Abstract
This excellent book comes at a difficult time for the ‘climate movement’ in the United Kingdom (and elsewhere). Those paying attention to the science could be forgiven for despairing, while those who only see the headlines proclaiming the ‘success’ of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change’s Paris Agreement could be forgiven for thinking that matters are in hand. In addition, UK unions are largely on the back foot, and have had to cut back on environmental work. For example, the University and College Union announced in its May 2016 Annual Environmental Report that it had been unable to recruit sufficient numbers for the day release courses for its environmental representative training. Meanwhile one of the biggest unions, the GMB, the union for energy workers, has resolutely defended fracking, time and again. In the unlikely event of Labour forming the next government, fireworks will ensue!
Hampton is offering a rich empirical story, not a dense theoretical treatise. As often is the case with PhD theses turned into books, the ‘theoretical’ chapter (‘Climate politics and the potential for climate solidarity’) is pretty heavy-going, and could easily be skimmed or skipped by a non-academic reader, with no loss of comprehension in later chapters, which are all clearly written and argued with a dazzling level of detail and precision.
Hampton adopts a (non-Stalinist) Marxist interpretation of climate change politics. For Hampton, ‘working-class self-liberation is at the heart of Marxism’ (p. 4). As such, the main aim of the book is ‘to articulate the valence of organised workers for climate politics’ (p. 8) by critically assessing the dominant social science framing of climate change, investigating workers’ climate interests and capacities, and ‘extend[ing] Hyman’s (2001) model of trade unions operating between the market, society and class to understand their role in climate change politics’ (p. 8). He seeks to examine whether ‘workers organised in trade unions have the interest and capacity to tackle dangerous climate change’ (p. 9).
Hampton’s history, based on close documentary reading and more recent participant observation (in the United Kingdom), starts in the late 1980s, and moves seamlessly through to and beyond the 2009 occupation of the Vestas wind turbine factory on the Isle of Wight, which gets its own chapter. On the way, Hampton provides well-referenced scepticism about the more booster-ist notions of ‘green jobs’, often promulgated by people who will not be affected by a successful or unsuccessful ‘transition’. For unions, the bread-and-butter of the coming months and years can never be hand-waved away with generalities. As an interviewee says in a study he cites, ‘I will die quicker from not having a job than from climate change’ (p. 67). Hampton is good on what is hidden in popular terms like ‘just transition’ – that it can underestimate the embeddedness of technologies within power relations, and that rights are never granted, but always fought for. Nor can he be accused of shying away from thorny issues, acknowledging that ‘The TUC and key unions organising at Heathrow (TBWU, and Amicus, later Unite, GMP and BALPA) are highly visible advocates of expansion’ (p. 111).
There are very minor errors (on page 18 National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) scientist James Hansen becomes Joseph Hanson) and some surprising omissions – the discussion of other countries experiences of linking ‘red’ and ‘green’ does not reference Australia’s early 1970s ‘green bans’ or the efforts of Judi Bari to bring together radical environmentalism and loggers (efforts that led to a Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) asset blowing her up); that said, Hampton’s discussion of the 1970s Lucas Aerospace Corporate Plan from page 82 to 84 is excellent. Similarly, while there is some brilliant detail on early efforts by, for example, the US Steelworkers Union to raise environment and climate issues, discussion of the sometimes anti-environmental role that unions take (e.g. the United Auto-Workers and United Mineworkers in the United States were staunchly anti-Kyoto Protocol) and the effects of this role would have thickened the discussion. There is, as often the case, a focus on the (undoubted) damage of neoliberalism. In places, there seemed to be a hankering for the clock to be turned back to the social democracy that lasted from the post-war era to the collapse of the Keynesian consensus. In this reviewer’s opinion, there is little new to answer the ‘what is to be done differently’ question, more a sense that the ‘Left’ should simply do more of what it has been doing to date. Ultimately, Hampton does not quite show how unions might be a ‘pole around which a revived climate movement might coalesce’ (p. 8).
However, these are minor reservations. Paul Hampton has written a cautiously optimistic book that anyone who wants to understand the history and tensions in UK trade union positions on climate change simply must read. Each chapter comes with notes and references, and any of them would be an invaluable teaching tool for undergraduates and masters students, and his further work will doubtless shed light on an important thread of civil society responses to the pending ecological debacle.