The first 2022 edition of International Union Rights (IUR) journal explores key issues around climate justice and just transition.
Georgia Montague-Nelson from GLI Manchester contributed an article to this edition of IUR. The article explores the contribution of livestock production to the climate crisis. In the article, she puts forward a set of trade union proposals for the sector – developed by the IUF and GLI – which demonstrated the potential for engagement with climate activities around shared ideas about decentralisation and redistribution, reducing the size of supply chains and the role of global corporations in the food sector.
The International Union of Foodworkers (IUF) commissioned GLI Manchester to transform IUF research on the climate crisis in intensive livestock production into a guide to equip affiliated unions in meat, dairy, and agriculture sectors to influence the conditions for a just transition.
The climate crisis is already destroying the livelihoods of workers across the world. It is of particular concern for workers in livestock production. Livestock production is one of the most emissions intensive sectors in the global food system. The sector is also negatively affected by the impacts of climate change.
Global transformation to a more climate-friendly food system is more urgent now than ever. But this poses huge risks to workers who face potentially negative impacts to their livelihoods.
Unions need to demand a voice to lead and shape the necessary change to ensure that any transition does not leave workers behind. This means fighting for a just transition. Unions need to take action at the local level to facilitate transformation of the global food system.
GLI Manchester was commissioned by the International Union of Foodworkers (IUF) to produce a guide on tackling the climate crisis in intensive livestock production.
This guide aims to equip unions representing workers in the meat and dairy sectors to influence the conditions for a just transition, and to propose the necessary transformative solutions to tackle the climate crisis.
This document includes a guide on the climate crisis and an activity workbook.
The guide provides information about the contribution of intensive livestock production to the climate crisis, about why the climate crisis is a union issue, and how unions can take action. The guide sets this in the wider political context. It is important for unions to understand this context to recognise the need for system transformation to address the climate crisis. Unions can use this information to formulate practical demands at the local level.
The activity workbook includes exercises that can help unions to better understand the main issues, to plan for just transition and to develop practical action.
There’s a question every trade unionist must stop and ask at some point: ‘what am I organising for?’
Kirill Buketov (image from Union Solidarity International)
For Kirill Buketov, international campaign officer of the International Union of Food and Allied Workers (IUF), the central driver behind is fundamentally that ‘we are dissatisfied with the way the world is run.’ Putting this into positive action means being political – and possessing a few vital qualities.
Buketov raises some examples. In Moscow under the Soviet Union ‘what really shook the system is when workers went on strike.’ But to be successful, it took organisation and leadership. At first, workers struck without any idea what they wanted – state officials simply sent them back to work until they had some demands. It was only when they had a strategy that change began. In contrast, the Occupy movement was unsustainable and didn’t last because it lacked organisation.
For Buketov, every conflict is at root the same – ‘you need organisation, strategy and commitment to win – to fight until the very end’. He points also to the Kazakhstani oil workers’ struggle in 2011 when 26,000 workers walked out for six months. It was brutally crushed and achieved nothing. Why? They decided not to have organisation, changing their negotiators every time. There was no strategy or organisation.
But the most poingnant example is today in Ukraine. There, the Maidan movement was a genuinely popular democratic movement – and it achieved Yanukovich’ resignation. But right-wing forces abused the situation to lead the country after the left failed to create structures, organisation and strategy for when Yanukovich resigned. In sum, the right-wing were more prepared.
In a global economy however, if we want to be organised, we must work cross-borders. That’s where social media steps in – rank and file cross-border movements can utilise Facebook and Twitter to help build international platforms for organising people to fight and win.
The recent Thai shrimp industry slavery scandal, which the IUF is currently working on, shows that operating internationally for solidarity across borders is more vital than ever. To win, workers will need the ‘organisation, strategy and commitment’ that Buketov stresses is necessary. And with 250,000 slaves in the industry, they really do need to win.
Josiah Mortimeris a guest blogger for the Global Labour Institute’s third International Summer School for trade unionists at Northern College this week. The views expressed in this article are therefore solely those of the author in his personal capacity and do not necessarily represent the views of GLI.
Proponents, opponents and trade negotiators involved in the elaboration of two vast investment treaties currently under construction, the EU-US trade deal now known as the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and the twelve-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA) between Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the United States and Vietnam agree on the most essential point.
The agreements, which have been deliberately and misleadingly branded as Free Trade Agreements to boost their marketing, have little to do with lowering tariffs, which are generally already low. At the heart of these projects is the drive to further expand the already considerable power of transnational investors by restricting the regulatory power of governments and locking the system into place to prevent new regulatory initiatives or reverse privatizations.
A new IUF publication, Trade Deals That Threaten Democracy, exposes the corporate power grab at the core of these two mega-treaties, how they build and expand upon the toxic web of the thousands of investment treaties which have been layered on to the WTO rules and why the labour movement should throw its full support behind the growing movement in outright opposition to these deals.
