Green Collaring a Capital Crisis?

The global economic crisis has delivered a boost to ‘green collar’ employment in wealthy nations through sizeable injections of public stimulus funds. It is therefore timely to question what this means for relations between labour, capital and the ecosystem. This article offers a critical analysis of political economic and policy aspects of the green jobs growth anticipated to flow from the global financial crisis. While critics of the growth imperative of capitalist political economies are skeptical of market-based approaches to averting destructive climate change and the associated social and ecological costs, governments, industry and organised labour are confident that this is the appropriate course of action to the current economic and climate crises. However, snapshots of labour conditions at the lower end of the green economy suggest that social justice notions of green jobs and the possibilities of a just transition are likely to be elusive aims in capitalist societies.