Today is World Environment Day. Clara Paillard looks at the impact on working people and surveys the key organisations campaigning on this.

On World Environment Day, is there much that the labour movement could be celebrating? As the Climate Justice agenda has fallen from the politics and trade unions radar since Covid, fossil fuels extraction continue to grow, wars are killing more people, generating a huge amount of emissions and destroying the environment and the far right and their climate denial agenda are growing at a disturbing pace.

But there is a strong case for trade unions and the labour movement to return to environmental politics as a working class issue:

• Shifting our energy systems to renewable and sustainable solutions could tackle the cost of energy and create tens of thousands of jobs with a workers-led Just Transition programme.
• Building thousands of new well-insulated  social housing and affordable homes could help tackle the housing crisis as well as cut the price of energy bills.
• Public spending on sustainable and affordable public transport systems would help tackle car pollution and congestion as well as create thousands of jobs.
• Investments in sustainable land and food production programmes could make good food affordable, improve people’s health, avoid food shortages and help restore natural habitats.
• Bringing back water systems into public ownership would help resolve water pollution issues, ensure water rates are affordable and plan for water conservation.
• The growth of AI is threatening jobs, increasing workplace surveillance and creating a new major source of emissions and need trade unions to organise resistance.

2026 was designated as the Year of Trade Union Climate Action by the TUC and a number of unions at their annual conferences. The TUC set up a dedicated page on their website with some information but doesn’t seem to be proactively organising activities. UNISON have launched their Year of Green Activity dedicated hub with resources and a calendar of events. Education unions and other partners organised the Climate and nature education festival in March to explore the role of educators in organising for a just transition.Other unions like the BFAWU are using this opportunity to renew members’ education, training of green reps or introducing the issue of climate into their bargaining and Health and Safety agenda.

But a lot of the focused efforts to shine a light on Climate Justice through the lens of Class and Cost of Living are led by other worker-climate organisations: 

• the Campaign Against Climate Change Trade Union group actively trying to get unions engaged in the Year of Trade Union Climate Action. 
• The Greener Jobs Alliance has been publishing a regular newsletter with worker-climate news for several years. 
• The Worker-Climate project has been engaging with young workers and Trades Councils to try and foster organising around Just Transition Plans.
•  Workers Planet organised a fringe day-event at the TUC last year and will again gather young workers and climate and community activists for an annual event on 12^th September 2026 in Brighton. 
• The Working Class Climate Alliance has been trying to organise working class people for Climate Justice. 
• The Climate Justice Coalition is actively working with Migrant Solidarity groups to combat racism and climate denial via their Migrant & Climate Justice group, while our Health system and food production is heavily relying on Migrant workers, often poorly organised by the mainstream unions. 
• Safe Landing, a community of aviation workers concerned about climate change, have been trying to put in practice Workers Assemblies to discuss the future of Aviation workers.
• NEON has been developing a Worker-led Transition partnership with the TUC to build strategic collaboration between the climate movement and trade union movement, while changing the public narrative about a transition and who it is for. 
• Platform, Uplift and Friends of the Earth Scotland have continued their efforts to win an energy transition in Scotland and have launched the Our Power Scotland with no official backing of trade unions while the long established Just Transition Partnership there has concentrated on research and lobbying of the Scottish government. 
• Climate Cymru has been rolling out their Warm this Winter campaign since a couple of years ago, advocating price control on energy and rents via an impressive coalition of groups which include the Welsh TUC.

The reality is that nobody has yet cracked the issue of real engagement with workers in the pollutive sector, partly because the unions that represent them, GMB and Unite, have solely focused on the threat to  jobs and favoured ‘false solutions’ that come from the fossil fuel industry and are neither proven technologies nor yet viable, such as carbon capture and storage, hydrogen, so-called ‘sustainable aviation fuels’ etc… Their vision and policies very much stay with ‘business as usual’ and the ‘balanced energy mix’. Indeed thousands of jobs have been lost in the past couple of years with very little industrial resistance from trade unions:

• Over 400 jobs in Grangemouth refinery went when Ineos moved investment to the US and other parts of the globe.
• In Port Talbot, 2,000 jobs went when Tata decided to shut down pollutive blast furnaces to replace them with electric furnaces. Although Unite ran a strike ballot, false promises by the Labour Party just before the general election meant we delayed industrial action and failed to protect jobs or to secure local investment in alternative jobs.
• In Luton, Stellantis car plant shut down with over 1,000 job losses despite promises to move to electric vehicle production.

All those situations were very much dealt with in crisis mode rather than with a strategic approach. Surely, trade unions should be mapping out potential closures in industries and designing their own alternative plans to have something concrete to campaign for positively.

Will UK workers get inspiration with the italian ex-GKN workers who have occupied their car-parts factory for the past four years? They produced an alternative plan in collaboration with the Italian climate justice movement to create a workers’ co-op and launch an alternative production of cargo bikes and solar panels, reusing their skills for a socially useful production. It’s very much a reminder of what Aerospace workers attempted to do with the Lucas Plan in 1976 and some are trying to keep that legacy alive via the New Lucas Plan for the 50th anniversary.

Unite did launch their No Ban Without Plan campaign to defend their North Sea oil and gas workers but haven’t developed alternative plans and have continue to call for the opening of new fields, in total contradiction with any UK carbon targets. As a decision on the Rosebank oil field is looming, an open letter signed by ten General Secretaries and almost 2,000 union members is demanding that the government acts for the public interest and rejects Rosebank.

Traditionally, the TUC had confined their climate strategy to an industrial strategy where the industrial unions’ voices are the only ones heard because of the threat to their members’ jobs. In reality, the climate and environmental crisis is a threat to all workers and their communities, their health, their food, energy and housing security, and the poorest people in the UK and in the Global South are the ones paying for this crisis. 

There is still a gigantic task to provide more education about the impacts of the climate and environmental crisis because many workers and trade unionists still don’t realise the bigger picture about climate shocks and tipping points. As grassroot groups are organising across the country to hold screenings of the National Emergency Briefing on climate and nature, how many trade unions are showing it to their members?

But it seems that a recognition of the wider impact these crises have on workers is growing as extreme weather events are starting to materialise. The Heat Strike campaign successfully brought together Health and Safety reps and their unions to highlight how heatwaves affect workplaces, impacting a wide range of workers, from outdoor and factory to health and education workers and campaign for a statutory workplace temperature enshrined in law.

There is also a growing call for unions’ equalities networks to have a voice as the Climate Crisis disproportionately affects women, disabled workers, workers from Global Majority backgrounds, young workers and LGBT+ workers, but it is clear that so far, trade unions haven’t been paying enough attention to that dimension of the climate crisis.

In recent years, much energy of the labour movement has been rightly been concentrating on combating the cost of living crisis, the genocide of Palestinians and the growth of Reform and the far right. But all those issues can be related to the climate crisis as prices, racism and wars are only likely to grow with climate change.

Isn’t it time for workers, their trade unions and the labour movement to renew class efforts to revive the Climate Justice movement that gained so much momentum with the massive climate strikes young people carried out across the world in 2019? Working class people are and will be the most affected by climate shocks and their survival is at stake – surely that is a top trade union issue?

Clara Paillard is a Unite Branch Secretary, writing in a personal capacity. She is a cofounder of the Unite Grassroots Climate Justice Caucus and Workers Planet. She is also the former President of PCS union Culture Group and now works as a Trade Union Organiser for  Tipping Point UK.

For educational resources about worker-climate issues, click here. For more info about Reform, the far right and the Climate Crisis, click here.

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