This week I have decided to slot in this important and urgent topic; originally my plan was to post on the companies Vestas and Siemens, their fallen share prices, and how this could affect workers – so watch this space, if you are interested in this topic. The reason for making the thematic change is that during the last few days two leading diversity scholars in management studies, one from the UK, one from mainland Europe, have asked me what was the relationship between the two, climate change and diversity. There is also a near absence of scholars at management and employment relations conferences and in textbooks that, even marginally, deal with climate change and ‘green jobs’. This is a symptom of management and employment relations scholars either lagging behind, being too few, or being not as prominent in their engagement with climate change compared to those of other disciplines. Management, employment relations, and diversity scholars need to engage with climate change as climate change will transform our societies regardless of societies tackling it or not, but most certainly with very different outcomes.
There are of course some notable exceptions to this lack of attention to climate change by management and employment relations scholars. To name just a few, Carla Lipsig Mummé and her team in Canada and collaborators in Europe who study the Just Transition and do work together with trade unions on this topic. Notable is also the work by Linda Clarke and collaborators in the UK on skill formation in the European home insulation industry. Linda and Carla have recently edited a volume of the European Journal of Industrial Relations on ‘Green Jobs’ in the broadest sense of the term. And there is the seminal edited volume by Nora Rätzel and David Uzzell on ‘Trade Unions in the Green Economy’, which gives voice to a variety of writers from the global north and south, who present and discuss trade unions’ and the various labour movements’ engagement with climate change. See also Heiner Dribbusch’s work on the German trade union IG Metall and its organising of the solar and wind power industries in Germany.
More broadly there is some scholarly an engagement with how public policy can manage the industrial transition required by a move to a low carbon economy and society with the aim to mitigate the negative effects on regions that have strong polluting industries, see for example the work by Béla Galgóczi from the European Trade Union Institute (ETUI) on the German Ruhr coal district. And of course, international organisations such as the ILO, the IEA, and governments have engaged with the topic, e.g. the European Union and more recently and notably the US (see previous post).
From the above it is obvious that the engagement from a management and employment relations perspective with climate change has largely focussed on trade union work and industrial policy. But what are the diversity issues at stake in the context of climate change and the low carbon transition? The issues are manifold and I will come to this in a moment, after introducing diversity studies very briefly and superficially for those unfamiliar with this area.
Diversity studies – what differences?
Diversity within management studies is a wide-ranging field, but its common denominator is the interest in differences among people, and depending on the perspective authors take, their impact on organisational or societal performance or their impact on individual and group outcomes. In other words, there is a distinction between two foci, a managerialist or functionalist one and a critical one, which is exploring the theme from a social justice perspective, hence takes interest in equality and inequality, inclusion and exclusion.
The demographic differences most commonly taken into account in diversity studies are those related to social characteristics protected by law against discrimination in many countries in the world: sex, race, gender identity, age, disability, faith and belief, parenthood, sexual orientation, and civil status. And another important social characteristic – sometimes but rarely considered by anti-discrimination policy, is class. Class is a person’s socio-economic status within the hierarchy of social and economic organisation. For example, the UK’s Office of National Statistics collects data on seven of these hierarchy strata, ranging from people who have been out of work for a long period of time or have never worked at the bottom to higher managerial, professional and administrative professions at the top. (In day-to-day conversations, people tend focus more on the distinction between working and middle (and occasionally the upper) classes.)
The class distinction in official national statistics refers to people within one country. But of course, in terms of climate change, which is a global phenomenon, global diversity needs to be taken into account, as well as saliently geographic differences that make some parts of the world more vulnerable to the effects of climate change than others, but also differences in wealth distribution, political stability, and access to resources across the world.
The legacy of colonialism and imperialism has left the global north and south deeply divided in terms of socio-economic outcomes but also keeps shaping identities and power relationships between what we like to think of as sovereign countries. In sum differences between individuals and social groups have historically been instrumentalised in shaping power relationships within nations and across the globe, and have led to socio-economic divides that lead to inclusion of some and exclusion of many from access to resources and political participation, with an impact on their individual and collective life chances and choices (see for example the work of Geraldine Healy and also Barbara Samaluk on this).
Having laid out management and employment relation’s currently limited focus on climate change and having described the basic issues and definitions at the heart of diversity studies, I will outline some of the issues where diversity studies with a focus on social justice and the interest in climate change come together (and this is also true for activism and academic interest).
The transnational perspective
Looking first of all at the global level, there are two important injustices related to colonial and imperial history and the global organisation of production. First, many of the poorest countries in the world, with the least financial resources to tackle climate change, will be those who will be disproportionally affected by climate change due to their geography and location. Geographic and locational disadvantages, e.g. climate zone and level above sea, will be exacerbated by poverty and the lack of global visibility. For example, some has been written about how Hurricane Katrina affected poor communities in the South of the US, but near to nothing has been written internationally about how it affected poor communities in Guatemala, Mexico, Nicaragua, Honduras and Ecuador, thus countries with far less resources and global attention than the US.
Second, the global organisation of production, as it is currently, means that most of industrial production takes place outside of the ‘post-industrial’ West, where, paradoxically, most of the consumption of industrially produced goods takes place. Hence, the West exports its carbon footprint, the environmental pollution that is the by-product of production, to poorer countries.
There is another related issue, which is the discussion of development of climate targets. Industrial policies for the low carbon transition and how rich countries, which have produced most of the industrial pollution and emissions in the past, will help poorer countries to develop wealth, but also to transition to lower carbon industries and energy sectors. This discussion is well underway and will of course be continued during the COP26 meeting in November this year, where countries across the world will aim to reach a new climate agreement.
Also there is the potentially perverse effect that climate reduction targets might have transnationally, when countries differ in terms of environmental regulation, e.g. in rates for carbon taxes for companies. Companies that have production segments with high levels of carbon emissions, might just offshore these production segments to countries with more lenient regulation regarding emissions. And this of course, will affect local workers, labour markets and populations in both, the abandoned and receiving, locations.
My last point with a more transnational perspective is that climate change is also prone to increase diversity of societies and hence exacerbate tensions, e.g. racial discrimination, but has also potential for societal development, e.g. expanding our ways of life and horizons. As climate in different parts of the world changes and becomes more extreme, the number of ‘climate refugees’ will increase in parts of the world that are safer in terms of climate or better equipped to deal with extreme weather phenomena such as hurricanes, floods, and draughts.
Green Jobs
Turning now to unjust effects that may or do already occur in labour markets and within societies. For now, when I refer to green jobs, I mean those jobs that are created in order to replace jobs that are relatively contributing to more emissions in the production process or with their production outcomes. For example, following this definition (and largely simplifying as I am not taking into account the entire supply chain), if a job is created in the electrical vehicles industry and replaces a job in the combustion engine industry, then this is a green job. Equally, jobs in the wind turbine and solar panel manufacturing industry that replace jobs in the extractive industries (oil, gas, and coal) are green jobs.
Just a side note on nuclear power. I am leaving nuclear power out of the discussion in this post for two reason: it is a polluting industry, it is unsafe in the longterm, and it relies on energy intensive extraction – see for example Naomi Klein’s discussion on this in her book ‘This changes everything’ –, but nevertheless, it is counted as a low carbon alternative by some countries, for example the UK.
The definition of ‘green jobs’ used in this post hence is notwithstanding the fact that all three, electrical vehicle, wind turbine, and solar panel production still require extraction of raw materials (which is highly polluting) and are high in carbon emissions in the component production process. We also need into account that, relatively seen to demand, there are limited alternatives to high emissions currently. Renewable energy is still scarce at the moment, if we take into account the total need of global industrial production (there is an interesting story on this on the company Google’s attempt to cover its energy needs with renewable energy only, see podcast on FT tech tonic from November 2019), and the still developing carbon capture technologies.
Having defined green jobs, it is notable that, if consumption patterns in society do not change completely over this decade, most of industrial production will not simply disappear but change its energy supply to low carbon technologies, such as wind and solar power. This changes jobs of workers in the energy technology industry and wider technology industry, services and maintenance, and hence leads to massive increases in ‘green jobs’.
How green jobs affect people differently
One first issue is to look at how the changes of jobs in industries affect gender relations. Research has shown that job creation, in particular, manual ‘green’ jobs in the renewables industry particularly benefits men and not women in the low and medium skilled strata of the labour market. In my own research interviewees anecdotally mentioned however that women with higher education engineering degrees progressed much easier in the emerging renewable energy technology industries as compared to more traditional sectors such as automotive. Others have told me that the emerging green sectors offer more often flexible working time arrangements than traditional sectors for highly skilled positions and therefore are more attractive to women. Some reports have also shown less discrepancies in terms of pay between men and women in these new sectors.
In terms of vocational skills training, one director of a wind turbine engineering school stated that the completion of her vocational degree by one woman among the nine men on the programme was a huge success, whilst another woman had ‘naturally’ dropped out, as she didn’t like the work climate and the physicality of the job. One could however argue that this unequal increase in ‘green’ jobs and skills for men, is not that unfair in the bigger picture as the transition from polluting industries to less polluting and low carbon ways of production also disproportionately creates job losses among men, as also there men represent the bulk of the workforce. This shows that the study of the question of the effect of ‘green job creation’ on gender has potential at both the level of the workplace and the wider labour market.
Industrial workplaces that I have visited in Germany not only had a predominantly male workforce, but interviewees also reported racist incidents that were intertwined with status differences between permanent and temporary workers. What is more, at one site a production worker told me about ripe misogyny towards the very few female production workers. Thus, not only gender but also racial discrimination in the context of ‘green jobs’ could be questions to be addressed by diversity and employment relations researchers. In the end, even if they contribute relatively more to preserving the planet, on all accounts green jobs don’t seem to be that much more progressive than traditional industries.
Furthermore in the green transition, there is the question how specific workers can adapt regarding required skills and geographic mobility. In this context, a variety of groups might become marginalised because of potential barriers such as age, disability, and parenthood just to name a few. It is also of interest how policy makers can help overcoming difficulties related to such barriers by providing additional support and resources.
Consumption and socio-economic differences
Yet another question in the area of gender diversity, but also age, and the low carbon transition is the question of consumption patterns in families with an impact of broader socio-economic trends. Who decides to consume what, how, and based on what rationale? Here is also a link to intergenerational conflicts, intergenerational justice but also class, as exemplified by the largely middleclass Friday’s for Future movement of the past few years and more recently by the Constitutional Courts verdicts on the German Government’s climate targets.
Staying with the topic of consumption patterns and linking it to class. It has been shown that high earners have also higher carbon footprints, in other words their consumption patterns generate higher emission levels. This could be tackled by carbon taxes, but the outcomes of this penalise poorer workers, with less disposable income, relatively more. This understandably, from a social justice perspective, has led to social unrests, as they were taking shape in the ‘yellow vests’ movement in France in the autumn of 2018 and beyond. This shows that diversity and socio-economic inequality is a very important, politically salient area of study within the broader interest of tackling climate change.
Other relatively more penalising effects on people with lower incomes might come from the use of market mechanisms to deliver green energy technology expansion, such as the competitive tenders of seabed leases for offshore windfarms in the UK. As the Financial Times reported this year in February, bids for seabed space to construct windfarms have hiked high, pricing out of the market smaller, earlier renewable energy investors due to the increasing entry of former fossil fuel giants such as BP and Total, who due to their size are able to spend a lot more, also because they have access to cheaper capital. The costs incurred by the high bidding developers will with strong probability end up as a rise in electricity prices on consumer bills, which again penalises poorer consumers relatively more strongly. In order to avoid this kind of collaterals of markets and concentration of private sector capital, many within the green scene advocate nationalisation of the electricity generation and supply industry. But large scale nationalisation is not the only system level solution being discussed in the low carbon transition arena.
What ‘green’ growth paradigm, if any?
Most of the above has focussed on changes in production and consumption while not touching on the overall ‘growth’ paradigm within which much of the world operates. Be it in capitalist or (more) socialist economic systems, the mainstream growth perspective has stayed widely unchallenged among politicians and the wider populations. In brief, the growth perspective advocates for the growth of gross domestic product (GDP), and either a trickle-down effect of wealth from richer to poorer people in liberally inclined countries or redistribution of the generated wealth in more socially inclined countries.
Piketty’s seminal book ‘Capital in the 21stcentury’ on inequality in Europe on the US since the 18thcentury has shown that growth and an increase in equality across societies after the two world wars of the 20thcentury, were due to very specific phenomena (high inflation, destruction of most of industry, political endeavours to create more economically equal societies) as discussed in Lucas Chancel’s monograph ‘Unsustainable Inequalities. Social Justice and the Environment’ (published by Harvard University Press, 2020). And others, for example Herman Daly in the 1970s (with a second edition of his essay collection in the early 1990s), and Tim Jackson in the 2000s (basing much of his theoretical developments on Daly’s seminal work), have shown that increasing equality during the post-war period was based on never before seen increases in the extraction of fossil fuels during the era of Keynesian economic policies, thus policies that sponsored industries but also strengthened workers’ rights and wages.
Herman Daly writes about a class compromise from after World War two until the 1970s between working class and capital, which happened to the detriment of the class of landowners. The field of employment relations does not even consider landowners as a relevant class in itself, whose interest would be, according to Daly, in preserving the natural environment.
Notably levels of fossil fuel extraction have grown less steeply during the following era of Neoliberalism, partly due to the OPEC drastically increasing oil prices, partly due to the end of political support for some polluting industries, for example coal in the UK. Nevertheless, experts state that given their environmentally damaging externalities, fossil fuels are still too cheap. Instead of continued growth beyond a certain level, Daly advocates for a steady state in which material use (throughput) is adjusted to the ability of the planet and ecosystem to recover used resources and process waste. And he proposes a mix of market mechanisms and absolute regulations for achieving this.
It is still questionable if all of the world’s energy demands can be met safely by renewable energies, such as wind and solar. Other alternative energy sources such as the use of water power and biofuels can have very strong negative impacts on the poorer and rural populations, in particular, by displacing communities when building dams and by price hikes for food as biofuel plantations outcompete nutritional commodities for agricultural space.
Thus, there is a strong argument to not changing only where our (increasingly electrical) energy comes from, but also to reduce its consumption drastically. And diversity studies, employment relations and management studies should be at the forefront of exploring the effects on social organisation, the various parts of the workforce, population more widely, within this massive socio-economic shif