Greener trade unions?
Recent reports are highlighting the growing involvement of the trade union movement in driving a greener economy. In a reversal of traditional allegiances, the union movement is growing more vocal in holding the government to account for the promised delivery of green jobs in the economy.
Following the TUC Congress earlier in the year, at which the Green Alliance report “Working on Change” was published by, Brendan Barber, TUC General Secretary, commented “This year’s Congress has called for a really profound shift in economic policy priorities to meet the challenges of a completely new economic era.”
Whereas the report might, cynically, be viewed as a means of raising a positive profile for the unions, the contributions made by various well known trade union leaders, and the substance of the content of the report, convincingly assure the reader that the trade unions, if not the organisations within which their members are employed, ‘get it’; they understand that the economy we work in today bears little resemblance to that in which most us will be employed in the near future, relatively speaking, and they are responding, pro-actively, to the challenge.
If all is really what it appears to be, then any government that follows the incumbent into power in 2010 had better beware; the self-serving militancy of the 1980s may well be replaced by a greener, and more appropriate, form of militancy which we shall doubtless see echoed at the Climate Change Conference this month as placard bearers from across the continent descend on Copenhagen to make the delegates accountable for their time.
What is simultaneously encouraging as well as disappointing is that the trade unions appear to clearly understand the threats and opportunities in a low carbon economy and are preparing for the challenge whilst many of the globe’s larger organisations and, more disappointing still, the vast majority of world governments are still mired in platitudes and power plays, all the while burning, at an alarming rate, fast-diminishing carbon resource and allowing low carbon energy providers to wither and die by the roadside not because these companies are not providing economically viable energy solutions, but because both governments and corporations are unwilling, or incapable, of taking even a medium term view.
So, though it shocks me to say it, I may be fast coming to a point where I welcome the resurgence of trade union activism since, though it has taken a few decades for them to arrive at this point, they appear to have re-discovered their raison d’etre; to protect the long term futures of their members, something they will only do if they add their voice to growing cacophony of noise from scientists and a small number of well thought of economists who are all saying that the processes that got us to where we are today will not sustain us into the future.
The unions appear to have grown up and become educated; time for ‘the bosses’ to do the same?
