ABSTRACT
Long viewed as a global issue, scholars are increasingly aware of the inequalities inherent in the manifestation of climate change. Among the hardest hit are workers in the South, facing a unique double jeopardy as contemporary climate precarity erodes the foundations of livelihoods and communities caught in global warming’s ground zero, whilst the shift to a low-carbon economy threatens employment futures. Yet a particular omission has been the role of labour agency in shaping responses to the changing climate. Indeed, the ratcheting pressure of environmental change has in recent years begun to promulgate a transnational display of worker agency that transcends borders and confounds the will of the establishment. No longer content to battle within the oxymoron of “green growth”, the global organised labour movement is waking up to the existential challenge of the Capitalocene, fighting for a future that radically reshapes the relations between labour, capital and the environment they inhabit. From this standpoint, this chapter explores the vital intersection between the environmental and labour movements, examining growing awareness of the class politics of climate change and using this as a basis to return labour agency to the study of the environment.
