CLIMATE CHANGE: A WORKERS' ISSUE

As school students and other young people spearhead global strikes and direct action against the planet-threatening climate crisis, they have appealed to workers to join them in 'a global general strike'. 

This appeal is an extremely important and welcome step forward; a glimmering of recognition by young people too young to have experienced work or trade unionism that the organised workers' movement is critical to winning meaningful action against global warming. And an important riposte to the utterly false and dangerous idea that it's older people who are to blame for the climate crisis.

As we've said before, the climate crisis is not a generational issue, it's a class issue.  

Older or middle-aged workers haven't polluted the planet. Profit-crazed capitalists have. 

For over 200 years they've plundered the planet and exploited its people for carbon, to fuel their accumulation of private profit. 
Recent reports confirm that it's the likes of BP and Shell - financed by the big banks - who are the biggest polluters. 
Another reveals the biggest 100 companies on earth account for 71% of carbon emissions. 

Trade Union Issue

As the recent TUC Congress unanimously agreed, climate is a trade union issue. The radical changes needed to tackle the impending disaster - with scientists giving us a mere 12 years to stop irreversible damage to the planet - require the active, urgent, collective action of workers. 


As the SSP has consistently argued, and TUC Congress reiterated, we need a Just Transition to fossil-free energy, not a punishing programme of job decimation and deprivation of working class communities, as some of the fringes of the environmental movement advocate. And public ownership of all forms of energy and other key sectors of the economy - including transport, housing, shipyards, and banking - is at the very heart of the solution to pollution. 

Public Ownership of Energy 

Policies adopted - unanimously - at the recent TUC Congress recognise this truth. Alongside Motions demanding that 'workers must be at the heart of delivering' a Just Transition, and a green transport system, Congress demanded public ownership of energy and the big banks. As Bakers Union general secretary, Ronnie Draper, said in proposing it:


"Public renewable power is less expensive than private, which not only faces higher interest rates and other costs, but also relies on various subsidies and long-term “power purchase agreements” in order to guarantee profits for investors.
Public ownership not only eliminates those unnecessary costs and provides cheaper power for users, but also allows us to address domestic skills deficits. Under public ownership and a planned approach, we can make use of the skills we have in the present, while we develop the new skills we need for a vibrant, thriving sector in the future."

SSP Members Active on Issue

SSP members in the unions have combined with others to maximise involvement of workers in the Youth Climate Strike week of action. For instance, both as an elected Usdaw national Executive Council member for Scotland, and SSP representative, I've collaborated with union activists in Unison, GMB, PCS, Unite and EIS to establish a Campaign Against Climate Change group in Glasgow. 

Though in its infancy, this group is working to involve workers alongside young people. We recognise that the first task is to engage with workers, explaining the issues, offering alternatives that would enhance workers' lives, rather than pose a threat to jobs and living standards. 
For example, we've discussed the win-win policy of free installation of solar energy in homes, and I advocated the council unions lobby Glasgow city council to take over the bus service being surrendered by First Group, as a baby step towards a full municipal bus service, which in turn should become part of a free public transport service to help combat car pollution. 

Alongside that we have been building for attendance at the demos and rallies on 20 September, for instance during workers' lunchtimes, or using flexitime, or days off, or where possible by clocking off to attend. Unison stewards have negotiated non-victimisation agreements with councils for members who participate.

Answering Workers' Fears 

Likewise, at the September meeting of the Usdaw Executive Council, I got the issue put on our agenda, introduced it, spelling out the key issues from a worker's perspective, and advocated concrete steps by our union - all of which were agreed, unanimously.  That includes appealing to all reps to take part in rallies if possible, encourage members whose shifts allow to join the events, and to stage workplace events where feasible - above all, starting discussions on climate change and alternatives in meetings of members.  

Crucially, we need to overcome the legitimate fears of many workers that what's on offer is the slaughter of jobs and a 'hair-shirt'  existence. That emerged in our very healthy discussion at the Usdaw EC, which our explanation of massive job creation through a Green New Deal, and trade union control of a Just Transition, convinced the entire meeting. And that's in the union primarily organising retail workers; how much more critical it is to have a package of policies to engage, convince and mobilise workers in the fossil-fuel sector, such as North Sea installations.

Class and Climate 

That's precisely where a class-based socialist alternative comes into its own. The public ownership demanded by the TUC would open up the opportunity to redeploy existing workers, reskilling where necessary, as well as a whole new green industrial strategy that could create at least 1.5 million skilled, well-paid, unionized jobs. 


The concrete example of the heroic resistance to closure being staged by the 123 Harland and Wolff shipyard workers in Belfast proves the point.  They are battling for renationalisation to include green energy production, which they've already done as their primary source of work in recent years, to help build equipment for offshore energy. 


Alongside the campaign to end the globalised capitalist lunacy of equipment for the giant £2bn NnG offshore windfarm a few miles from the Fife BiFab yards being built in cheap-labour Indonesia, and then transported 7,000 miles in diesel-belching vessels, this shows how democratic public ownership of all production and distribution of energy supplies could vastly boost jobs and wages, combat fuel poverty, and help clean up our corner of the planet for generations to come. 

System Change - to Socialism 

We urgently need system change to combat climate change. 

Change to a system of democratic public ownership, where the skills of workers are deployed to produce and distribute clean, green energy; build and retrofit homes to the highest environmental standards; offer an integrated, free public transport network that combats both poverty, social isolation and pollution; and uses the vast funds of a state bank to help finance a Green New Deal. 


The power of organised workers - alongside the energy and vision of young people - needs to be mobilised for such a clean, green, and nuclear-free, socialist Scotland. 
The SSP commits to combine with others for that future. 

September 20: WORKERS AND YOUNG PEOPLE UNITE AGAINST THE CAPITALIST POLLUTERS!

Youth climate strike, Sydney, Australia

As we live through the molten heat, thunder and lightning, floods and general climate chaos of recent weeks, new reports on the catastrophic impact of global warming highlight the urgency of action. 

And plans are in motion for the biggest global protest action so far, on 20 September, with striking school students appealing to workers to join them in 'a climate general strike'. 

A new Australian academic study warns of “a high likelihood of human civilisation coming to an end” by 2050!

Even at the less apocalyptic end of the scale, there is widespread agreement that unless the impact of relentless plundering of the planet by the likes of Shell, BP and the banking sector that finances their environmental rampages for profit is reversed, the world's poorest will suffer most – and devastatingly.

Flooding, mudslides, raging fires, homes wiped out, loss of clean water and destruction of farming land are already happening, and could be joined by escalated wars and conflict.

No wonder tens of thousands of young people have decided enough is enough; started the Fridays for Future school strikes; staged bold, eye-catching direct-action protests - and called for a global 'climate general strike' on 20 September. 

That call, that appeal to workers to join the school students’ protests, is a very welcome glimmering of recognition of the potential role and power of collective workers’ action to challenge the climate crisis. 

Harland & Wolff workers demand 'Save Our Shipyard - Renationalise Now'

Harland and Wolff Workers Inspire Others

As 20 September looms, we've had glimpses of that potential power in the land, as groups of workers and their unions take collective action on their own immediate struggles for survival. 

Probably the most dynamic display of the power that needs to be unleashed more generally - with concrete demands that point to solutions - has been the courageous and audacious action by the workers in Belfast's Harland and Wolff shipyard. 
During 1939-45 war production, 35,000 worked there! As part of the deindustrialisation and deskilling of the economy - in favour of cheap-labour, insecure, service sector jobs and fast profits - the yard has been decimated, with a mere 130 now employed there. The last time a ship was built was in 2003. And the current battle is to prevent outright closure.

Save Our Shipyard - Renationalise Now!

Under the privatised ownership of Norwegian Fred Olsen's, these highly skilled workers turned to ship repairs and construction of offshore equipment for wind turbines, oil and gas drilling. But Olsen faces bankruptcy, tried to sell H&W, convinced the workforce a buyer named Flack was the bees’ knees, until he flacked off and left the workers and their families facing closure on 30 July.

Rather than lie down in abject surrender, the workers and their unions - Unite and GMB - staged an occupation of the yard days before the administrator was due to wield the knife, and made a clear, stark demand: Save Our Shipyard - Renationalise Now!

Their fighting action and demands rallied the support of a whole array of other trade unionists and young people.

People Power: ‘Together we become Giants’

This highly visible, militant collective action - with the clear-cut call for the government to take over the yard and save the jobs and skills - won at least a short reprieve from closure.

As UNITE rep Joe Passmore said,

"This is people power, a small step, but we were due to close today if it hadn't been for our action. Not just ours, but the actions of the entire trade union movement which has responded en masse. It shows that when we shout together, somebody has to listen. When we stand together, we become giants." 

Nationalisation would allow diversification and create vastly more jobs

Climate Crisis is a Workers’ Issue

This battle highlights several critical points of general significance: the utter inability of private capitalism to secure jobs and a future for the next generation; the power of organised workers to effect change, because of their role in the economy (in contrast to pleading with remote politicians for solutions); the central role of the working class in the struggle to utterly change the system and thereby protect the environment from the rapacious destruction by profit-hunting capitalist owners, whose only concern is short-term maximisation of profit margins; and the equally pivotal solution of democratic public ownership in order to protect people and planet alike. 

Diversify to Clean Production

Harland and Wolff workers have skills they want to utilise and pass on to the next generation. They are rightly demanding nationalisation to achieve that. 
They have already diversified use of their skills to an extent, but the entirely piecemeal nature and appallingly limited (in fact, declining) rate of investment by governments and big business in clean, renewable energy means the potential for the yard in these fields has been totally untapped, leaving workers looking into the abyss.

They are demanding some of the substantial Royal Navy contracts should go to Belfast, and their decisive action could embarrass Johnson into conceding that. In itself that would be a victory for collective union action - and would buy time to campaign for urgent diversification of production into the likes of marine engineering for offshore energy production, as part of a publicly owned green energy industry. 

Scotland's offshore energy could be a massive source of jobs - if publicly owned

BiFab & the Caley - Cases for Public Ownership

Meantime in Scotland, two groups of workers face devastation that could easily be averted, and transformed into secure, expanded, socially useful production, if the Scottish government had the political ideology and will to take them into public ownership: the BiFab yards in Methil and Burntisland, and the Caley railway workshop in Springburn. 

 

Rally at the Caley - 163 years of tradition wiped out

Workers were in tears of rage and sadness as they rallied at the Caley on the day it shut down, after 163 years of rail manufacturing. That is industrial vandalism, by the capitalist owners since privatisation, and by the SNP government who spurned the unions' calls for nationalisation. 
It could be an integral part of a public rail and transport network, building and repairing rolling stock for a vastly expanded and improved rail service. 
And as the SSP has pioneered and fought for over the years, a fare-free public transport system would slash car use, combat poverty and pollution - a radical and immediate contribution to tackling climate change. An example of workers’ jobs, skills and livelihoods being vastly improved whilst reversing the destruction of the planet wreaked by capitalism.

 

Empty rhetoric about Scotland leading the way on green energy not matched by action

At BiFab, the Fife yards are to be awarded production of a paltry 8 out of the total 54 turbine jackets ordered for the massive, £2bn Neart Na Gaoithe (NnG) offshore wind project, just off the same Fife coast. The promise is of this saving "up to 200 jobs". 
That's 'up to 200' more jobs than would have existed if there hadn't been a vigorous campaign by the unions and local communities. But it’s still an insult; the other 46 jackets will not be built a few miles from the offshore windfarm, but in Indonesia! Built by cheap labour, then shipped across the globe and up the Fife coast by diesel-burning barges. 
So much for the boasts by the Scottish government of Scotland pioneering green energy! 

Public Ownership a Key Solution

Full and democratic public ownership of all forms of energy, transport, construction, shipyards and the banks is at the heart of a solution to pollution.

To have a just transition from fossil fuels to clean green energy, but with guarantees that all the jobs and conditions of today's workers in the energy sector are protected and transferred by agreement with their unions into a green public energy company.

To deploy the skills of workers in the shipyards, railway workshops and others to build the new ferries and the fleets of buses, trains and trams to create a world-class, free, integrated public transport network.

To create 100,000s of well-paid, unionised jobs and apprenticeships in a Green New Deal for the working class. 

To resurrect the social housing sector, building at least 100,000 new homes for rent a year, built to the highest environmental standards, combating fuel poverty and the housing crisis as well as creating vast numbers of decent, fulfilling jobs.

With local authorities, local cooperatives and the Scottish government aided in funding these projects by a state bank, instead of the current scandal of banks helping BP, Shell and other multinationals desecrate the planet for profit.

Free public transport - would cut poverty, isolation, pollution...and create jobs

Local Workers’ Struggles & Socialist Change

These links between local workers’ struggles and the need for socialist change in how the economy is owned and run in order to tackle the climate crisis need to be discussed and popularised in the run up to the 20 September action, and beyond. 

It would be fatal if the courageous young people who have electrified the awareness of the climate emergency did not get the support of workers, young and older. 

It would be disastrous if the young protestors began to blame older workers for a crisis that has been created by a tiny, fabulously rich minority of the population, through the very nature of capitalist production for profit. 

It's the capitalist minority who plundered and polluted the earth, not older workers. It's not a generational issue, it's a class issue!

It's capitalists - Shell, BP, etc - who pollute, not workers of any age 

Action on 20 September

Achieving a genuine general strike on 20 September is a tall order. And it's a demand that should not be light-mindedly thrown around without thinking through the almighty preparations it would take, at workplace level, especially in the teeth of anti-union laws. 

But that should not prevent trade unions organising for maximum solidarity and participation in some forms of protest - armed with some of the policies described above, to help convince working class people that we can be far, far better off by taking drastic measures to tackle climate change - rather than being asked to pay for a crisis we didn't create, through jobs being slaughtered and services slashed. 

Local union organising meetings are being held to discuss practical protest actions. Workplace meetings should be called to discuss the issues and solutions, as well as action. And the UCU union has proposed a Motion to the TUC Congress in early September, calling for a 30-minute strike to be called by the TUC on 20 September. 

Workers and Young People Unite

Young people have lit a fire underneath the backsides of those in power. Workers are beginning to take action in some areas in their own self-defence, in ways that would and should be linked to expansion of 'green' jobs that would help reverse the tsunami of destruction caused by capitalist ownership and production.

The power of the working class, united with the power of protest by young people demanding a future, needs to be wielded to ensure we have a world to live in.

And socialism - collective, sustainable production for the democratically decided needs of people, not profit - is the increasingly urgent need of the hour. 

PUBLIC OWNERSHIP TO PROTECT PEOPLE AND PLANET

Those who deny the urgency of action against climate change are as rare and as ridiculous as members of the Flat Earth Society. A plethora of reports pour out, and millions witness climate-based human disasters across the globe, both confirming the need for emergency action against global warming and associated chaos.

But the central question is how to make a radical, rapid transition to a clean, green economy that benefits the working-class majority, rather than measures that punish us with mass job losses, punitive carbon taxes and increased inequality. All the evidence, including in Scotland, proves that ownership is at the heart of what is dubbed a ‘Just Transition’.

For at least 200 years, western capitalism has relied heavily on carbon to build its wealth and power, plundering people and planet alike. The carbon emissions have helped create the crisis where the recent UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned we only have 12 years to take emergency action to keep global temperatures to below 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels, or else it will be too late; irreversible. 
The same study concluded pollution from carbon emissions must be eradicated by 2050, not 2075 as suggested by previous world summits.

Oxfam has identified that climate-based disasters have increased four-fold in the short ten years from 1995-2015. 
The World Health Organisation estimates that by 2030, climate change will cause 250,000 additional deaths each year, due to malnutrition, malaria, heat stress, and diarrhoea - mostly in the global south.

Droughts, landslides, floods, hurricanes, forest fires, creeping desertification, extinction of species...all these and others are common symptoms of the system we need to confront. But at whose cost?

Class and Climate Chaos

Every disaster, itself the product of the reckless, ruthless profiteering system that is capitalism, also serves to remind us of the class divide inherent to that same system. When wildfires erupted in California last November, millionaires hired private firefighters to shield their sumptuous homes, whilst working class communities were burnt to the ground.

Equally, if we rely on the capitalist rich to ‘green’ the economy, every hopelessly inadequate measure they take will be at the expense of the working class: regressive ‘green’ taxes, reduced services, slaughter of jobs, etc.

In the words of author and pioneering environmental activist, Naomi Klein, “neo-liberal climate action passes on the costs to working people, offer them no better jobs or services and lets the big polluters off the hook. People see it as class war, because it is.”

Scotland is prone to boast of being a world leader in reducing carbon emissions, by 49% since 1990. But there are two other sides to that encouraging fact. 
One of the reasons is the closure of mines, steelworks and other deindustrialisation, which has left the devastation of mass poverty, alienation, rising crime and drug dependency in whole communities. Hardly a ‘just transition’!

The other sobering fact is that much of Scotland's carbon emissions have simply been shipped abroad, dumped on other peoples, as part of capitalist globalisation. Taking total carbon emissions generated at home and abroad in the production and transportation of goods and services for consumption in Scotland, the reduction is a far more modest 8.6% from 1998-2014. 
It's not just jobs that have been offshored, but pollution too. 

The Market Won’t Provide

Capitalist ownership gives no comfort nor guarantees of a stable future for workers in the existing high-carbon sector, let alone the population of Scotland as a whole. 
The cut-throat competition between privately-owned North Sea companies has meant worsened terms and conditions, lengthened shift patterns for offshore workers, use of cheap labour overseas workers, and 160,000 job losses in 2014-17. 
The one-man dictatorship of capital, in the form of INEOS owner Jim Ratcliffe, owns 4% of Scotland's GDP. He used this to bully and blackmail the workforce and Scottish government with threats of total closure at Grangemouth, wiping out effective union recognition for several years, and squeezing millions of public funds in subsidies from Alex Salmond's government, in Ratcliffe’s pursuit of fracking.

But capitalist ownership is no route to a just transition to a clean, green economy either. 
And the reliance of successive Scottish (and UK) governments on the market economy has led to an utter failure to carry out the necessary measures to combat climate chaos and simultaneously protect the jobs and living conditions of workers.

The STUC have published a devastating report exposing the gaping chasm between promises of massive job creation in the low carbon and renewable energy economy (LCRE) over the past 15 years – by successive Labour-LibDem and SNP governments – and the paltry reality of less than 2% of jobs being in this sector...which, in any case, includes nuclear power!

Promises in 2004 of 7,000 new jobs by 2020; 35,000 by 2020 (in 2004); 130,000 by 2020 (in 2010); 40,000 in renewables by 2020 (in 2011). The soaring visions of a green and pleasant land have crashed to earth with a shudder; taken together, all forms of renewable energy (onshore wind, offshore wind, hydropower, renewable heat, bioenergy and alternative fuels) only account for 7,600 direct jobs in Scotland (17,600 direct and indirect). 

Scotland’s Natural Potential

Mother Nature provided Scotland with 40% of Europe's onshore and offshore renewable energy potential. Not to even mention the copious hydro-power sources. Yet Scotland is a net importer of low carbon and renewable energy goods and services – to the tune of £229m trade deficit in 2017, including £165m in the case of onshore wind! Why?

Despite nature’s gifts, Scotland builds virtually nothing for this sector, even though Howdens of Glasgow manufactured the UK’s first ever wind turbine in the early 1980s; removal of government grants, and failure by British capitalism to bother investing, opened the way to Danish companies to carve out a profitable niche.

The lack of a publicly owned energy industry, with planned and integrated investment in research, production and development, has meant a complete lack of an industrial strategy for transition to clean energy production that could tap into nature’s advantages for the benefit of workers and the environment. 
Instead, piecemeal developments have been handed over to networks of overseas, profiteering capitalist firms – who often lack expertise, have dodgy track records in the sector, but are often heavily subsidised by their own governments in their pursuit of global markets.

Lunacy of Globalised Capitalism

At the Moray East Windfarm, off the Caithness coast, 100 turbines are being built by a consortium of firms from Portugal, France and Japan. The blades are being made by a Danish company, the wind turbine jackets by a Belgian company that subsequently handed the contract to Lamprell, of the United Arab Emirates.

Kincardine Offshore Wind Ltd is developing a floating wind farm south-east of Aberdeen; contrary to its name, KOWL is Spanish owned. In turn it's contracted Navantia, who build the Spanish Navy's warships, but made a whopping loss when they diversified into renewables.

Meantime, the BiFab yards in Methil and Burntisland are mothballed! So much for the Scottish government's pledges a decade ago of ‘a Saudi Arabia of renewables’.

Even the massive, lucrative decommissioning sector of the offshore industry is a victim of the same capitalist ‘logic’, the lunacy of globalised profiteering at the expense of workers’ jobs, workers’ conditions, and the climate.

Bountiful tax relief is being handed over to the oil and gas companies for decommissioning, while some of them have been exposed for paying below the legal minimum wage to overseas workers. 
North Sea rigs have been towed across the oceans to be decommissioned on the beaches of Bangladesh and India, without environmental protection or workers’ rights – sailing past several sites with the capacity to do the work up the east coast of Scotland. 

Just Transition Through Public Ownership

We need the trade union, socialist and environmental movement to demand democratic public ownership of the entire energy industry to seriously tackle climate change and ensure a just transition to clean, green energy production - with not only the protection, but vast expansion, of decent jobs and conditions.

A recent House of Commons report brutally declared that “green investment has collapsed”. The capitalist market will never save the planet that it has despoiled for profit.

The SNP government’s talk of a Publicly Owned Energy Company is a lame, timid half-step, miles short of the bold move required. It is designed to be merely another energy retailer in a crowded marketplace, competing with the capitalist sharks – but not in any way involved in the actual production of energy supplies. 
But public ownership of oil, gas, hydro, wind-power, all forms of renewables, is precisely what is needed. With unions representing energy workers and the wider working class - alongside scientists, local and national government, colleges and universities - having a full voice in planning the urgent transition to green energy without loss of jobs or skills, with retraining, investment in research and development, and expansion of education in the sciences of the sector. We already have world-leading academic expertise in offshore wind, wave, tidal and carbon capture techniques – all squandered by a system based on short-term profit maximisation.

Full public ownership of all forms of energy could then be integrated with an expanded public transport network that tackles pollution and poverty through investment in fare-free public transport. 
And with a nationalised construction industry, local councils and social sector housing, to retrofit and insulate homes; build 100,000 new homes for rent to the highest environmental standards; cut fuel prices and eliminate fuel poverty; and in the process, create at least 100,000 well-paid, skilled jobs and apprenticeships.

Public ownership is at the very heart of the solution to pollution, replacing the private plundering of our planet for profit by capitalism. 
Tackling the emergency of climate change requires urgent system change – to a socialist democracy where it’s not a false choice between jobs and the environment.