Workers as climate actors: what can unions do about climate change? Introduction

Climate change is an existential threat requiring mitigation and adaptation efforts likely to affect workers, their workplaces and their communities. The introduction to this thematic issue of Transfer: European Review of Labour and Research explores how workers and their unions become climate actors. In addition to presenting the seven studies featured in this issue, we identify cross-cutting themes emerging from them. These include: the importance of unionisation and collective bargaining on attitudes to climate change measures; the diversity of strategies and the need to move from typologies of union climate strategies to an understanding of how these strategies emerge and are linked to specific sets of conditions, notably unequal exposure to climate impacts, divergent development trajectories and asymmetrical access to institutional resources; the intractable complexity of climate change strategies; whether union strategies are predicated on growth or on degrowth/post-growth, on paid labour in the labour market or all forms of labour including social reproduction; the influence of gender on climate vulnerability and climate action; and the promise and the perils of just transition.