perani, 2000; Röttger, 2017; Weingarten et al., 2015). The contemporary examples of worker-led conversion demands have also ensued to counteract redundancy and are motivated by a growing claim to transition, often even in alliance with the climate movement. Thus, I propose to analyze these new phenomena as part of the struggles for a just transition.

In their debate about two types of policies needed for a transition, Normann and Tellmann (2021) highlight the importance of mixing destructive policies to phase-out fossil fuels and creation policies to build new industries. However, they miss a third path which is the demand for a green transformation of existing production and the “recycling” of skills after conversion. The conversion demands presented here signal a purposeful and conscious attempt to rescue and reuse craft and knowledge by those industrial workers whose jobs are often considered obsolete. Carr and Gibson (2016) argued in a similar direction when they asserted that industrial workers’ skills and knowledge about material objects should be understood as part of the solution to climate change. Thus, more than restraining policies to a destruction-creation binary, these workers’ collective agency calls to reflect on repurposing existing skills, materials, machines, knowledge, and production goals as part of a just transition.

Finally, in addition to analyzing conversion demands as a form of environmental labor agency, labor-centered “conversion by community” cases open debates about winning power for a just transition. For example, how to break from isolated conversion demands and consolidate regional/national or transnational conversion projects capable of strengthening workers’ power. Successful conversions in the form of regional restructuring can provide valuable insights on scaling up. For instance, the end of the Vietnam and Korean wars led to overcapacity in many regions and sectors of the US that were highly dependent on defense production (Weingarten et al., 2015). Pressured by regional politics, the government at the time decided to expand the Office of Economic Adjustment (OEA) to oversee regional restructuring by replacing jobs in military grounds and industries (Weingarten et al., 2015). The governmental body managed to oversee and collaborate in regional conversion projects across all fifty states. The case of Long Island represents a successful example. In the nineties, business in Long Island was highly dependent on military expenditure. A decrease in contracts threatened jobs so the OEA and defense companies collaborated in diversification and retraining campaigns that eventually outweighed the loss (Weingarten et al., 2015). Although not explicitly termed a conversion project, the German union confederation (DGB-Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund) is currently undertaking an ambitious project. It seeks to accompany and shape the economic restructuring of the country’s three mining regions. After the German government committed to phasing out coal and providing funds for the affected regions, the DGB applied for a project called Revierwende. The project oversees work programs in collaboration with varied unions (see Revierwende (no date)) with the intention to create new jobs. Research on cases like the OEA expansion with a labor agency focus can provide parallels and lessons for scaling-up projects like Revierwende. As of now, the project is restricted to coal mining. However, it could initiate conversations on how to feasibly scale-up conversion projects at a level that would meaningfully decarbonize other industries. Furthermore, by scaling-up, the project could build toward mass politics and ignite discussions about democratizing production. To conclude, cases like the aforementioned can be expected to multiply and play more important roles in labor-environment nexus debates. The German IG Metall board member H. J. Urban foresees a surge in climate change-induced conversion debates given the necessary restructuring of some economic sectors. In his opinion, the tendency might lead to a possible “forced conversion strategy” (Röttger, 2017: 1) in the coming decades.