Labor Unions: A Critical Tool for Climate Action
By Avery Lentini
May 6, 2021
The United States has a long history of addressing big issues using top-down approaches. A high-ranking individual or entity makes a decision that then gets passed down and disseminated to lower ranks of the hierarchy. Even the small government 'trickle down economics' that began under Reagan was enabled by top-down decisions—manipulating everything from interest rates to the farm bill to foreign policy—and more recently, has been extended to the sphere of climate policy.
This architecture takes center stage in international treaties such as the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Climate Accords; however, concern not only exists around these measures’ effectiveness in combating climate issues, but also the ways in which they may fail to serve working class people by ignoring the systemic roots of the climate crisis. Neoliberalism emphasizes efficiency and producing cheap goods at high volumes, which come at the cost of exploitation of natural resources and labor alike.
Top-down policies often neglect to consider the realities of those lower in the hierarchy, who make up a majority of the American population and who are most likely to face realities of climate change despite contributing the least to global fossil fuel emissions. Environmental policies have been historically lenient with corporations, like oil giants who are the main drivers of climate change, because of their enormous contributions to the American fossil-fuel dependent economy. The system functions so that the average person feels powerless in the fight for climate justice as they confront the supremacy of governments and corporate power.
A solution, however, may lie in the recent tide of unionization activity among environmental organizations. Nonprofit groups, like the Sunrise Movement, voting in favor of unionizing their workplaces shows a promising development in the amplification of voices fighting for our planet. Environmental issues, ultimately, cannot be untied from the issues of working-class people. Labor is uniquely positioned to tie these overarching global concerns with the microcosm of people’s lives, shedding light upon the parallel exploitation of the environment and working class people.
In order to understand why labor movements could be such a powerful tool in working towards climate justice, one must first investigate the root causes of the plight of the planet that stems from humans’ disconnection with it. James McGuffey, a lecturer in the Department of Community Development and Applied Economics at the University of Vermont (UVM), examines the concept of “alienation” in his work to answer this question. Alienation can be understood as a state of being isolated or disconnected, and this shows up in a number of different sociocultural outcomes. McGuffey sees alienation as “a lack of reflection on relationships and understanding of our relationship and connectedness to others to other things, to other persons, and to our climate.”
He discusses how the western capitalist obsession with efficiency purposefully exploits and isolates the worker. “The challenge is to better understand our potential relationships with one another… [and] with the environments we interact with. The isolating mechanisms of alienation exemplified by the assembly line and mass production...eliminate the sense in which somebody can connect from the work to something later down the line.” As the climate crisis gains momentum, the reality of workplace structure has profound implications on the planet and the working class.
Corporations are instrumental in detaching people not just from collaboration with each other but also from the environmental ramifications of their actions “downstream.” McGuffey points out that “we live in a world where we're so interested in defining our differences, and living by those as opposed to finding our common ground when it comes to the environment.” He warns that “alienation needs to be mediated and moderated” and supports the idea that labor unions could be the “social collective space for discussion” that bridges the gap in finding common ground and establishing a shared class struggle.
My brother, Ryan Lentini, is part of a team unionizing his workplace at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles. He believes labor is a powerful tool because of its ability to build community beginning in one of the most familiar spheres of life— the workplace. Unionization allows for workers to “bargain for the common good,” a mode of building laborer power and representation by demanding a seat at the table. Lentini refers back to Marx in conversation, saying that “[labor] joins people together in a class struggle. It is important for people to enter into a struggle that is founded on the basis of a shared class identity.” Similar to McGuffey, he sees workplace organizing as a radical opposition to a pervasive American individualistic culture that prevents communication between communities and disconnects political figures from the will of people.
Lentini is critical of capitalism and its upholding of the destructive systems that have caused the climate crisis and he sees the labor movement as a way to translate the fight for climate justice on a global scale. “The only thing that can truly challenge [the capitalist system] at the end of the day is a system which challenges the flow of capital or the way that capitalism is administered and administrated.” This change ultimately, he believes, will create a system that respects the dignity and value of every human life. By contrast, under the current capitalist system, human lives are calculations in determining who, where, and what is expendable. Lentini acknowledges the hesitancy many have in adopting these ideas that challenge the status quo. “So many people write off left-wing change as being utopian—or they're afraid of change—that people would much rather go with what they know.” But what if “what we know'' is the very system that is destroying our planet?
Like many young people, Lentini is hopeful about the recent unionization vote at Sunrise and how this affects the viability of policies like the Green New Deal (GND) and the shift towards redistributed power. In contrast to the ambiguous voluntary commitment of international treaties like the Kyoto Protocol and the Climate Accords, the GND proposes a radical suite of policies advancing economic and environmental justice on the ground. Lentini tells me that he thinks “the messaging and the idea of the Green New Deal is hugely important. It connects the environmental movement to a much older movement for organized labor.” He sees Sunrise’s unionization, coming from the very organization that helped conceive the idea of the GND, as evidence that workers are trying to live up to the ideals that their organizations are putting forth. Workers are fighting not just for the right to live with equitable wages, but are also using organized labor and its power to make sure that institutions live up to their creed.
Brian Tokar, who currently serves as a lecturer in the environmental program at UVM and on the board of an independent organization called the Institute for Social Ecology, discusses the shared values of the pairing between unions and environmental movements. He states, “the concept of union organizing and environmental issues is always strangely kind of pitted against each other as if their messages are at odds. I think it's only a quite recent development that people are realizing they actually share a lot of the same values and core messages.”
Tokar points out the systemic interconnectedness of problems in this common struggle, discussing “the ways in which the whole social and economic system, the drive toward profit, the drive toward consumption for the sake of consumption that...ultimately works to the detriment of almost everybody.” The two movements share common goals that are played out in the “just transition paradigm,” which seeks to transition away from a fossil fuel economy to a clean energy one while integrating ethical labor practices. The value in unionizing a nonprofit workplace, for example, does not just involve the expansion of fair wages and labor rights; rather, it extends to the creation of a holistically safer and healthier world at large.
Abby Mnookin, of 350Vermont, witnesses the power of nonprofit action in her workplace and speaks about the potential and importance of redistributing power in the nonprofit sector. She points out the flaws in the streamlined model of top-down organization: “In some ways, it's easier to just have one person telling other people what to do...it's more streamlined and more efficient in some ways, but I think it's misleadingly efficient.” Mnookin emphasizes that decisions made with only higher-up actors instead of including community voices are not likely to last in the long-term.
Part of her organization’s initiative is to address the environmental and human exploitation that stem from capitalism and systemic inequality—“extractive racialized capitalism,” as she calls it. “The history of colonization, brutalization, genocide, and slavery is all wrapped up in the destruction of the land as well and the pollution of the air and water.” She states that it is important to acknowledge those intersections of the exploitation of workers running in parallel to the exploitation of the earth. Mnookin’s answer to this problem is rooted in achieving consciousness around collective liberation and shared struggle. “We can't be individuals pitted against each other in this struggle. [Justice] is not going to be possible if we're staying separate and individualized.”
The march towards economic justice and climate justice will be a long and painful one. But we cannot expect to achieve one without fighting for the other. For too long, environmental issues have been disconnected from the needs and realities of working class issues, but labor organizing presents a powerful platform for advancing this shared liberation. As the modern proverb in union circles goes, “you either have a seat at the table or you're on the menu.”
