Socio-Ecological Class Conflicts between Status Preservation and Societal Change

Amidst the climate crisis, conflicts between workers of emission-intensive industries and parts of climate movements become manifest currently. Frequently a class-conscious workforce faces opposite political claims compared to the climate change movement (Bose et al. 2019). One side claims the preservation of jobs, the other an ecological future. Conflicts like that can be understood as socio-ecological transformation conflicts, whose forms have by now been empirically studied for different industries (Tullius & Wolf 2022; Dörre et al. 2023; Schaupp 2024). Yet, there are partially alliances that connect both issues successfully. A prominent example is the 2020 founded campaign #Wir fahren zusammen (#we run together) – a cooperation between the union Ver.di, the climate movement Fridays for Future and workers of public transportation. The alliance demands an expansion of public transportation as well as improved working conditions (Liebig et al. 2022).

This research is related to prior studies, which investigated the attitudes of climate activists and workers as well as their divergences (Hassan-Beik 2022; Lucht & Liebig 2023), yet follows a reconstructive research logic in form of a mixed-methods design and asks, how public transportation workers in an East German region interpret the climate change as well as climate policies. Furthermore, it investigates attitudes towards the cooperation between climate activists and unions as well as experienced respectively anticipated conflicts. To answer the research question(s), we develop reconstructions of field specific orientation patterns on the basis of biographical interviews. Based on this, we conduct a survey to show how these patterns spread across the aimed region as well as how they correspond with sociostructural and other characteristics.

The investigation aims to recognize which potentials and challenges regarding the ongoing socio-ecological transformation exist and to discuss what they mean with respect to the practice of political actors as unions or parties.