Climate Change in the Global Workplace

Labour, Adaptation and Resistance

Nithya Natarajan, Laurie Parsons, Nithya Natarajan, Laurie Parsons

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000377903
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Économie
• Subtopic: Économie du travail

This book offers a timely exploration of how climate change manifests in the global workplace. It draws together accounts of workers, their work, and the politics of resistance in order to enable us to better understand how the impacts of climate change are structured by the economic and social processes of labour.

Focusing on nine empirically grounded cases of labour under climate change, this volume links the tools and methods of critical labour studies to key debates over climate change adaptation and mitigation in order to highlight the active nature of struggles in the climate-impacted workplace. Spanning cases including commercial agriculture in Turkey, labour unions in the UK, and brick kilns in Cambodia, this collection offers a novel lens on the changing climate, showing how both the impacts ofclimate change and adaptations to it emerge through the prism of working lives.

Drawing together scholars from anthropology, political economy, geography, and development studies, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of climate change adaptation, labour studies, and environmental justice. More generally, it will be of interest to anybody seeking to understand how the changing climate is changing the terms, conditions, and politics of the global workplace.

1 Introduction

Climate change in the global workplace: labour, adaptation, and resistance

Nithya Natarajan and Laurie Parsons

Global temperatures rose by 1^oC from the late 1800s to 2017 and continue to ascend. “Profound alterations to human and natural systems” are underway, posing “unprecedented risks to vulnerable people and populations” (IPCC, 2018, p. 53). From political leaders to the media, calls are growing in volume for a plan by which human populations might be able to adapt to these worsening conditions. Because we cannot stop what is already underway, it is imperative that we learn to adapt.

This pressing need to respond to the changes in our environment has seen the concept of adaptation assume a leading role in the response to climate change. Yet despite its prominence, adaptation is a contested topic. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) defines climate adaptation as “actions taken to manage the impacts of climate change by reducing vulnerability and exposure to its harmful effects and exploiting any potential benefits” (IPCC, 2018, p. 51), a relatively ambiguous definition that is left open theoretically to any number of political paths. Yet in practice, climate adaptation – a well-funded global architecture of multilateral institutions, local and national governments, and private business – centres on a methodological individualism, limiting the scope of formulation. As Taylor (2015, p. xi) states:

Extracted from its roots in biology and transposed into the context of contemporary climate change, adaptation is now held to represent an equally innate process of social adjustments to external climatic stimuli. Facing the assuredly grave consequences of global climatic change, the pressing need for immediate and comprehensive adaptation is seemingly self-evident

Framed thus, the process of adaptation appears natural, individually centred, and apolitical. Climate change acts as an external threat upon society, and adaptation processes serve to adjust to it. As Taylor suggests (2015), such a notion of climate adaptation, with its core focus of maintaining the status quo and naturalising change, serves to radically depoliticise the process of addressing climate change.

We write as countries across the world begin to reawaken from state-enforced lockdowns following the Covid-19 crisis. The long-standing arguments from governments lamenting the impossibility of state intervention around climate change appear frailer than ever, as we live through one of the most far-reaching periods of state control in recent times. A number of commentators have compared the now sizeable bailout and welfare packages being pushed by state governments across the world to the need for increased state spending on the climate, and calls to do this in recent decades (see, for example, Watts, 2020). Yet this misses the key point about what current state spending represents in terms of capitalism. That is, whilst Covid-19 bailout packages for businesses and wage replacement schemes for workers represent a means of supporting, stabilising, and eventually relaunching capitalist growth in its current form, the calls from much of the climate movement ask for an end or radical restructuring of the current system. This is precisely the difference between climate adaptation, as revealed by Taylor, and climate resistance. Whilst the former advocates individualised adjustments in the face of climate impacts, the latter, we contend, speaks to a political act, addressing the structural roots of both climate change and labour exploitation through reworking the relations of degradation, appropriation, and exploitation.

Such an approach foregrounds how climate change and capital are inextricably intertwined. The creation of wealth under capitalism is reliant upon the plunder of natural resources, at rates that outpace natural cycles of recharge and in ways that cause untold emissions of harmful substances, all enabled through the exploitation of labour (Foster, 2000). Therefore, in asking how the poorest and most marginalised adapt to climate change, this volume adopts a labour-centred lens, attentive in particular to linkages between the drivers of climate change and the forces engendering poverty.

Indeed, as it becomes increasingly clear that “the world of work is intimately connected with the natural environment” (ILO, 2019, p. 16), those who are relatively socially disadvantaged are likely to find themselves “disproportionately affected by temperature extremes” (Hansen, Bi, Saniotis, & Nitschke, 2013, p. 2), with ethnic and political disadvantages acting as key channels for the impacts of climate change. Nevertheless, this remains a largely neglected scholarly nexus. Indeed, in general, “environmental studies have largely ignored labour issues, while labour studies have paid little attention to climate change issues” (Räthzel & Uzzell, 2011). Therefore, in order to properly understand the durable vulnerabilities that exist and persist at this intersection, it is necessary to broaden the scope of analysis in relation to both economic development and climatic change.

This book provides a set of perspectives aimed at bridging this disjuncture, bringing together authors from a range of disciplines to shed light on the nexus of labour and climate change. Seeking to structure this inquiry in terms of key areas of relevance to climate change scholarship, it does so in three parts: labour, adaptation, and resistance. In the first of these, three authors offer perspectives on how labour is shaped by climate change, highlighting not only the empirical need to attend to this question but also the conceptual adjustments necessary to effect its proper resolution. In the second part, on adaptation, three further contributions speak to the need to reframe and deepen conceptualisations of adaptation within climate change scholarship, highlighting the complex, multi-scalar factors which shape how people respond to their environment and the outcomes of those responses. The final part of the book addresses the key question of agency and resistance under climate change, calling across its three chapters for a more nuanced and economically embedded understanding of climate resistance, capable of articulating the everyday struggles and contestations that shape workers’ lives and livelihoods in a changing climate.

Labour under climate change

The working poor constitute the mainstay of the global economy (Breman & van der Linden, 2014). With repeated assertions from the IPCC (IPCC, 2014, 2018), to the United Nations Development Programme (2020), to radical organisers (Pettit, 2004), that the most vulnerable will be those that face the most adverse impacts of climate change, we argue here for a more coherent focus on what constitutes vulnerability – labour – what work and workers look like today, and what this tells us in terms of efforts towards addressing climate impacts.

Today, the majority of work across the global South and parts of the global North is low-paid, insecure, and lacking in social protections. As Breman and van der Linden argue (2014), in Western Europe, improvements around improved working conditions, social safety nets, and wages that were won through collective bargaining in the past two centuries were eroded through the onset of neoliberal policies from the 1970s. In particular, the “full employment capitalism” promoted in the post–Second World War (WWII) era across the West came to an end, replaced instead by “flexibilization”, and a rise in precarious jobs (Breman & van der Linden, 2014, pp. 923–924). Alongside this, the past four decades have seen a decline in the state social safety net – through welfare, public utilities and infrastructure, and public finance – all of which have increased the living costs for the working poor.

As Munck argues (2013), this informal landscape of work has arguably always been the norm in the global South. However, a similar process of erosion in terms of social safety nets has also taken place. In the post–WWII era, post-colonial countries across the global South have largely transformed from agrarian to industrial and services sector–led growth economies, with this uneven process of transformation beginning for many during colonial regimes (Bernstein, 1996). Crucially, the many global South countries compelled to take on Structural Adjustment Programme loans from the International Monetary Fund from the late 1970s onwards have seen an acceleration of capitalist development. Agrarian commercialisation, characterised by land titling, commodification of agricultural inputs, and the entry of global capital into agricultural commodity chains, has seen a deepening of class differentiation in the countryside, as the rural poor are dispossessed and forced to seek work in the non-farm sector (Bernstein, 2006; Li, 2009). Yet the transition towards industrial and service sector–led growth in many of these countries has not seen the creation of adequate jobs. Instead, in many regions of the global South where growth continues apace without adequate labour absorption, large populations of poor are rendered “surplus to capital’s requirement” (Li, 2009, p. 69). Under such circumstances, reproducing the household often involves labour migration, within and across national borders, with remittances now advocated as a key strategy of global development (Kunz, 2011).

Notwithstanding the heterogeneity of informal labour markets and their causes across the world, these broad trends of declining social safety nets, the ascendancy of capitalist growth without job creation, and the erosion of working conditions and wages for existing jobs speak to a rising landscape of precarity. Crucially, the rise of this landscape corresponds with a period of unrivalled global wealth creation, as shown in Figure 1.1.

Figure 1.1 Global gross domestic product (US$), 1960–2019

Source: World Bank (2020).

Wealth in the neoliberal era is therefore built in part through the complex and myriad means through which workers are adversely incorporated into new circuits of capitalist accumulation (Hickey & Bracking, 2005), on precarious terms and without adequate social support. The system that undermines the working poor thus undergirds the success of capitalist accumulation.

During the last four decades, these conditions have seen ‘the coincident economic and environmental “crises” of our time’ (Castree, 2010, p. 185) enact a bilateral vice on labour, especially in the global South contexts most recently integrated into global production. Indeed, as we contend, the forms of precarity effected by environmental factors on the one hand and economic factors on the other are so deeply intertwined that they should no longer be seen as separate. Rather, in an era where climate change has become fully embedded in worker livelihoods, a perspective is needed that acknowledges this everyday uncertainty and risk as the norm, rather than the exception in capitalist practice.

In the first chapter of Part I, Chapter 2, Parsons explores this contention through the lens of the uneven geography of heat in the global workplace. Applying a novel “thermal inequality” lens to explore the processes by which vulnerability to heat stress is mediated through channels of socio-economic and cultural disadvantage, the chapter draws on the context of brick workers in the Cambodian construction industry to examine the translocal dimensions of heat stress. From this standpoint, it shows how those most exposed to excess heat in rural areas experience linked vulnerabilities in urban and modern sector work. Thus, Parsons argues, the impacts of climate change are embodied by individuals and rendered mobile by structural inequalities. They are therefore not only unequal but durably unequal in their manifestation.

Chapter 3 tackles these issues from a different perspective, switching a translocal for a vertical lens to explore the power relations shaping transitions to sustainable agriculture. Arguing that the literature on agroecology has tended to ignore the persistent role of top-down power structures in managing labour during such transitions, Patrick Bottazzi, Sébastien Boillat, Franziska Marfurt, and Sokhna Mbossé Seck explore how vertical channels of labour impede workers from becoming genuine agents of transformation, casting them instead as “technical demonstrators” rather than becoming agents of transformation. As they show, this is a gap that resonates with a widespread lack of attention to questions of power and social inequality in sustainable agriculture research, in particular climate-smart agriculture, which tends to focus exclusively on technical and farm-level issues.

The final chapter of the labour part, Chapter 4, seeks once again to broaden the scope through which impacts of climate change are assessed. Arguing for the need to expand the scope of development and disaster risk management to include a political economy framework, Taneesha Mohan draws on the experiences of two marginalised communities in Bangladesh to show how the impact of disasters in this, one of the world’s most climate vulnerable countries, is inextricable from the growing insecurity of work. Exacerbated by exclusionary government policies that have left the marginalised worse-off in Bangladesh, the impacts of climate change are therefore moulded by macro-political factors and imbricated into wider processes of agrarian neoliberalism which have created a “crisis of labour” marked by exploitative working conditions (Bernstein, 2001).

What draws these three contextually diverse accounts of labour together, therefore, is a shared commitment to extending the frames governing the analysis of labour in a changing climate. Whilst Parsons advocates a translocal framing, in order to capture the durability and transportability of climatic impacts, Bottazzi et al. advocate a vertical lens to account for the power relations governing sustainable transitions. Mohan, similarly, calls for an expansion of analytical scale, placing labour under climate change within the precarities and inequalities of the wider political economy. Across these three intersecting perspectives, each chapter therefore speaks to a common concern with the insularity of labour analysis under climate change, showing it to be inseparable from the wider power relations within which labour relations are played out more generally. Not only does “climate change exacerbate precariousness, disrupting all work and intensifying and extending individual risk” (New...