The International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) is the world’s largest trade union federation. The ITUC represents 181 million workers through its 340 affiliated organizations within 163 countries and territories.
And while the United States, under the leadership of President Donald Trump is not focusing on a transition to a greener and lower-carbon economy, the rest of the world is already busy working on plans to reduce our carbon footprint.
Canada, our neighbor to the north, has been working on the transition, and already has plans to phase out coal-fired electricity by 2030 and introduce new greenhouse gas regulations for natural-gas-fired electricity. There is also the carbon tax that will soon be enacted.
Trade unions are now concerned that many workers will end up being left without jobs. And with Canada’s ongoing green economy initiative, the issue has become a hot talking point. “We’ve seen many transitions before and they haven’t been pretty,” said Sharan Burrow, general secretary of the confederation, according to CBC Canada.
The “Just Transition” framework
The ITUC held a conference on the issue called Just Transition in Vancouver this week. Burrow, who is based in Belgium, was a keynote speaker at the event. As Burrow explained, it isn’t the issue of moving away from fossil fuels, but being prepared to do so in the future so that we maintain job security for workers in the energy industry.
“We need to make sure that workers and their communities are not stranded, they are not left behind,” she told Stephen Quinn, the host of CBC’s The Early Edition.
It is a big job that requires the cooperation of governments, employers, workers and community leaders in devising concrete plans and policies that will ease the transition – like job security policies, training workers in new skills and aiding companies in the transformation, Burrow said.
“It’s not about one pipeline or one building or one industry,” she said. “It’s about making sure that all industries have a transition plan so that we know the future will not be dependent on what have been good industries but sadly are damaging the very existence for the planet.”
Burrow predicts economies will complete the transition to renewable energy within the next two to four decades. “We know that the transition is now,” she said. “Unions know there are no jobs on a dead planet so we’ve got to get this right.”
A green economy could be likened to an alternative to the economy we are familiar with today. After the 2009 global recession, also known as the Great Recession, new attention was focused on structural flaws in current economic models and assumptions. And as many economies began to recover, many began looking at the broader concept of the “green economy.”
Governments could envision an economy that had a place for both growth and the improvement of people’s lives that would lead to sustainable development. And a green economy promotes all three of these visions. Sounds sort of like an Utopian society, doesn’t it?
The prevailing economic growth plan relies on increasing Gross Domestic Product (GDP) above all other goals. The U.S. focus on becoming a world leader in oil and gas development is a good example of an economic growth plan that focuses on GDP only. But there is a huge downside to this kind of thinking, including social, environmental and economic costs.
And other countries have the same GDP focus, and this has caused persistent poverty for over 2.5 billion people worldwide, even as the Earth’s wealth of natural resources are being depleted. A recent report stated that close to 60 percent of the world’s ecosystem services were found to be degraded or used unsustainably.
We can add the ever-widening gap between the rich and the poor. The International Institute for Labour Studies released a report on the income gap worldwide in 2013. According to the report, “In the majority of advanced economies, the size of the middle-income group has been shrinking in the last several decades. The trend has been partly attributed to job polarization, but also public policy and institutional factors that have been found to play an important role.”
Needless to say, all the above issues play into an economy, and to have a green and sustainable economy, all issues have to be addressed through a number of institutional reforms and regulatory, tax, and expenditure-based economic policies and tools.
Next time, we will look at some excellent examples of “green economies” in the world today. You may be surprised at the cities, countries and industries that have been transitioning successfully toward sustainability in all aspects of people’s lives.
