Labour and Climate Change

Building on a recent special issue of the Journal of Industrial Relations, and the growing interest in the relationship between work and climate change, we call for papers that address climate change as an issue of and for labour. Too little attention has been paid to the complex and often awkward questions posed by the fundamental fact that climate change is a product of work. Just as human labour has been necessary in fossil fuel extraction and in centuries of manufacturing, so it will play a central role in how we shift to a low-carbon future. Central problems of labour about how different work is organised and regulated cannot now be separated from environmental questions. This new politics is proving to be, in many places, deeply challenging to the assumptions and traditions of organised labour and the institutions they have helped establish. We invite papers that will advance scholarship on the relationship between the climate crisis and labour in all its forms. We are especially interested in papers that examine: how labour has worked with or against capital and states in the long hegemony of fossil fuel-based capitalism; how labour regulation might change in ‘green’ workplaces; how states regulate labour and environment in different national settings; how labour might constitute itself as an agent of transformation.