Workers As Agents of a Transformative Just Transition – the Everyday Vs. Utopias of Hope

The discipline of Environmental Labour Studies has broadened across the globe, and there is now a lively debate about labour and its role in a just transition. How well-paid, safe, and well-organized are the expected new jobs in the "Green Economy"? Which jobs will need to transform and how? Will there be jobs for everybody? How can trade unions influence the changes that are happening to protect workers? What does a just transition mean for workers in different sectors and globally? And yet, in all these necessary debates, something is missing: the voices of rank-and-file workers. It seems clear: they want to keep their jobs. Trade unions have fought to slow down closures of coal mines, arguing that workers need their jobs. However, 85% of workers in the oil industry in Scotland said they wanted to work somewhere else - if they only could. When we asked workers in Spain and the UK in what kind of society they would like to live, they stressed community, access to nature, locality, and working less, living more. Using the voices of workers from my latest research, I want to discuss the needs of workers across sectors and beyond the pressures of the everyday. What kind of future do workers want? How can they become the agents of change as opposed to being perceived and perceiving themselves as its victims? Can environmental policies connect with the desires of workers for another kind of life? Are there perspectives for democracy at work and is there any hope that utopias can become real?