- Convenors:
-
Radhika Krishnan
(IIIT Hyderabad, India)
Rohit Chandra (Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi)
- Format:
- Panel
Format/Structure
We intend to have four presentations in a single session. We would like 2 sessions and invite six to eight paper presentations on this theme.
Long Abstract
Labour continues to be an important component of energy as well as mineral extractive regimes. Labour thus needs to be at the centre of discussions around energy transitions. Planning for post-fossil futures tends to define ‘labour’ as workers employed in specific energy-related sectors and the aligned industries. However, communities in regions dependent on coal and the energy sector in the Global South navigate life between formal and informal economies, between agrarian, land-based livelihoods, temporary jobs within the energy and mining sectors and the informal coal economy and other non-farm employment.
The process of imagining fossil free futures could be reinvigorated by engaging with the diversity of labour and labouring particularly prevalent in the Global South. We invite scholarship on energy transition trajectories in the Global South that engage specifically with ‘pluriactivity’ , precarity and informality of lives and livelihoods . This panel hopes to bring in voices, concerns and aspirations of industrial workers as well as forest and land-based communities into energy transition narratives by focusing on the broader framework of ‘labour’ rather than a ‘trade’ and on multiple forms of existing precarity.
We encourage papers that engage with labour activism pertaining to coal transitions in the Global South. The panel in turn also proposes to examine the challenges of bringing in environmental concerns and the urgency of fossil free alternatives into the practice of organised labour. In the process, we seek to explore the possibilities of reimagining not just ‘labour’ but equally trade union ‘praxis’ and the nature of organisation of workers in the coal and energy sectors. We encourage a critical look at the possibilities and challenges of imagining fossil free futures rooted in lived experiences of the various forms of work and working in the Global South in the specific context of energy transitions.
Accepted papers
Presentation short abstract
Drawing on ideas of ‘pluriactivity’ and on neo-Marxist conceptualizations of labour, this paper suggests that a ‘24x7’ engagement of trade unions, an engagement which encompasses all facets of living and labouring, could open up the potential for a socially sensitive approach to just transition.
Presentation long abstract
The coal sector remains a significant provider of employment in coal-rich regions in India, and consequently the conundrum of the future of labour in a post-coal economy features in just transition narratives. Post-coal futures envisaged in policy documents and just transition narratives tend to define ‘labour’ as workers employed in the coal sector and the aligned industries. Recommendations for accommodating concerns of labour therefore focus on “reskilling” and on creating “green” jobs. This definition of labour, also articulated within trade union discourses in India, is however limited by its lack of engagement with and acknowledgement of the interconnections between various sources of livelihood in coal-rich regions in India. It fails to recognize the multiple ways in which communities navigate life between formal and informal economies, between agrarian, land-based livelihoods, temporary jobs within the coal economy and other non-farm employment in the Global South. Drawing on ideas of ‘pluriactivity’ and on neo-Marxist conceptualizations of labour and of ‘class’ as a social relation rather than as a structural location, this paper suggests that a ‘24x7’ engagement of trade unions with labour, an engagement which encompasses all facets of living and labouring in coal regions, could open up the potential for a more locally grounded and socially sensitive approach to just transition. Such approaches could allow for the reframing of trade union praxis, and hence lead to a more involved and constructive integration of workers’ voices in just transition narratives.
Presentation short abstract
This research uses a social reproduction lens to understand the energy transition in South Africa and what this might mean for labour and inequality. The details of working conditions and life around a coal plant and a solar plant are explored and compared.
Presentation long abstract
The just energy transition has gained extraordinary traction across different social groups in South Africa, and internationally as a response to climate change. Widespread support may be due to the fact that “[l]ow-carbon sources of energy are often framed as more equitable, egalitarian, and just than their fossil-fuelled or carbon-intensive counterparts” (Sovacool, 2021, p. 1). In reality, there is significant uncertainty in this transition as it will impact the livelihoods of many communities, particularly those who are dependent on the coal value chain. The nature of employment on renewable energy power plants is also relatively unknown. This arises in the context of a crisis of social reproduction, where most people in South Africa are struggling to meet their basic needs, as poverty, unemployment and inequality are prevalent.
Using the lens of social reproduction calls into question the assumptions made about the economy in the energy transition. These assumptions include the narrow focus on formal jobs and energy production, avoiding the informal economy, unpaid work and energy poverty. Using mixed methods, I compare two towns, one that is close to a coal power station and another nearby a solar power station, looking at the characteristics of social reproduction in each town to answer the research question: What is the relationship between energy transition and social reproduction in South Africa, with a focus on gendered labour?
Presentation long abstract
Just transition debates in the Global South often understate the role of organized labour, despite the concept originating within global trade union movements. India’s coal sector provides a critical lens to address this gap. This paper draws on the experience of Singareni Collieries Company Limited, a state-majority-owned coal enterprise in Telangana, to examine how trade unions shape the social and institutional foundations of transition in resource-dependent regions. Declared a ‘sick’ company in 1997 with losses of ₹1,219 crore, SCCL’s recovery is usually attributed to technological upgrades and managerial reforms. However, equally vital were strengthened labour-management dialogues and consolidated bargaining structures, which evolved from nearly 100 unions in the 1990s to five major unions today, following India’s first coal-sector union elections in 1998.
Unions in Singareni have negotiated on pension reforms, dependent employment, wage revisions, medical benefits, workplace safety, and the implications of coal block privatization. Through these actions, they advance principles central to just transition frameworks, participation, social dialogue. Yet energy-justice scholarship rarely examines such labour-driven practices or the influence unions exert within the coal political economy of the Global South.
Drawing on semi-structured interviews with union leaders and workers, and primary data from grievance registers, this paper analyses the institutional capabilities and bargaining strategies of Singareni’s unions and their embeddedness in state politics, given SCCL’s significance as a voter constituency. Situated within broader Global South debates, the study demonstrates how labour institutions in state-owned coal sectors can contribute to equitable, worker-centred transition planning in India and other coal-dependent regions.
Presentation long abstract
Climate crisis has put pressures on national governments to adopt energy transition policies. Indonesian government decides to focus on biofuel development, whose input among others rely on palm oil. Critics to such national agenda emphasizes a just transition perspective, which considers the voices of not only workers, but also affected communities, including women and marginal groups. Palm oil development in Indonesia has been accused for its adverse social and environmental effects, and, thus, energy transition agenda will intensify such impacts. In this effort of re-imagining a just transition, this paper invites a reconsideration in which monoculture oil palm plantation is viewed as waste. This in particular implies a theoretical examination on how the plantation system produces labour-gender-nature nexus of wasted bodies and wasted nature. Drawing insights from ecofeminist political economy, this paper examines labour struggles of casual women workers on oil palm plantations for secured employment. While women are mainly employed with casual employment status on oil palm plantations, plantation companies may agree to the demand of women workers for secured employment after they work for a lengthy period of time. Drawing on a case study on oil palm plantations in Sambas, West Kalimantan, this paper argues that the success story of women workers in demanding permanent employment must also be understood within the context of the production of wasted bodies and wasted nature through monoculture oil palm plantation.
Presentation short abstract
Examining India's electric vehicle transition, this paper interrogates capital's 'green' realignment deepening precarity, and the variegated response of labour. It argues the transition's core contradiction is its intensification of social crisis, making capital's solution its own undoing.
Presentation long abstract
The global shift to electric vehicles (EVs) intensifies the automotive sector's historic role as a socio-technical crucible, forcing a strategic re-alignment of capital and the state. This transition reconverges the energy, tech/digital, and extractive mining sectors, creating new global alliances and deepening ecological pressures.
India's automotive sector, vital to its manufacturing and GDP and integrated into Global Automotive Value Chains, is a key site for this transformation. National policy, driven by urban pollution and climate imperatives, actively pushes electrification, while automakers forge new ties to critical mineral supply chains. However, this "green" transition is being built on a "low-road" labour regime.
Based on research in the Pune automotive cluster (2024-25), this paper reveals how restructuring for electrification—through plant closures and new facilities—systematically deepens reliance on a precarious workforce. The transition intensifies the sector's reliance on precarious labour, leveraging gendered, migrant, and 'deskilled' identities as instruments of control, even while discourses of feminization, re/up-skilling, and new 'green jobs' are hegemonic. The paper explores the resulting fragmentation of the workforce and the emergent, variegated responses from labour in factories, regional clusters, and across the supply chain. It argues that a 'just transition' is impossible without confronting the sector’s foundational political economy and forms of labouring in India. Ultimately, this case illuminates how the decarbonization model—in the absence of an industrial policy centred on sovereignty and labour—seeks to resolve ecological crises by intensifying social ones, making the crisis of capital a permanent feature of its own proposed solution.
Presentation short abstract
The study assessed the impacts of climate change on workers and just transition demands of unions in the Philippines and found a disconnect between the strong green advocacies of a national labor center and the weak climate praxis of local affiliates. Thus labour’s praxis can vary across the scales.
Presentation long abstract
A robust literature has examined climate interventions in the Philippines, a country that is disproportionately affected by global warming. Understudied though are the responses of the labour movement, especially at the local and sectoral level. This research gap tracks the global trend. Through a labour-centric qualitative methodology of focus groups involving 22 unions and 68 workers across five industrial sectors, and document review of resolutions of one labor center and collective bargaining agreements of its affiliates, the study assessed the impacts of climate change on workers and just transition demands of unions. The study found a disconnect between the strong green advocacies of the national labor center and the weak praxis of local enterprise-level unions for climate action. While it is commonly held that workers are climate skeptic and transition defiant, the literature in fact reveals that unions can be both enabling and and constraining in the fight for a just transition. The study argues that this variation occurs not just at the horizontal but also the vertical axis in that labour’s praxis can vary across the scales. In the Philippine case, weak interventions by enterprise-based unions occurs hand-in-hand with strong advocacies at the national level. The study thus recommends bolstering the dissemination of advocacies from national centers to local unions, and integrating climate advocacies in collective bargaining and union activity at the firm-level.