Gender, climate change and trade unions: moving past the male industrial worker archetype

This conceptual article explores the tensions that climate change creates between environmental sustainability, gender equality and economic stability. It argues that these dimensions fundamentally challenge the foundations of traditional industrial relations (IR) and thus trade union strategy. By bringing union studies into dialogue with feminist political economy and eco-feminist perspectives, and drawing on scholarship and current evidence of union initiatives across the Global North and South, it proposes a union–climate–gender normative framework. This framework is structured along three interrelated continua: unions’ i) climate and ii) gender equality ambitions and iii) economic paradigms. We advocate for gender-responsive approaches that reframe productivity by considering the interdependence between paid-productive and social-reproductive labour, and call for unions to treat gender equality not as additional to but as a constitutive principle of just transition strategies.