This motion is for trade union branches, trades councils, AGMs and annual conferences, and TUC 2024. It is intended to set the fundamentals in place for the climate debate within and between trade unions, in the interests of workers across the whole economy. The ambition is for union branches and AGMs, and delegate conferences, to table this motion, or a tailored adaptation of it. It is meant to complement sector- and issue-specific climate motions and sets the overall context within which trade union discussion of climate issues should take place.
If you pass this motion at a meeting, AGM or conference, we would be very grateful if you could let us know at the link here: https://rb.gy/96wu5e
Motion text
Conference affirms that climate change is a class issue and a trade union issue.
Conference notes that the:
- UN Secretary General has said we are in a new era of global boiling with unprecedented extreme weather impacting every part of the globe with increasing frequency.
- International Energy Agency (IEA) states that to stay below the Paris Climate Agreement of 1.5oC fossil fuel use must reduce by 25% this decade and we cannot develop any new fossil fuel sites.
- Working class in the U.K. and globally are already being impacted by the terrible consequences of climate change, through loss of lives, livelihoods, food, access to water, housing and accommodation, forced migration, unbearable working conditions and an intolerable burden on emergency services.
- UK government is doing little to safeguard workers or people from the impacts of climate change and, far from it, is advancing a narrative that seeks to make a virtue of weakening its commitments.
Conference believes:
- We need a rapid transition away from oil and gas to prevent catastrophic climate breakdown.
- Failing to take urgent measures to transition away from fossil fuels puts jobs at risk from sudden climate events or their economic consequences and foregoes opportunities to build in a timely way the larger skilled workforce needed across the whole economy without which decarbonisation cannot happen.
- Inequality and declining standards of living for working class people are explicitly locked into a fossil-fuelled market economy and austerity policies.
- The costs of transition to a decarbonised economy and society must not fall on those least able to pay.
- Transition policies must be generated by state investment.
- We must resist attempts aimed at using climate to divide working people; this only serves elites and distracts us from our common interest in jobs and a secure future.
- Political posturing on net zero policies does not help our class and we must fight for policies that address climate change and environmental degradation rooted in economic and social justice.
- Trade unions and workers in all sectors are central to transition plans.
- Workers in other countries are our allies.
Conference agrees to fight for:
- Policies to address climate change and environmental degradation that are in the interests of workers and communities, and a plan for the forms of bargaining and industrial action to achieve them.
- Negotiated transition plans that guarantee protection for all workers in all sectors of the economy including across all equality strands, and as a minimum should cover jobs, wages, pensions, training and skills and trade union rights.
- Public ownership of key sectors such as energy, water, transport, mail, broadband, education, health and social care.
- A fair and progressive taxation system, accessing the wealth of one of the world’s richest countries without asking working people to pay for a crisis they did not create.
- A National Climate Service to plan, coordinate, fund and ensure education/ training for the workforce necessary to undertake the rapid and wide scale transformation to a decarbonised economy.
- Workers and their unions being directly and immediately engaged with government in designing and defining what the decarbonised industries and their workforces of the future look like.
- Solutions to the climate crisis that are in the interests of workers and communities, not capital.
Further, conference agrees to build combines within and across sectors, at the level of branches as well as nationally and globally, to develop common industrial strategies that contribute to a ‘whole economy’ approach to decarbonisation, including engagement with community and climate justice groups.
Link to motion text online and form to record when the motion has been passed:
The Green Light 