From 31st October to 12th November, the 26th United Nations Climate Change “Conference of the Parties”, known as COP26, will meet in Glasgow. This was scheduled to happen in 2020 but was cancelled due to Covid-19. Pressure is growing on world leaders to take decisive action on climate change. A generation of school students, participating in “climate strike” walkouts from school, have already made their voices heard.
In almost every trade union in the UK, motions have been debated at national Conferences which commit the unions to fighting for a “just transition”. This means a shift away from a carbon-emitting economy in a way that protects working class people from job losses and higher prices and taxes.
The capitalist class, who see the climate crisis not as a threat to the planet but as a threat to their profits, have also been exerting pressure. In their populist mode, the capitalists hire useful stooges like Alex Jones to pour conspiracy theories and climate change denialism out into the internet and the airwaves. For COP26, however, the capitalists will be rubbing shoulders with world leaders and such tactics will be far from view. Quite a number of large polluters – energy companies, corporations reliant upon global supply chains and banks – have taken to sponsoring COP26, to ensure that they can pose as concerned whilst making sure their profits are protected by governments.
Working class people have no such privileged access to these leaders. Dramatically widening inequality, decades of anti-union laws and the shattering of socialist politics in the mainstream left parties have all ensured that workers have no seat at the table. Only by mobilising workers across the UK – and across the world – will we ensure that our voice is the loudest, so that bosses and politicians are left in no doubt that the burden of de-carbonising the economy should be borne by the wealthiest.
Fight for One Million Climate Jobs and a Green Workers’ Recovery
On 20th July, the union’s Assistant General Secretary, John Moloney, issued a circular (Branch Bulletin 99/21) which lays out the need to build a campaign in anticipation of COP26. This includes giving support to a climate strike on 24th September, by using it as a day of action, and preparation for major demonstrations on 6th November.
We agree with this bulletin and call on all Broad Left Network supporters to raise its contents at union meetings. However, the danger, given the right-ward trajectory of the current leadership of the union under Fran Heathcote and Mark Serwotka, is that these good intentions are left suspended in mid-air. Outside of ensuring to get their faces on union material, or posing alongside other worthies for a photo opportunity, there is no real sense that the leadership are trying to push this amongst members, to raise its profile and build participation at a crucial moment.
Politically, there has been no attempt to take issues and political demands – such as for a just transition or for the public ownership of utilities – and ground them in real issues faced by members of PCS in the workplace. This was the advantage of the demand for one million green jobs, first articulated by BLN supporter and former PCS Assistant General Secretary Chris Baugh. At the time we first put this forward, it was in answer to the devastating job cuts unleashed by the government after the 2008 crash. It connected directly to a burning issue.
This can be done again, in the context of the Covid-19 crisis and the economic slump that is already hitting jobs up and down the UK. The one million climate jobs we identified included the creation, within the UK Civil Service, of a National Climate Service. This could coordinate the creation of green jobs, with state-led investment to reverse a generation of under-investment. It could transform sectors like manufacturing, energy and transport.
Such an organisation could also have links to every single workplace, especially those run by the government. The current Tory government has published a sustainability strategy – but it amounts to fine words. When it comes to the institutions which the government controls, any reduction in carbon footprint will be by slashing local offices, ditching office car parking spaces and services and by getting rid of the tens of thousands of additional staff taken on during the Covid-19 crisis. In every way this is the opposite of a “just transition”.
A National Climate Service, with sweeping powers to get the UK economy to zero carbon emissions and yet to protect the interests of workers, could link up with Green Reps in every workplace. Green Reps, members of, appointed by and accountable to the trade unions, would speak up for workers’ interests while simultaneously pushing employers to address questions like how to reduce energy consumption like electricity and heating, how to invest in the fabric of buildings, how to rationalise transport usage and so on.
It is these local aspects of fighting climate change – defending jobs, workers’ control in the workplace – that we must use to mobilise in every workplace.
With billions of pounds of debt built up by the crisis, with county court judgments for debt skyrocketing and 650,000 businesses reporting serious financial distress, an economic crisis is happening right in front of us. Swingeing government cuts are an inevitability, once the heroic role of nurses, teachers and others fades a little. If we do not connect the battle against climate change to the fight for jobs, then it will be spun the other way by bosses, their politicians and a compliant media, that climate change necessitates suffering for workers.
If we do not use this opportunity, this huge mobilisation that has the potential to be felt in every corner of the country, to demand economic justice, the result will be much like the aftermath of 2008. The Labour government at that time bailed out the banks, preserved the profits of the capitalists and the obscene bonuses of their financial lackeys and used the resulting debt as an excuse to gut spending on public services, the poor, parents, the sick, the disabled, the young and the old. This mantle was gleefully donned by the Tory and Lib-Dem coalition.
We must mobilise now.
How Could We Build The Mood In Our Workplaces?
There is reason to believe that a mood to fight could quickly build up around the question of jobs and a green recovery. In our own union, workers are already facing job cuts. This is one of the reasons for the current 2-week strike at Just Ask Services, at the Royal Parks. Other private sector contractors will likewise be scaling down staffing, as additional cleaning measures adopted during the pandemic are abandoned by the government.
Staff like this exist in virtually every civil service workplace, and in addition there are the tens of thousands of Fixed Term Appointments taken on to deal with Covid. There are also vast backlogs in certain areas which clearly indicate the need for still more workers to be recruited. Staffing – and related issues such as work related stress, workloads and so on – is an extraordinarily potent issue, if the leadership were to include it in our National Campaign.
This must not just be – as the bulletin referred to above has been – a one-off announcement from the leadership. Nor should it be just Zoom meetings or surveys, designed by the leadership to pointedly avoid any discussion of a strategy to win and to demoralise and demobilise members, as in the recent DWP Safety Campaign. It will have to be a serious effort, involving detailed discussions with reps at every level, painstaking confidence-building amongst branches and then a clear plan to connect all of this back to the major protests planned for COP26 November and to take it out to the entire labour movement.
This mood is strong enough that it is forcing action even in unions traditionally considered to be bastions of the right-win, such as USDAW. Strike action at Weetabix in Kettering, or at BCM Fareva, which supplies Boots and the Body Shop, has resulted from threats to jobs. In Glasgow itself the battle at McVities revolves around the threat to 500 jobs. Any one of these factories could be re-purposed to produce the infrastructure on which a green economy would be based.
BEIS, the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, which has oversight of COP26, has been hard at work trumpeting the future potential of the “hydrogen” economy. Total government investment is a paltry £105 million and looks a lot like a Tory green-washing exercise. Instead of this, civil servants could get to work mapping out factories and workplaces threatened by closure, identifying available machinery and skill sets and required investment, so as to support workers to take over and run these factories to build green infrastructure.
Inevitably there will be opposition – both from the entrenched bureaucracies within the trade unions and of course from the political class, the capitalists and their minions in the media. Workers could be mobilised, however, and given the confidence to strike and occupy factories threatened with closure, to demand nationalisation and to demand that the government drastically scales up its investment in the future zero carbon economy, starting with their jobs.
Workers Can Link Up With Students
The twin demands of reducing carbon emissions and a green recovery that protects jobs are universal. The school students who took strike action in 2019 are finishing school and looking around for jobs. Their options are limited. In Glasgow, even in skilled areas such as teaching, councils – faced with economic crisis – are refusing to permanently employ those they take on as trainees. There is scope for a massive campaign that unites workers and students.
Workers – and their organisations, the trade unions – must take the lead, allied to combative campaigns with a proven track record, such as Youth Fight For Jobs. Union branches must pro-actively approach Trades Councils, as is suggested in the PCS branch bulletin referred to above, but we can and should also approach university, college and sixth form students unions, to ask for their support and involvement in making an impact on November 6.
Young workers and students want jobs, they want rights at work and they are absolutely fed up with a capitalist class which has no answer to climate change except an unending series of international junkets in Kyoto, Paris, Copenhagen, now Glasgow. Their lived experience is of their future being endlessly threatened, wages undermined, jobs casualised, pensions evaporated. A socialist approach to these issues unites workers and students.
Every union branch should show a lead in reaching out to the rest of the labour movement, and the union’s National Executive Committee should instruct the network of union offices across the UK, the Full Time Officers and the regional and devolved nation committees to support this work. The union is also affiliated to campaigning organisations that can help, including the National Shop Stewards Network and, as mentioned, Youth Fight for Jobs.
In Glasgow, Youth Fight for Jobs is already organising on campuses for a demonstration outside Skills Development Scotland, in which PCS members work. Firstly, to protest the Scottish Government’s acquiescence in the exploration of a new oil and natural gas field in the North Sea, but also to demand better support for workers and students, in the form of jobs. A lunch time demonstration by workers at Skills Development Scotland, to show support and solidarity, would allow for a broad discussion of the socialist demands needed to win.
Local issues are also worth highlighting. Controversy has raged over the exploration of a new oilfield off the coast of Scotland, with the SNP-led Scottish Parliament in support. It is defended as a necessary evil, and as propping up jobs and investment in the north-east of Scotland. Such a view is only sustained by the under-investment in renewable energy needed to reduce carbon emissions and keep fossil fuels in the ground. In other parts of the UK, fracking or wood pellet burning are well-known issues that can be raised.
Scotland is actually ahead of most of the rest of the UK in terms of its generation of energy by renewable means, but this is not to praise the Scottish Government, it merely reflects the lack of urgency being shown by the Johnson’s Westminster government. A little less mired in corporate corruption though it may be, the Scottish Government has nevertheless passed on massive cuts to local authorities, affecting every area from adult social care to rubbish collection and recycling.
Council leaders frequently blame their inactivity on issues like climate change on these cuts. We don’t accept these excuses but this should underscore how the reversal of austerity is the most obvious and immediate step towards the kind of job creation and investment that would sustain a green recovery and take a giant step towards a zero-carbon economy.
All of these issues – defending jobs, defending local services, making every workplace as green as possible – are relevant in virtually every community across the country. Achieving them is not just compatible with the demand for a zero-carbon economy – they are dependent upon each other. This is the banner under which the trade unions must prepare for a major battle – beginning with the mobilisation laid out in the PCS branch bulletin, but going beyond that.
PCS Broad Left Network 