We know that the points of convergence between the labor and the climate movements are immense, but that several challenges lie ahead of us. It is nevertheless of extreme importance and urgency to cut emissions and do so by drawing on plans that are created by the workers and communities and in regard to their interests and needs.
Often, we do know what work needs to be carried out in order to cut emissions, but workers are being left out of the discussion and climate science is being disregarded. We need to build a movement that not only is capable of setting its own program, but that has the power to implement it.
As so, we are bringing together people from all around the world, and bringing together the labor and climate movements to discuss how we win a program that can allow us to stop climate collapse. Join us for two days of thematic sessions about the strategies, technical and social perspectives, and challenges we face in building Climate Jobs Campaigns.
Invited speakers:
Negrai Adve;
Max Ajl;
Chris Baugh;
Jeremy Brecher;
Leonor Canadas;
Claire Cohen;
Rehad Desai;
Patricia De Marco;
Suzanne Jeffries;
Paul Le Blanc;
Josua Mata;
Suda Sim Meriç;
Jonathan Neale;
Andreas Yetterstad
Schedule
All the sessions will be recorded and available online. Sessions will be 1 hour and 30 minutes and will be composed of a introduction by the invited speakers and a workshop space between the participants.
Saturday, September 17
12:00 GMT [5 pm ET] – General Session: Strategic Orientation
14:00 GMT [7 pm ET] – Special Sessions
1) Building Climate Jobs Movements
2) Food and Farming
16.00 GMT [11 pm ET] – Special Sessions
1) Ecofeminism
2) Racism and Refugees
Sunday, September 18
12.00 GMT [5 pm ET] – General Session: Workers in the Fossil Fuel industry
14.00 GMT [7 pm ET] – Special Sessions
1) Cutting Emissions
2) Resilience
16.00 GMT [11 pm ET] – General Session: Summing Up
The Global Climate Jobs Network is organising an online international conference Friday June 3 to Sunday June 5, 2022. This will be online to make it easy for activists and organisations to participate from all over the world.
Themes
The theme is Climate Jobs, Climate Crisis and Green New Deals. But we are open to sessions on related topics linked to community, union and other climate justice struggles. If you are not sure if your topic would fit, send it anyway and we can chat it over.
Who
Our Global Climate Jobs Network will be coordinating the conference. But we want organisations to propose and present your own sessions.
We are looking for sessions from different organisations, from national unions to local branches, from international networks to national campaigns. From environmental and climate justice community campaigns to local Fridays for the Future groups, student unions, social movements, feminist and LGBT groups, faith groups, farmers and fisherfolk organisations and Green New Deal campaigns and from groups of scientists and engineers.
We especially want to provide a platform for those fighting for climate justice now and we particularly want to hear about the struggles of the peoples of Africa, Asia and Latin America.
How
You can run a session based on your own organisation or you can put forward speakers and we will link them up with speakers from other organisations on similar themes or from the same country.
We also want to encourage artistic sessions using, music, film, and anything that tells your story and makes the event more like an online festival of resistance, ideas and solidarity.
You can propose sessions in any language, and you can propose two sessions in different languages.
We will timetable all the sessions and try to arrange them so you can follow different themes.
Sessions will last 75 minutes. We suggest no more than three speakers, and at least half of the time is taken up by contributions from the audience and in breakout groups. If you have three speakers, please have at least one be a woman. If you cannot find an appropriate woman speaker, please write to us and we will try to put you in touch with someone.
What’s Next
To propose a session or a speaker, to ask a question or talk to someone on the organising committee, please write to: Climatejobs2022@aol.com
Sponsoring Groups (list in formation):
Global Climate Jobs Network
Climaximo (Portugal)
ScotE3 (Employment, Energy and Environment – trade union and environmental activists in Scotland)
Review of African Political Economy
AIDC (Alternative Information and Development Centre – South Africa)
Million Climate Jobs Campaign (South Africa)
Pittsburgh Green New Deal (USA)
SENTRO (Sentro ng mga Nagkakaisa at Progresibong Manggagawa – labour federation in Philippines)
Alongside our friends from the Portuguese Climate Jobs campaign Climaximo , and a host of other organisations, Scot.E3 is supporting the Fifth International Ecosocialist Encounters conference which takes place in Lisbon from 21st to 23rd January 2022.
Find out more on the conference website – but here’s the brief description.
The climate crisis is worsening before our eyes at an accelerating pace.
While the flames of overwhelming fires consume our earth, more and more people are getting expelled from their lands so that extractive and emissions increasing projects can take place, pushing us towards the abyss of climate chaos. As heat waves are getting more intense all around the world, increasingly more people are left in unemployment and precariousness due to the escalating economic and social crisis that the capitalist management of the pandemic worsened. As the seas rise and climate catastrophes such as violent storms, droughts and hurricanes threaten even more populations, the violence towards the already marginalized bodies of our societies increases and access to essential services, such as housing, energy, food, health and water keeps being denied, giving place to the accumulation of profit instead of securing life.
The newest IPCC report confirms what we already knew: in less than two decades we will reach the 1.5ºC temperature limit of global warming whereupon the worst climate phenomena become even more uncontrollable, unless we take urgent and drastic action now.
Capitalist elites keep applying the same profit accumulation mechanisms that have led us here in the first place, creating the illusion that something is being done to fight the climate crisis while taking advantage of all these crisis as new opportunities to amplify profit, militarize and privatize essential life services.
We did not create this scenario nor did we choose to be living in the major civilizational crisis of our times, but we do have the responsibility to stop the climate crisis, leaving no one behind.
If decades of worsening climate, economic and social crisis created by capitalist business as usual have taught us anything, it is that we ourselves have to assume the political and social mission of reaching climate and social justice on the deadline defined by the climate science.
Since 2014, ecosocialists, ecofeminists, peasants, trade unionists, several social movements and political organizations have been gathering on the international ecosocialist encounters to collectively imagine and set in motion an ecosocialist alternative to the abyss towards which the capitalism and climate collapse push us. In 2018, we started from the understanding of ecosocialism as a critical political theory and practice, which sets itself the joint task of dismantling capitalism, productivism and inequality, and constructing the alternative that can produce ecosocial justice. It does so by addressing at the same time the crucial issues of the purpose of economy and work, of production and social reproduction, the ownership of the means of production, the sharing of essential commons and solidar democratic decision-making. At the same time, it bears in mind the restoration of our wounded ecosystems.
In 2022, on the 5th International Ecosocialist Encounters, we start from all this understandings to seek more answers and collectively built a stronger international articulation, capable of fighting the major crisis of our times.
Together we will envision the ecosocialist world we need, starting to shape with which tools and strategies we can achieve it.
Scot.E3 is part of the Free Our City campaign which launches with a conference on 19th September. We’re demandinga world-class, fully-integrated and accessible public transport network for Glasgow – free at the point of use.
Over the last few years hundreds of forward-thinking cities across the world – from Kansas to Calais – are upgrading their public transport networks and making them free for everyone to use. This radical policy is a necessary one: to address the climate emergency and gross inequalities in our society.Free public transport benefits everyone, but especially those living on poverty pay or benefits, young people, women, black and ethnic minorities – who all rely on public transport more. In a city like Glasgow with such low car-ownership (49% of households), free public transport would have a dramatic effect in reducing social isolation and lifting people out of poverty.
Last year, Glasgow City Council agreed the ambitious target to reduce the city’s emissions to net-zero by 2030, and agreed to undertake a ‘formal assessment of the potential for making the transition to a public transport system that is free to use’.
The Free Our City coalition has been founded to ensure this ‘assessment’ becomes action, and that this policy becomes a reality sooner, rather than later. We don’t have time to waste. Reliance on private cars is the main cause of carbon emissions and toxic air pollution in our city.In order to meet the 2030 target, car mileage will have to be cut by as much as 60% in the next ten years [1]. We need to provide universal and comprehensive active travel and public transport networks, so that everyone can fully participate in the social and economic life of our city without need or aspiration to own a car.
Free public transport also has economic benefits which far outweigh the cost of running it – returning £1.70 to the economy for every £1 spent, [2] and it can pay for itself in increased tax receipts. But it is only practical and cost-effective to deliver with full public control of the whole public transport network [3]. We must therefore use all new powers available in the Transport Act 2019 to re-regulate our bus network (under ‘franchising’) and set up a publicly-owned bus company for Greater Glasgow to take over routes and reconnect the communities left stranded by private bus company cuts.
Why now?
The coronavirus crisis has proved that public transport is an essential public service to get our keyworkers to their jobs. It has also laid bare the absurdities of running our public transport on a for-profit basis. The need to maximise profits from fares is not compatible with current social distancing guidance. When services were reduced during lockdown, they ended up costing us more to run. The Scottish Government has already bailed-out failing private bus companies by more than £300 million. This should be an opportunity to buy back our buses, so that they can be run in the public good for the long term.
There are many ways to improve the safety of our public transport and public control is central to them all. If we own and run our own buses, then we control the safety for staff and passengers. We can improve pay, conditions and training for staff. And we can deliver far more frequent and reliable services for passengers to reduce overcrowding, and better plan the routes to speed-up journey times and minimise the need to change. We can upgrade the fleet to zero-emissions electric buses and make them more spacious, with air-conditioning and multiple entrances and exits [4]. Upgrading the fleet of Glasgow buses can be an opportunity to save Alexander Dennis, the world-leading bus production company based at Larbert, which is currently threatening to make 650 workers redundant because orders have slowed down through the coronavirus pandemic [5].
We need to use this crisis as an opportunity to build back a far better public transport network, which actually serves our needs and helps us meet the many challenges of the decade ahead. Once the pandemic has passed, we will be faced with a massive economic crisis and a climate emergency that is not going away.[
Building a world-class, fully-integrated and accessible public transport network – free at the point of use – will provide the thousands of high quality, ready to go green jobs that we’ll urgently need for our city to make a just and green recovery [6].
Imagine if buses were free?
The Free Our City coalition is launching with a conference “Imagine if buses were free?” on Saturday 19th September. Speakers from other cities which have achieved free public transport will describe how their system works. We will discuss in break-out groups what we need in Greater Glasgow, and how we move forward to achieve it. The conference will be open to all, welcoming representatives of community organisations across Greater Glasgow and interested individuals to share in the discussion. Register for the conference on Eventbrite. Promote the conference by sharing the Facebook Event and the Event Tweet .
[1] During the crisis, publicly-controlled buses in London were made free so that passengers did not need to make contact with the driver to pay fares.
[2] By the end of 2020, as many as 1 in 3 young Scots could be unemployed as a result of the coronavirus crisis.
One of the workshop streams at the Scot.E3 conference in November was devoted to housing. This report is from Mike Downham who was one of the facilitators of the discussion.
Housing in Scotland is a disgrace – from the Muirhead tower blocks to new-build. A participant from Hungary, who has been in Glasgow for a year or so and has had extreme difficulties in finding somewhere to live and which is affordable to heat, said that Scotland’s housing compares very badly with Hungary’s, which at least has thick walls. “You’ve got to do something about it”.
Student housing. The Universities are supplying student housing which is unaffordable except for wealthy students, mostly from the Far East, and make it difficult for most students to find less expensive accommodation. There has been a lot of public criticism about students having such high quality housing, while many citizens are homeless. But the reality is that the majority of students have huge difficulties in finding housing they can afford to rent and heat. It’s not unusual for them to end up on someone else’s sofa.
Commodification of housing since 1980 is at the root of the housing crisis in Scotland. Housing policy has been primarily aimed at growing the national economy, instead of housing being recognised as a human right.
What we can do together towards a just transition in Scotland’s Housing:
Demand that Councils bring building standards up to passive-house specifications and replace building control jobs lost in the name of austerity, without which new housing can’t be adequately inspected. These changes are perfectly feasible for Councils.
Put pressure on the Scottish Government to ensure that the new Scottish Investment Bank will direct enough funding to build the new houses needed (this is urgent – the Scottish Investment Bank Bill is going through parliament now).
Put pressure on Pension Funds to invest in housing.
Support grass-roots protest as demonstrated by Living Rent’s support for Muirhouse tenants, which started with door-knocking to get all tenants’ views.
Suggest to XR that they target some of their direct action on grass-roots projects such as Muirhouse
Suggest that grass-roots projects such as Muirhouse deliver their demands to the COP 26 – to both the formal and the alternative meetings.
Keep in our sites the eventual objective of a National Housing Company through which communities will choose the type of housing, local facilities and green species they need
Climate is just one part of the wider argument – so the challenge for the Climate Movement is to build links with all other movements concerned with social injustice.
“We need to close this down” – just as we would have no hesitation in doing if there was a proposal to build an asbestos factory at the end of our street. Though this was said in respect of the climate polluters, the fact that it was said in a discussion on Housing, Health and Fuel Poverty suggests that it should be our approach to all forms of social and planetary injustice.
The final speaker in the session on climate jobs was Clara Paillard. Clara is President of the PCS Union’s Culture section, a member of Red Green Labour and active in the Campaign Against Climate Change.
The afternoon of the conference began with a plenary session on Climate Jobs. Eurig Scandrett, representing UCU Scotland, was the first of three speakers.
Mary, who is Head of Campaigns at Friends of the Earth Scotland followed on from Simon Pirani. In her contribution she talked about the Scottish context and the need to mobilise for COP26 when it’s held in Glasgow in 2020. You can watch the video of her speaking here.
In the second plenary session of the conference Simon Pirani and Mary Church reflected on the growth of the climate movement and the challenges we face. This post includes video of most of Simon’s contribution. He began by reflecting on the connections between some of the struggles for just transition highlighted in the REEL News films and the onslaught on working class communities that took place in the Miner’s Strike of 1984/5. Miners were fighting for their communities and lives and livelihoods. He argued that in the context of climate crisis we are defending communities no less than we were in 1984/1985.
Simon was clear that there is a still an argument to win. Some trade unionists suggest that jobs and climate action are in opposition. He argued that this a false choice – without system change we face disaster on an unimaginable scale – our fight is for effective action and social justice. Each depends on the other.
Employment, Energy and Environment 