A Green and Just Transition: Transnational Labour Governance and Climate Crisis Response

Trade unions, while showing notable industry and national variations, exhibit mixed histories of addressing environmental concerns. The persistent risk of a politics of conflict between environmental imperatives and workers’ jobs and livelihood security put workers’ interests into turmoil. Unions express more emphatically in the 2020s a two-fold interest: transition to a more sustainable economy, to an at least post-carbon dependency in economic and production activity, must attend to workers’ socio-economic interests simultaneously with ecological protection. It must be a “just” transition.

Much attention to date on labour questions and sustainability addresses state actors and national or regional union bodies and other labour forums such as works councils, and international union confederations. Other debates pursue efforts of labour-environmentalist NGOs and community coalitions. Questions arise as to how labour actors in countries with highly sector variable or weak institutionalised social dialogue can effectively engage with a “just transition” and decarbonisation imperatives.

Our project, in contributing to advanced debate, focuses on transnational relations and dynamics among labour and company actors in global corporations. Global companies are significant non-state global actors. Their activities in regard to global climate response and acceptance of a just social transition can have significant influence among global MNC supply chain parties and regional powers. The quality and effectiveness of their transnational labour governance is a crucial factor in accelerated adoption and implementation of an eco-social program of response and reform.

This paper especially focuses on workers’ voice, social dialogue, and demand formation in local and transnational labour relations. It discusses findings from our empirical study of labour and eco-social actors in Asia Pacific contexts. Multilevel transnational labour governance generates new qualities and capacities for more democratic global governance of common concerns, crucially including a just eco-social transition.