Negotiating Sustainability: Climate Change Framing in the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union

Environmental problems are often reduced to a catch‐22 that portrays sustainability‐oriented policies as disastrous for resource sector workers. Despite efforts by many industry leaders to frame climate change in “jobs versus environment” terms, the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union of Canada (CEP) has supported ambitious greenhouse gas reduction policies. Using interviews with union members and staff, this study examines CEP's climate change framing. It finds that CEP extended the environmental justice master frame to define its response to climate change, neutralize anti‐Kyoto rhetoric, and work with the environmental movement. CEP's framing was accomplished through negotiation processes that continue to unfold as members work out the union's positions relative to their own values, experiences, and interpretations of what is possible. These findings suggest sustainability can be understood as an emergent, localized, and contested social order, and point to “self‐negotiation” in longer‐term social change struggles as a potential area of further study.