Understanding UK trade union responses to climate change: a multi-level case study of union concerns and capacities in Yorkshire and the Humber, 2008-2019

Climate change alters the political economy that trade unions face. As a wicked, global, social problem, it strains the meaning of Just Transition: unions’ demand to ameliorate hardships as environmental problems are solved. My thesis addresses trade unions’ limited engagement with climate change, and how the potentials of their role in achieving a Just Transition can be activated.

In a decade of exclusion by government, legislative pressures, and reducing memberships, UK unions represented their memberships’ interests in high-carbon industries through close relationships with key employers. However, in Yorkshire and the Humber, where previous transitions were unjust to whole communities, a regional, cross sectoral, Just Transition taskforce created by the Trades Union Congress in 2016 developed new engagement processes and narratives.

My thesis explores how UK unions nationally and within the region were developing their concerns and capacities around Just Transition in 2018-19, as young people brought climate justice to popular notice. This multi-level case study, combining participatory activist research, interviews and documentary analysis, investigated unions’ framing of their social and environmental concerns, and the development of their capacities to engage around climate change and promote a Just Transition. The thesis extends labour environmentalism theories, to acknowledge climate change as global and social, and supports trade union engagement around climate.

My research findings were, first, nationally, where unions had no seat at the table, the development of union capacities was constrained by their narrow framing of concerns for energy workers. In contrast, in the TUC Yorkshire and the Humber Taskforce, the role of unions was developed through regional bodies seeing them as partners, developing unions’ capabilities to articulate broader and deeper concerns. Thirdly, geographical inequalities and historical injustices in the region made the social and economic aspects of place-based climate action more salient for unions.