Contribution short abstract

The presentation examines a German climate-labour coalition to show how alliances between workers and environmental groups can build power for a just green transition, and to understand how they might function as a space of the re-negotiation of the meaning of work in the ecological crisis.

Contribution long abstract

My research contributes to the relatively recent call for a climate-labour turn. This turn positions the alliance building between the climate and labour movements as crucial for developing a strong counter-hegemonic movement with the power to push for a just social-ecological transformation and confront the forces of capitalism. To understand the conditions and strategies necessary to foster such a movement I look at the case of “Wir Fahren Zusammen” (WFZ), a German alliance between the public transport department of the labour union ver.di and the German branch of Fridays for Future. This was done through interviews with 13 members of the coalition, as well as analysis of several documents that played a role in the coalition’s work. Based in eco-Marxism and labour sociology, I trace how workers' and activists' subjective relationship to ecological questions and the meaning of work in a sustainable society shifted through the campaign experience. Through an organising approach inspired by Jane McAlevey, the campaign addressed workers as protagonists of ecological transformation rather than as consumers or voters, thereby activating latent orientations toward the social and ecological use-value of their work. I argue that this dynamic points to an underexplored resource for labour environmentalism: the potential of dialogical spaces of solidarity and alliance between workplace concerns and the environmental movement to articulate workers' existing sense of occupational meaning in ecological terms.