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- Convenors:
-
Theodora Vetta
(Universitat de Barcelona)
Rune Bennike (University of Southern Denmark)
Send message to Convenors
- Discussant:
-
Jessica M. Smith
(Colorado School of Mines)
- Formats:
- Panel
- Mode:
- Face-to-face
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 23 July, -
Time zone: Europe/Madrid
Short Abstract:
This panel unpacks “green jobs” in decarbonizing regions. We invite papers addressing “reskilling” processes and concrete working experiences in energy restructuring, with a particular focus on gendered and racialized labour.
Long Abstract:
What are green jobs? The eco-modernist narratives of the current energy “transition” tell us that–if we decarbonize the global economy–we will eventually end up not only with a greener world but with an estimated gross gain of 26 million jobs (ILO 2019). Indeed, green employment seems to be on the rise, with 13.7 million workers registered in the renewable sector alone in 2022 (IENA 2023). Yet, besides purely quantitative approaches and wishful worries about “decent jobs,” and a “Just Labor Transition,” we still lack thick ethnographic data on the greening of the global division of labor. Having a particular focus on decarbonization regions, but covering the whole value chain from prime material extraction (biofuel, minerals…) to manufacturing, planning, finance, construction, operation, and maintenance, we seek to address three main questions:
1) What are the lived realities of the “re/up-skilling” processes, promising the transformation of black to green jobs? How are transitional development programs and funding schemes grounded? Which “skills” are valued and which are not?
2) How is “sustainability” translated into concrete working experiences within the heavily financialised energy markets? What are the processes of unity and fragmentation in the making of this segment of the working class?
3) What are the gender aspects of such transformations and how do they fit the mainstream gender agenda of decarbonization policies? Can we talk about green labor instead of jobs in order to account for the unpaid gendered and racialized green labors in different temporal/spatial reconfigurations of the energy restructuring?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 23 July, 2024, -Charlotte Bruckermann (University of Cologne)
Paper short abstract:
A Chinese app allows users to convert carbon savings into real trees that are planted by a feminized and aging workforce in the decarbonizing countryside. The exploitation of their green labor entrenches inequality at the nexus of financialization, environmental work, and neosocialist ideals.
Paper long abstract:
In China, digital users and green workers connect through a green fintech app developed by Alipay, the country’s largest e-payment platform. In the “Ant Forest” app, consumers use their carbon footprint savings to grow digital trees. Over time, these e-trees can be converted into actual physical seedlings that rural women and senior citizens plant in the deserts of northern China. During fieldwork with app users in the decarbonizing coal region of Shanxi and green afforestation workers in desertifying Gansu Province, those connected through the app presented themselves as part of a labor vanguard in the service of green development and a new ecological subjectivity. The app seemingly connects the virtuality of financial speculation and carbon metrics with the actual work of the green transition. However, the app entrenches new forms of inequality through its reliance on an eco-precariat, a workforce wedged between digital labor and environmental work. These workers not only bore the brunt of ecological devastation from accelerated carbon-intensive industrialization, but they are now being made responsible for environmental clean-up. They are precarious in multiple ways, economically, socially, and ecologically. As green finance and decarbonization entrench their precarity, workers nonetheless praise their green jobs. However, their elevation of green labor is not rooted in neoliberal subjectivities and decarbonization finance, but neosocialist imaginaries. I therefore argue that the financialization of nature is a partial, variable, and uneven process of globalization, and relies on both speculation and spectacle to create its values.
Theodora Vetta (Universitat de Barcelona)
Paper short abstract:
This paper problematizes the proclaimed “re/up-skilling” of labor on decarbonizing regions, by looking at the gendered realities of “green jobs” in solar megaprojects in Greece.
Paper long abstract:
Skill is not some objective form of knowledge but a result of struggle over socially recognizable knowledge. It is all about social worth and as such it creates categories and hierarchies within a specific labor process. This paper explores the “re/up-skilling” of labor in the main coal-dependent region of Greece (Kozani), navigating a contradictory and violent restructuring of its productive base. With decarbonization implying an estimated loss of thousands of direct and indirect jobs, this district became a target area of Just Transition Fund: EU’s redistributive mechanism promising greener, but also more equal, labor markets through financing both green investments and educational actions of human capital. In the anticipation of becoming a green-hydrogen hub and an industrial cluster of lithium-battery production, Kozani became the epicenter of renewable energy investments (mega solar and wind parks) from global energy firms and hedge funds, taking advantage of fast-track (green-grab) regulations, tax incentives and “cheap nature.” Based on ethnographic fieldwork in 2022 and 2023, I explore the “economy of green certificates,” built around reskilling imaginaries and funds, and the materialized promises of ecomodernist politics, namely green jobs in solar parks. By looking at male precarious construction work in photovoltaics and female agricultural labor in an ESG Investing project, it seems that, rather than upskilling, the proclaimed “preservation of the energy identity” of the region translates to deskilling gendered processes, unable to tackle the pre-existing inequalities of local labor markets and curb the skyrocketing outmigration.
Marianna Betti (University of Bergen)
Paper short abstract:
Today’s transition to zero-emission and the western democratic project relies on LNG.Paradoxically,transport of LNG on ships faces challenges in crew safety,just labor and environmental impact.Through this case,the paper delves into these complexities and the contradictory nature of the green shift.
Paper long abstract:
The transition to a zero-emission society is facilitated by the crucial role of Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) as a cleaner energy resource, utilizing existing infrastructure and acting as a transitional energy source. Following the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, disruptions in gas exports to Europe have elevated the importance of LNG from regions like the US, Qatar, and Australia, symbolizing both the democratic Western project and the energy transition. Meanwhile, the emphasis on the blue economy promotes a sustainable maritime industry, prompting the retrofitting and automation of LNG carriers to meet environmental standards. While equipped with hybrid engines running on various fuels, practical challenges arise, forcing the crew of these ships to use heavy oil outside regulated emission control areas. This not only contributes to environmental pollution but also poses risks to the crew engaged in demanding and potentially hazardous work. The paper explores the complexities of decarbonization efforts, considering the proximity of workers to infrastructures and technologies essential for this shift. Drawing on Mary Douglas, the paper explores how this proximity challenges natural and symbolic boundaries, potentially exposing workers to contamination as they safeguard the LNG cargo. The organized conglomerate of experiments within LNG carriers, managing dirt and heavy oil residues, exemplifies the contradictory nature of their role in facilitating the green shift, simultaneously exacerbating vulnerability for those involved.
Arnaud Le Marchand (Université du Havre Normandie)
Paper short abstract:
An ethnographic approach of work in offshore wind farms (France and UK) show a green activity but with a global market of itinerant and intermittent work, with seasonality, in a patchwork of rules and highly gendered. Green but similar to the offshore oil industry
Paper long abstract:
The green quality of work in the wind sector is a controversial subject. The ILO (ILO, 2012) lists wind power as a green activity, with solar methanization, material recycling operations, and even the greening of nuclear power. However, the ILO distinguishes decent green jobs from those participating in the energy transition, but in a dangerous, unhealthy environment. The ILO report (ILO, 2012) compares, from this angle, the work of wind power to that of hull dismantling, or of the automobile industry, because of the mechanical risks and exposure to products toxic. From this angle, wind power work is not “green” in the ILO sense, because it is not always “decent”. Additionally, skills related to risk acceptance, intermittent and itinerant work are highly valued in the offshore wind industry, where weather monitoring and seasonality are present.
This allow the retraining of former military personnel and individualized approaches to work, as in the offshore oil industry. An ethnographic approach to work in the offshore wind industry( in France and UK) also shows the cohabitation of different rules and practices which evokes a patchwork, making a link with the patchwork economy of the post-socialist transition in Poland, or the patches of Lowenhaupt Tsing. In and around these wind farms,we can observe a very low participation of female workers in these operations; work in offshore wind farms is highly gendered, for reasons that lie in its long-standing technical connections and proximity to the social landscape of the offshore oil supply chain.