Let’s face it: Single-issue advocacy that directly pressures government and business won’t solve today’s crises on its own. It also won’t create the deep relationships and power we need to achieve multi-level, community-based, systemic change.
Sure, there are small (sometimes compromised) gains in the short term when organizations and groups muster enough strength, resources, and staff to pummel their opponent, but we’re losing the war. Wins are often rolled back when we can’t keep up the pressure or critical mass with finite resources. Too often, non-profits replicate the same systems of oppression they’re trying to dismantle in the first place. **Burnout is real**
More deep and lasting cultural change can happen if non-profits build real relationships with supporters*. By talking with more people, organizations can share resources that draw more people into leadership roles, expand internal and external capacity, and consensually support infrastructure on the ground to leverage power and create change.
It’s time to start doing better, deeper digital work to build real relationships with supporters — relationships that transform communities, grow and develop skills, support the grassroots, and expand movement infrastructure — you know, the things that we know create lasting change.
It’s possible to talk to more people, and I’m going to ask some hard questions and delve into how it can be done throughout this blog series.
The internet (“digital” or “online advocacy”) has given us the ability to reach more people and send a message further than it ever has gone before — so, why aren’t we winning more?
Let’s ask the hard questions: Are we using online platforms strategically to build relationships and power with the resources we have? Are for-profit platforms fundamentally changing the way we connect with people for the worse? Is it unethical to consistently grow your email list without the staffing, resources, and know-how to actually organize it? Is it even possible to cut through a crowded online space and make an impact on the ground?
More importantly, is online advocacy even organizing anyone? What would our movements look like if we focused a little more on personal connections instead of on getting signatures on a petition or on other, temporary, performative “wins” that push for an urgent and temporary critical mass?
“We have lived through a good half century of individualistic linear organizing (led by charismatic individuals or budget-building institutions), which intends to reform or revolutionize society, but falls back into modeling the oppressive tendencies against which we claim to be pushing. Many align with the capitalist belief that constant growth and critical mass is the only way to create change, even if they don’t use that language. If the goal was to increase the love, rather than winning or dominating, we could actually imagine liberation from constant oppression. We would understand that the strength of our movement is in the strength of our relationships. Scaling up would mean going deeper.” — adrienne maree brown, emergent strategy (edits made for length)
Surely with the focus on adding millions of people to popular progressive email lists — we’d have more wins under our belts. Right? RIGHT?! With so many tech tools and platforms at our fingertips, we should be talking directly to more people and bringing them into community — not less.
If you’re an organizer, activist, or change-maker, ask yourself how you got into this work. For me, it’s because someone spoke about an issue with me face-to-face. There was a personal connection. A relationship began.
We live in an exciting time. The rapidly evolving digital sector has enabled us to reach people and scale our work like never before.
The downside is that for-profit social media platforms have fundamentally transformed how we communicate, share, learn, and organize for the worse. We need to be extremely cautious about how and why we use them.
“Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and others aren’t built to foster deep human connections; they’re built to maximize our time on their platforms. Social media uses notifications to trigger the release of dopamine to fool our brains into thinking we are making meaningful connections and keep us on their sites. Our brains think this is making us happy which is why we keep coming back for more but it’s actually making us miserable.” — Nicole Carty, Momentum
As the world changes, so must our resistance to it — and our resistance needs to be irresistible and strategic!
Most simply, advocacy organizations need better processes for creating online organizing strategy?— and reject for-profit tech traps that are vacant of real personal connection.
If we want to bring more people into our movements and win more, we need to get better at having more principled and personalized conversations with the right person at the right time. We need to talk with more people, more deeply.
To truly scale, we gotta go deep.
Only when we can build lasting relationships at scale will collective participation and liberation be the outcome. Building these relationships should be the focus of our engagement strategy online and offline.
I will be the first one to say that “digital” or “online organizing” isn’t a magical unicorn that will get us exactly what we need exactly when we need it. But, by constantly asking questions about our strategy like I’ve outlined throughout this blog series, I know we can get closer to multi-level, community-based system change where people and culture change come first — not the latest executive director, digital campaigner, elected official, or tech tool.
In our fast-paced culture, it’s important to make time to reflect on where we are and where we’re going. And, with billion dollar companies controlling the way we speak with each other, we need to be vigilant and intentional about what online organizing is going to look like in 5 years.
*Supporters are people who are on your email list, follow your social feeds, donate, or contribute to your group in some way.
**The scope of this series mainly focuses on non-profits with sizable email lists, not grassroots groups and frontline organizers — but there are definitely tidbits of insights for everyone. It also doesn’t go into how to support, be in coalition with, or exercise consent to grassroots or frontline communities.
Written by Vanessa Butterworth. Edited by Jay Carmona.
Throughout the 2018–2019 school year, young people around organized massive school climate strikes to demand that the world’s leaders take immediate action to address climate change. The strikes started first in Sweden, then spread throughout the European Union and around the world. By March, 15 tens of thousands of students in more than 100 countries around the world walked out of school as part of the first Global Climate Strike for Our Future issuing a strong challenge to the world’s leaders. Greta Thunberg, one of the strike’s leaders wrote in an open letter in the Guardian,
“We, the young, are deeply concerned about our future… We will no longer accept this injustice… We demand the world’s decision-makers take responsibility and solve this crisis. You have failed us in the past. If you continue failing in the future, we, the young people, will make change happen by ourselves. The youth of this world has started to move and we will not rest again.”
Inspired by these bold youth-led actions and motivated by the increasing urgency of the climate crisis, others in the climate movement have issued calls for climate strikes starting as soon as September of 2019. Starting on September 20, the students who have been organizing the weekly climate strikes are launching a major strike and week of actions. Then starting on September 27th, Earth Strike is calling for a general strike demanding immediate climate action from governments and corporations worldwide. WeRise2020, a widespread network of climate action groups across Europe is planning on mobilizing alongside EarthStrike starting on September 27th for four to six weeks of escalated actions before pausing to regroup for another wave of action.
These calls for climate strikes offer an inspiring vision for action at the scale and scope needed to disrupt the entrenched power structures that have created the climate crisis and continually blocked the serious measures needed to combat it. But beyond calls to walk out of school and work, truly effective climate strikes will require a strategy for mass participation and disruption to seriously threaten the entrenched power structures. It won’t be easy but by drawing on the lessons from previous mass strikes and tested organizing principles we believe that it is possible to build mass climate strikes that can offer a credible threat to the governments and corporations that have failed to address the climate crisis.
Strikes — A powerful tool in the toolbox
The term “strike” comes from a maritime tradition of workplace action where sailors would lower or “strike” the sails of their ship at sea demanding better treatment and working conditions from the ship’s captain and officers. Sailors would refuse to raise the sails and the ship would stay adrift until their demands were met, or at least an acceptable agreement had been reached. There was an art to organizing these early strikes. A large enough portion of the crew needed to be ready to take action so that they couldn’t be overpowered by the officers and loyal crew members. And the strikes were most effective when winds were high and the cost of lowering sails was greatest. If the strike failed the consequences to the unlucky sailors who overplayed their hands would be great. And ship captains knew that if the unrest was not addressed quickly it could escalate to a full blown mutiny.
Strikes moved ashore in the early 1600s with relatively small groups of indentured servants, slaves, apprentices, and craftspeople laying down their tools and refusing to work to demand better working conditions. While workers from all walks of life participated in different forms of strikes, skilled craft workers whose skills could not easily be replaced won the biggest gains during these early work stoppages. But as the industrial revolution and the introduction of steam-powered railroads transformed the organization of the economy, larger groups of unskilled industrial workers gained the ability to cause mass disruption by idling the factories and infrastructure that early industrialists relied upon to make their fortunes.
In 1877 workers on the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad (B&O) went on strike to protest wage cuts, choking the nation’s arteries and cutting off the lifeblood of the country’s commercial and industrial systems. The strike started in Martinsburg, West Virginia before spreading to Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia and as far west as St. Louis, Missouri and as far north as Albany, New York. Thousands of railroad workers took part in the strike but its effects were much more widespread because the stalled rail line blocked factories from getting supplies or transporting their goods to market and brought passenger travel to a standstill effectively shutting down a large portion of the commercial and industrial activity in the country.
Strikers in Pittsburgh burn the B&O Rail Depot
Later, in 1934 when Longshore workers in San Francisco and Teamsters in Minneapolis commercial activity in both cities ground to a halt. With the docks in Seattle’s ports effectively shut down and drivers refusing to move struck cargo, all of the businesses that relied on trading and transporting imported and exported goods were shut down. When Seattle’s truck drivers struck, “flying squads” of picketers refused to allow any truck roll through the city’s streets without a special permit from the union (strikers granted special permits to trucks moving supplies for hospitals as well as farmers from the supportive Farmers’ Holiday Association traveling into the city to sell produce in street markets). And as recently as this year, the wave of teachers strikes across the country rippled through entire communities, with parents of school children calling off work to stay home with their children while schools were closed (many parents and students used the time to join their teachers on the picket lines).
Mass Participation and Mass Disruption
Strikes are a very powerful tool, but they aren’t a tool to be used lightly. Strikes are, by their very nature, tools of mass participation. Just a handful of workers walking off the job isn’t likely to have a significant impact on operations. For a strike to be successful at impeding operations, large numbers of workers must be ready to collectively withhold their labor. This requires serious discipline and commitment. The costs of missing work — and a paycheck — can be significant for many workers. And the risks of being fired or retaliated against are serious. So the informed consent and active participation of large numbers of workers — particularly those most implicated in the strike activity — are essential ingredients in organizing a credible strike.
While some moderately successful strikes have been limited to specific workplaces or industries, throughout history, the strikes that have won sweeping societal changes won because they were able to spread throughout the economy, generating popular support, mobilizing mass participation and creating mass disruption. During the railroad strike, a large number of railroad workers walked off the job, refusing to work after management instituted pay cuts. But even more workers didn’t work because the trains were not running. Picketers refused to let trains leave stations or roundhouses, supplies weren’t delivered to factories, and passengers weren’t able to travel to conduct business. In Minneapolis, Teamsters made the decision that allowing any driver to move goods at substandard rates hurt every trucker so flying picket squads refused to let trucks driven by would-be strikebreakers move during the strikes.
Today’s labor strikes are much different than the strikes that led to the massive workplace gains a century ago. Because early strikes proved to be so powerful and disruptive, politicians offered something of a compromise, allowing strikes, but only under certain conditions. Anthropologist David Graeber observes,
“Unions are, paradoxically, the only organizations in the US legally permitted to engage in direct action; but they can do so only if they do not call it that; and only at the cost of accepting endless and intricate regulations over how and when they can strike, what kinds of pickets they can set up and where, whether, they are allowed to engage in other tactics such as secondary boycotts or even publicity campaigning, and so on.”
This uneasy compromise has been the subject of much debate within the labor movement. On one hand, federal labor law has offered some important protections for workers engaging in union activity, on the other hand, the legal framework of the National Labor Relations Act has dramatically constrained the repertoires of contention that are available to modern labor unions.
As a result of this uneasy compromise, the strikes that observers of the modern labor movement are familiar with bear little resemblance to the massively disruptive general strikes that led to the huge gains of the labor movement in the years before 1936. Early strikes relied on two essential components to create mass disruption: First, workers would organize large numbers of their co-workers to withhold their labor for the duration of the strike. Second, those workers and their supporters worked to actively disrupt commercial activity through pickets, blockades, social persuasion, and direct action.
This second, more active, component of early strikes was essential to creating mass disruption because it made the decision of whether or not to strike a collective one, not an individual one. Once workers collectively decided to call a strike, individual workers were no longer forced to make the tough individual decision of defying their employers and refusing to work — factories were inaccessible because their gates were blocked by strong picket lines; trains and trucks would not move because even if there were drivers and rail crews on hand willing to defy the strike, roads and rail lines would be blocked; shops would close partly because even if there were retail clerks ready to show up to work there would be no way to get goods to stock the shelves and customers would be discouraged from shopping.
Today, constrained by the framework of federal labor law, unions generally rely primarily on the more passive component of strikes — withdrawing labor en mass. Popular movement to fight climate change, however, are not bound by the constraints of the uneasy compromise of federal labor law, we are only bound by our ability to build mass participation, create mass disruption and withstand mass repression.
Striking for Climate Justice
The bold and courageous leaders of the student climate strikes captured the imagination of the world by walking out of school, Friday after Friday, eventually mobilizing millions of students in more than 100 countries around the world to take action. They have called for another round of mass strikes in September of 2019 and issued a challenge for older generations to join them.
“Millions of school strikers have shown us they’re serious about climate action. Adults, will you join our youth? School strikers are calling on everyone: young people, parents, workers, and all concerned citizens to join massive climate strikes and a week of actions starting on September 20. People all over the world will use their power to stop ‘business as usual’ in the face of the climate emergency.”
To date, climate strikes have relied mainly on large numbers of students withdrawing their participation in the status quo by walking out of class and joining demonstrations. But this round of climate strikes could truly jump scale and pose a credible threat to the politicians and corporations that have failed to take action on the climate crisis if we are able to combine organizing walkouts at massive scale with active disruptions to bring the economy to a screeching halt.
Building massive support and participation is one essential component of organizing for this September’s climate strike. But planning for mass disruption to actively shut down our political and economic system is what will make the difference between a powerful week of action and a serious challenge to the entrenched power structures.
If our movements can credibly plan to shut down the arteries of commerce and transportation we can transform a climate strike from an individual decision to withhold labor to a collective decision to shut down the economy until our demands are met. If we can ensure that commuter trains cannot run, key bridges are impassible for vehicular traffic, and major highways into commercial centers are blocked people will not be forced to make the tough individual decision about whether or not to go to work — going to work won’t be an option — they’ll be able to decide whether to stay home or to come out to the streets to join the demonstrations.
“But what about people just trying to go about their day? Won’t we just be inconveniencing them?“
To be sure, massive participation and broad popular support is an essential component of a successful climate strike. But if we are serious striking for climate justice we need to be serious about creating mass disruption. If we are going to invite individuals to give up pay, risk their jobs, or leave their classrooms to join a strike, we owe it to them to be serious about making it work. There can be significant personal costs to participating in a strike and strikes aren’t a tactic to call for lightly or to deploy as half measures.
The question of whether or not to organize mass disruption is an important gut-check for our movement. If we don’t think that the situation is urgent enough to warrant creating a mass disruption then the situation probably isn’t urgent enough to encourage large numbers of people to risk their livelihoods by going on strike.
A strike will be disruptive. Some people who want to go to work won’t be able to get to their jobs. Some parents will probably have trouble getting to their kids’ daycare to pick them up. Some people may have trouble getting to the pharmacy to pick up their medicine. Many people will miss paychecks. We can come up with plans to try to mitigate as many of these problems as possible, but if we aren’t ready to try to solve the problem of helping parents get their kids at daycare or finding ways people to get their medicine from the pharmacy, we aren’t ready to invite daycare workers or pharmacy techs to walk off the job.
From Individual Decisions to Collective Action
Organizing mass disruption to the key arteries of the economy also transforms participating in a strike from an individual decision to a collective action. If the strike just relies on individuals making the decision to withhold their labor or walk out of their classrooms, every person who participates in the strike is forced into a situation where they must personally decide whether or not they are going to strike and bear the full weight and responsibility of that decision with their employer or school.
But as the size of the strike grows, the risk becomes more distributed and dissipates. A boss can fire one or two workers for refusing to come to work during the climate strike. But can that boss afford to fire 100 workers for participating in the climate strike? 200 workers? 1,000 workers?
And if transportation infrastructure is shut down or the doors to the workplace are blocked, workers won’t need to make a decision about whether or not to go to work — they can’t go to work. And faced with the prospect of a mass strike and disruption that would make business as usual impossible, many employers would respond the way that they do in anticipation of a major snowstorm or the day after the home team wins the World Series — by simply closing their business for the day.
This doesn’t mean that a strike can be imposed from the outside or orchestrated by some vanguard of militant activists. Without the active participation of large numbers of people and popular support from many, many more — particularly those with the most at stake — a disruptive strike will almost certainly create an ugly backlash. And to the extent that disruptive activity impedes people who aren’t inclined to participate in the strike from getting where they want to go or doing what they want to do during the strike, it is best if the people doing the disruption are the ones with the closest relationship to the nodes of the economy they are disrupting. If commuter trains are going to be blockaded, people who normally ride those trains should lead those blockades; if bridges are going to be shut down, the people who normally rely on those bridges should take the lead in those shutdowns; if school buses are going to be kept in their garages, students who normally ride school buses should take the lead in keeping the buses in those garages.
Organizing at Scale
While organizing a climate strike that can credibly disrupt commercial activity within any city or region requires organizing at a massive scale, it doesn’t require unanimous participation. In a groundbreaking study of civil resistance campaigns around the world, Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan found that movements that mobilized at least 3.5% of the population in sustained civil resistance were successful in creating transformative political change. While much easier to build towards than 100% participation, mobilizing 3.5% of the population is still an ambitious mobilization. That means engaging 25 thousand people in Seattle, 95 thousand people in Chicago, 290 thousand people in New York City or 11.4 million people nationwide in sustained civil resistance.
Right now there is no organization or party structure in the United States that has the resources or capacity to build a program to organize at this scale. But working alongside each other many different types of organizations can cobble together the best practices and traditions of a wide range of social movements to organize huge numbers of people to take bold and dynamic action.
From the labor and community organizing traditions, organizations can adopt the models of disciplined, structure-based organizing. Tools like mapping workplaces and communities to build lists and identify organic leaders and one-on-one organizing conversations with clear action steps to push people into action can allow us to go beyond ‘hand raisers’ and ‘usual suspects’ to go deep into our communities and engage people we would have never thought about engaging.
We can use structure tests like strike pledges and practice actions to find out where we have strong support and participation and spend time and energy going towards our “biggest worsts” to break down barriers to action. The Central American Solidarity Movement, Anti-War Movement, and Climate movements used these tools to great effect with “Pledge of Resistance” campaigns where people publicly committed to taking bold action in support of their movements. As more and more people sign pledges, the more timid and skeptical supporters of the movements became more confident that the actions were going to be powerful and they added their names. Pledge organizers could also identify key areas and communities that had not signed the pledge, identify what was holding people back, and work with those communities to break through barriers to action.
From the direct action organizing tradition, a movement to build a climate strike can adopt models of decentralized and autonomous organizing through affinity groups that take responsibility for making their own plans to meaningfully participate in the strike. During the WTO in Seattle in 1999, the Direct Action Network divided the city into sections surrounding the convention center like pieces of a pie. Different affinity groups or groups of affinity groups made plans within their own sections of the city to shut down traffic. Some organized marches or rolling blockades, others organized mass sit-ins, and still others organized lockdowns in key intersections. With the city shut down, the trade summit was delayed and talks eventually collapsed as delegates from the global south who were being strongarmed into the disastrous trade deal became emboldened by popular resistance from around the world.
From the Momentum model that has informed the great work of the Sunrise Movement, If Not Now, and Movimiento Cosecha, a mobilization for a climate strike can adopt the practices of frontloading and mass training to breakdown the bottlenecks and onboard huge numbers of people in the ‘moment of the whirlwind’ — when the movement begins to take on a life of its own. By developing a strong program of training and onboarding, new participants are able to quickly learn the structures, stories, norms, and repertoires of contention of the movement and jump into meaningful action right away. This allows the movement to quickly scale up and absorb the time and energy and capacity of huge numbers of people during times of peak activity — when it’s often hardest to meaningfully integrate new energetic participants — and harness that energy when the wave of action recedes as part of the natural cycle of social movements.
To be sure, the conditions for organizing a climate strike are not ideal. Many of our movements are on the defensive, facing down new attacks from the Trump administration at every turn. The organizational infrastructure to support massive direct action is relatively weak right now and September is only two months away. But time is running out and the climate crisis is on our doorstep. The conditions for organizing are only going to get more and more challenging in the months and years to come. Young people around the world have challenged all of us to take bold direct action to turn the political tides and seriously confront the climate crisis. Their visionary leadership has created the momentum and opportunity we need to take serious action for climate justice. This September, let’s give it a shot. Let’s go big and strike for climate justice.
As the climate crisis continues to deepen and as it becomes less and less plausible that current efforts to curb global warming will even come close to preventing our earth from crossing the 2 degree Celsius ‘red line,’ the climate movement has shifted towards a bolder vision for climate action. Virtually every pole of the climate movement has evolved towards a set of bolder, more urgent demands and the mantra ‘keep it in the ground’ has begun to dominate the discussion about fossil fuel extraction and use.
While this bold position certainly reflects the urgency of the threat of climate change, the immediacy of the demand presents a new set of challenges for the climate movement. What happens to the millions of working families who are currently depending on incomes from jobs in and related to the fossil fuel industry? And what happens to communities whose economies rely on income from the fossil fuel industry and the low income workers as revenue dries up and energy costs rise?
According recent data from the BLS, 761,000 workers are employed in the extraction and mining sector and 116,700 workers are employed in the refining and processing sector in the United States alone. Each one of those direct fossil fuel industry jobs supports as many as 7 related jobs—from delivery drivers, equipment manufacturers, to the clerks at the mini-mart across the street from the power plant that workers stop into on their way to work. In total, it is fair to say that more than 6 million workers rely on the fossil fuel industry for their livelihoods in the US alone.
If we are going to keep fossil fuels in the ground, what happens to those 6 million working families?
Most climate justice organizations have adopted some messaging around a call for ‘just transition’ for workers and communities that are impacted by a shift away from fossil fuels in their public platforms. But it’s not clear what this ‘just transition’ would actually look like or how it materially amounts to anything more than just a messaging point.
For many, the concept of a just transition evokes images of workers walking off of their jobs in coal mines and oil refineries and walking into a factory right next door building wind turbines or solar panels. Anyone with even a passing familiarity with work in industrial manufacturing knows that vision is a fantasy.
Setting aside the most important factor—those ‘green energy jobs’ simply don’t exist in the numbers needed to transition the number of workers currently depending on work in the fossil fuel industry—the skills fossil fuel industry workers have spent decades honing are often not immediately transferable to other industries, the wind and solar jobs that do exist are not generally in close proximity to where energy workers (and their families) live, Further, these jobs generally pay a fraction of the wages and benefits that the largely unionized fossil fuel workforce currently experiences.
The challenges of an abrupt transition away from fossil fuels will extend beyond just the workers who rely on incomes in the fossil fuel industry. As workers look to find new jobs, oil refinery and coal mining communities will find themselves struggling to provide basic services to residents as the primary sources of revenue dry up. While many in the climate movement envision a future where energy from renewables is available at the same cost–if not cheaper than–energy from fossil fuels, the transition will almost certainly be accompanied by at least a temporary spike in energy costs. Even a small spike in energy costs could spell serious trouble for low wage workers already living on the economic edge.
If the climate movement is going to get serious about keeping fossil fuels in the ground, the movement needs to get serious about cultivating a real vision for a just transition. If we’re going to see coal-fired power plants and oil refineries and chemical plants shut down we need to have a real vision about what the future looks like for those workers, their families and their communities.
Anyone who has been involved in, or even around a plant closure or a mass layoff knows how disruptive and violent that transition can be. There are too many a 40-something refinery workers forced to leave their job of 25 years with skills that aren’t directly transferable to other industries only to find themselves in poverty-level service sector jobs. There are too many factory towns turned into ghost towns as all of the families evacuated after the primary employer shut down and left town. There are too many good people who’ve lost their jobs and couldn’t find ways to support their families that began to believe that suicide is the only way out.
The concept of a ‘just transition’ isn’t new. It was popularized in the 1980’s by Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers (OCAW) leader Tony Mazzocchi. As Mazzocchi navigated a challenging time as a leader in an energy union during the rapid growth of the modern environmental and antinuclear movements in the United States he argued that workers who were displaced as a result of shifting energy sources deserved support in transitioning to new jobs. His initial proposal was for a Superfund for Workers, arguing “there is a Superfund for dirt. There ought to be one for workers.”
The idea that workers who are displaced as a result of public policy isn’t radical and it’s not a novelty. Under the Trade Act of 1974 (and subsequent amendments) workers who are displaced as a result of trade are eligible for two years of unemployment compensation and two years of job training benefits. Even that falls far short in offering a smooth transition–particularly in communities experiencing concentrated unemployment caused by a plant closure impacting hundreds or even thousands of workers. Meanwhile, workers who are displaced as a result of environmental regulations are only statutorily entitled to 26 weeks of unemployment compensation.
Over the past three decades the concept of a just transition has gained popularity-if not specificity. The 2013 International Labor Organization passed its “Resolution concerning sustainable development, decent work and green jobs.” The resolution called for a just transition for workers whose jobs are eliminated as a result of environmental policy but appropriately noted that, “there is no ‘one-size-fits-all.’ Policies and programmes need to be designed in line with the specific conditions of countries, including their stage of development, economic sectors and sizes of enterprises”
Although most of the discussion about just transitions center on financial assistance and job training opportunities for workers who have already lost their jobs, some of the most important questions in articulating a vision for a just transition relate to how, when, and even if jobs should be eliminated. It seems relatively intuitive that shutting down an oil refinery would reduce carbon emissions but it is not always that straightforward.
Without addressing demand for fossil fuels and building alternatives to scale, shutting down oil refineries in the United States would likely have little impact on global carbon emissions. As refineries close in the United States, crude oil is increasingly being exported to new mega-refineries like the new Reliance Industries 1.24 million barrel per day refinery in India only to be refined and shipped back for sale in gas stations around the country. These refineries operate with fewer environmental or safety regulations than those in the United States and the carbon emissions generated by floating crude oil halfway around the world and shipping refined products back could even mean an even greater carbon footprint. If the climate movement is serious about cultivating a just transition, we need to make sure that we’re actually reducing carbon emissions and not just pushing jobs and refineries out of our own backyards and into other communities.
Climate change and its catastrophic impacts on our communities and planet are, without a doubt, the most pressing issues facing our world today. We need mass education, we mass mobilization, and we need mass resistance to build a real social movement to slow the devastating effects of climate change. But we also need to have a real, serious conversation about what a just transition looks like in our economy.
There are a myriad of proposals floating for serious just transition programs, from Mazzocchi’s Superfund for Workers which would provide four years of pay and training, to the expansion of TAA benefits to energy workers, to Senator Sanders’ proposed Clean Energy Worker Just Transition Act. It is not clear exactly what a just transition program for energy workers could or should look like, but if the climate movement really wants to keep fossil fuels in the ground it’s time to get serious about answering these questions.
A real just transition certainly doesn’t mean telling the millions of families who depend on jobs in and related to the fossil fuel industry that they need to ‘just transition’ to low-wage service sector jobs or to the handful of low-paying jobs in the wind or solar industries. If we’re going to stop—or even slow—climate change we all need to transition together.
Patrick Young is a Pittsburgh, PA based organizer and activist with deep ties in the industrial labor and climate justice movement. Patrick can be reached at patrickjamesyoung@gmail.com.
