ABSTRACT

This book offers a timely exploration of how climate change manifests in the global workplace. It draws together accounts of workers, their work, and the politics of resistance in order to enable us to better understand how the impacts of climate change are structured by the economic and social processes of labour.

Focusing on nine empirically grounded cases of labour under climate change, this volume links the tools and methods of critical labour studies to key debates over climate change adaptation and mitigation in order to highlight the active nature of struggles in the climate-impacted workplace. Spanning cases including commercial agriculture in Turkey, labour unions in the UK, and brick kilns in Cambodia, this collection offers a novel lens on the changing climate, showing how both the impacts of climate change and adaptations to it emerge through the prism of working lives.

Drawing together scholars from anthropology, political economy, geography, and development studies, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of climate change adaptation, labour studies, and environmental justice. More generally, it will be of interest to anybody seeking to understand how the changing climate is changing the terms, conditions, and politics of the global workplace.

chapter 1|12 pages

Introduction

Climate change in the global workplace: labour, adaptation, and resistance

part 1|58 pages

Labour

chapter 2|17 pages

Thermal inequality in a changing climate

Heat, mobility, and precarity in the Cambodian brick sector

chapter 3|17 pages

Climate change adaptation through agroecology in Senegal

Enhanced farmworkers’ autonomy or new forms of vertical labour control?

chapter 4|22 pages

Routes to food security

Strategies of survival of marginalised communities in North-western Bangladesh

part 2|58 pages

Adaptation

chapter 5|20 pages

Old ways and new routes

Climate threats and adaptive possibilities in the Indian Himalayas

chapter 6|17 pages

From climate adaptation to social reproductive resistance

Examining the gendered climate-labour migration nexus in Southeast Asian mobilisations for environmental justice

chapter 7|19 pages

Hands that adapt

Seasonal labour migration, climate change, and the making of adaptable subjects in Turkey

part 3|67 pages

Resistance

chapter 9|20 pages

A changing climate

Indigenous participation in the extractive industry

chapter 10|17 pages

Climate change is class war

Global labour’s challenge to the Capitalocene

chapter 11|7 pages

Conclusion

Towards a reworking of climate adaptation as labour “resistance”