Dimensions of repair work

Who will do the work of climate crisis? This is the fundamental question that Chantel Carr (2023) puts at the centre of a feminist perspective on the necessary post-carbon transition, arguing that repair and care are essential work that climate disasters and relief are amplifying, and that nonetheless remain largely unseen and undertheorized in transition discourse. Challenging the idea that care is fundamentally alien, or even opposed to industrial work, her approach foregrounds the important part that workers in carbon-intensive jobs could play (and are partly already playing) in climate mitigation and adaptation, mobilizing the knowledge, skills, and concerns they have developed along the course of their working lives. This is a very welcome perspective on the politics of Just Transition (Stevis et al., 2020), which allows overcoming older and now untenable contrapositions between production and care, industrial, and ‘meta-industrial’ work.

The perspective of feminist economic geography (particularly J.K. Gibson-Graham's work as developed over the past decade by the Community Economies research collective) allows the author to look beyond these conceptual dualisms, investigating the terrains where people cross socially constructed boundaries and act according to the more holistic, integral realities of daily life (Gibson-Graham et al., 2013). This feminist outlook on the ecological transition, I have also argued (Barca 2012; Barca, 2019), is key to understanding labour environmentalism as the ecological agency of both labour organizations and individual workers, driven by own concerns with the reproduction of human and non-human life. More broadly, I believe this approach could help us to better understand ecological consciousness and agency, in the sense of de-universalizing mainstream (i.e. western and middle class) conceptions, and paying attention to the particular, contingent, class/gender/race, and place-based forms that may develop outside the radar of managerial, techno-fix, and capital-intensive approaches to ecological transition. By looking at the different forms of repair work, scholars of ecological transitions, and social scientists in particular, have an important role to play here – that of developing analytical distinctions between different forms of ecological consciousness and agency, making the connections between each form and its specific socio-spatial background.

Going beyond dualism: A risky pathway

Considering the agency of industrial, high-skilled workers in the post-carbon transition as a form of care work, as proposed by Carr, is both refreshing and risky. On the one hand, looking at the present conjuncture from a historical perspective, we should note that ‘caring for the planet’ is not a new course of action for industrial workers, as they have challenged the jobs versus environment construction repeatedly, at different times and in different places along the past half century (Barca, 2012; Räthzel et al., 2021). This political tradition within trade union movements currently finds expression in the ILO/ITUC Just Transition strategy, which focuses almost entirely on the relevance of industrial workers in carbon-intensive sectors (such as energy, transport, and heavy industry) as active participants in and beneficiaries of the post-carbon transition (Barca, 2012). Similar, more grassroots initiatives in this direction are the various Climate Jobs campaigns (see, e.g. Campaign Against Climate Change, 2021), Green New Deal plans (Aronoff et al., 2019), and local initiatives – such as, for example, the workers’ restructuring plan at GKN in Italy (Gabriellini and Gabbuti, 2022). What all these initiatives have in common is an emphasis on the high-tech skills and capabilities embodied by industrial workers as essential resources for the ecological transition. The more grassroots initiatives also add claims for a workers-led transition, in terms of workers’ design and decision-making (White, 2020). All this is refreshing in the sense of liberating political potentialities that have been severely constrained by decades of ‘jobs vs the environment’ discourses and practices.

On the other hand, conflating care work with industrial repair and high-tech skills is a challenging intellectual move that runs the risk of backgrounding – once more – the specific, contingent contributions of life work (intended here as practical engagement with human and non-human bodies and their environments) to the ecological transition. Such risk stems from the eco-modernist attitude historically prevalent within labour movements of the ‘global north’, which have led to marginalize or even exclude life work from labour's imaginary and agency (Barca, 2019). At the present conjuncture, however, several factors are contributing to challenging and partly revising this eco-modernist tendency: such factors include the COVID-19 pandemic, which brought life work – as developed in hospitals and nursing homes, households, and communities, as well as in farming and food provisioning – front and centre in public discourse and in social movements organizing.

With this in mind, I want to suggest thinking about repair work as developed in two, mostly distinct, dimensions, both of which appear as essential to a workers-led ecological transition.

Manufact repairing

First, in line with Carr's focus on industrial repair, and with current Just Transition discourse, the repairing of material/energy infrastructures and the built environment come to mind, in response to not only climate-related disasters but also to structural obsolescence and decaying. This is a vast area of intervention for repair workers, involving high-tech skills and high-risk work. Turning infrastructural repair into careful work, however, involves ecologically oriented and socially inclusive decision-making capacity over which infrastructures (and buildings) are to be repaired, and which need to be phased out and replaced. In other words, it requires a process of de-alienation so that these choices can be oriented by environmental justice concerns, rather than by growth or profit imperatives, or by public spending constraints. Moreover, this kind of repair work should include those traditional, peasant, and indigenous infrastructures that are threatened by both climate disasters and by capital-intensive, managerial fixes (such as the CCRC mentioned by Carr). In other words, careful infrastructural repair must make sure that post-disaster reconstruction incorporates low-cost, locally based, vernacular knowledge and practices, with special attention to the risk of eviction and gentrification which typically ensue from capital-intensive reconstructions.

Second, a growing literature is paying attention to the work of repairing objects, for example, appliances or consumer goods, to extend their life cycle and reduce the need for increased manufacturing, transport, and waste disposal, as well as make them accessible to all. More than to post-disaster recovery needs, this kind of repair responds to everyday needs for contrasting the planned obsolescence, fast replacement, and universal commodification of manufacts, as well as safeguarding handcraft jobs which are disappearing everywhere; it also offers opportunities for capacity building at the individual or community level, autonomy from the market, and development of convivial technologies and/or skills – the ‘do-it-together’ ethos (Udall, 2019). As a convivial skill that is of scarce if any interest to capital, object repairing holds the potential for ushering in genuine circularity processes, or community economies, contributing to a careful ecological transition. This, however, contrasts with high-skilled and capital-intensive visions of the ‘circular economy’ – where the aim is to turn waste into a resource for expanding market valuation (Genovese and Pansera, 2021).

Repairing life (and the commons)

Manufacts, however, are not the only sphere of intervention for the repair work that is needed for a careful transition. The second sphere of intervention is that of life work. Two kinds of repair can be identified here. The first one consists of repairing agroecosystems and the biosphere (soil, water, forests, oceans, and the atmosphere), maintaining the conditions for humans and other species to survive and thrive. This work, traditionally done by peasant and indigenous communities who are dependent on local resources, calls for an unprecedented, de-colonized, and contest-specific collaboration between different knowledges and skills (as shown by the fire prevention initiatives on Australia's east coast described by Carr). The second one consists of repairing bodies, in the sense of healing physical and mental trauma consequent to climate disaster, to industrial contamination and ecocide (from extraction to transport, manufacturing, and waste disposal activities), to securitization and anti-immigration policies, or to public health disasters such as the COVID-19 pandemic. This work is typically done by (paid or unpaid) caregivers in households and institutions, and largely by women from low-income communities, as well as volunteers and activists; as such, it is assumed as infinitely available, and it is rarely if ever mentioned in post-carbon transition discourse and organizing.

Typically, these two dimensions of repair are structurally separated by divisions of labour along class, gender, racial, and spatial differentiations. However, repair studies are also increasingly pointing to a third dimension of repair, where such distinction tends to blur away, leaving space for the emergence of hybrid repair practices: this consists of the work of repairing the commons, in the sense of restoring and recuperating social/community infrastructures such as community centres, libraries, theatres, urban gardens, housing squats, and other public spaces, in the wake of both climate-related disasters (e.g. floods or fires) and abandonment and decay due to market failures and cuts in public spending (Graziano and Trogall, 2019). This work is done by mostly unpaid community carers and activists, from NGOs to radical collectives, to informal citizen networks, often in borderline legal settings, and subject to threats of eviction and police interventions. An emerging body of literature is showing how repairing the commons is, at the same time, a material and symbolic practice, allowing for the reparation of broken social and community ties, as well as framing communities in new ways (Callahan, 2019).

Towards radical repair

In short: though challenging dualistic thinking about work is key to the politics of ecological transition, we still need to maintain analytical distinctions that allow us to see how repair means different things depending on what is being repaired and by whom. This is key to understanding how distinct repair practices reflect different forms of ecological consciousness and agency, and what kind of praxis is needed to reconnect them within a politics of radical repair, that is, an ecologically sound and socially inclusive reconstruction of things, such that societies might become not simply more resilient, but more just and careful. When connected to each other, as in the work of repairing the commons, the two forms of repair might usher in a broader and more ambitious social endeavour: not simply putting things back to work as before ‘the crisis’ but disassembling the broken mechanisms of industrial modernity and re-assembling them in new ways, so that non-capitalist, non-colonial, non-patriarchal, non-ableist, and non-extractivist modernity might take shape from the repairing. Clearly, this broader meaning of repair feeds on a critical, but largely still to be developed convergence between industrial and non-industrial repair, crossing the material and political divides between the subjects of these two kinds of repair work, and the movements and organizations that represent them.