From The Union: Jobs, industry and climate change

Don’t just take my word for it, a report from the Climate Council found that our Government is doing the least of any developed nation when it comes to action on climate change. This Government’s inaction on climate will not only raise the risk that we will face increased global temperatures – and the associated increases in server weather events – it leaves our nation unprepared to deal with the realities of a low-emissions future.

With the US, the EU and other major trading partners looking at imposing carbon tariffs, our failure to invest in decarbonising our energy system and shifting our manufacturing industry to low-emissions technology is a huge risk to workers and communities that rely on those jobs.

The only thing worse than Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s Government’s woeful performance on preventing climate change is their support for the workers, businesses and communities that will be affected by this energy transition. The longer they put their heads in the sand and deny that urgent action is required, the harder that transition is going to be and the harder it will hit us.

But we’re not sitting on our hands and waiting for the Government to come to the rescue – we’re taking action and setting a standard that we’d like to see replicated around the country. That is why the AMWU is a proud member of the Hunter Jobs Alliance.

For those who haven’t been acquainted with the Hunter Jobs Alliance, I’ll take you through why we saw a need for it, and how we came to build it.

After the 2019 election, where we saw fossil fuel-reliant communities express their economic anxieties at the ballot box, everyone had an opinion on what went wrong, or what needed to be done.

The problem, as we saw it, was that workers had been completely alienated by politics and used as scapegoats for fossil fuel companies and conservative politicians to shield their inaction on climate. What became really clear to me, through our work on the Hunter Jobs Alliance, was that framing matters. How we define and talk about a problem shapes the way people feel about it, and what’s possible for us to respond to it.

So we got to work on building a solution that brought workers’ together to start talking about how we could work together to solve the problems that the political class have been unable to resolve. How could we deliver solidarity and social justice by working with the whole community?

One Saturday in the month after the last election, I assembled a group of AMWU delegates in our Western Sydney offices. We spoke together and heard ideas from some leading thinkers on their ideas for solving the challenges that faced our members and their communities. We spoke honestly about how they wanted their union to respond to climate change.

It was a challenging conversation, given a lot of our members make their living off the fossil fuel supply chain. I remember one delegate who stood up and said: “It’s not like I wake up every day and look forward to polluting the environment. If there was a job that I could use my skill-set on, and get a decent wage, I would move tomorrow. I am loyal to my family, not coal.”

After those meetings, our union decided that we were sick and tired of waiting and that we wanted to reach out and do something concrete for our members and their communities.

From there, the Hunter Jobs Alliance was formed – a coming together of nine unions and four environmental organisations.

We worked hard to establish the goals of the Alliance and I’d like to focus on a few of those now:

• Ending the Climate culture wars. Move past the convenient “Jobs vs Environment” framing that only helps those who want to do nothing about either jobs or the environment, and show how the change in our economy can be used to the advantage of working people and their communities.
• Advocating for labour-intensive, low-carbon projects in the Hunter Valley.
• Establishing a new, strong, clear voice for workers and communities about the future of our economy.

We’re still at the start of our journey with the Alliance, but we’ve made some important early gains.

We’ve learned to walk towards discomfort – we’re not here to speak to the converted. We need to change minds, engage with workers where they are, and help win them over to help us plan for the future. We need to challenge underlying assumptions – not through lecturing, but through earnest efforts to understand, and respectfully resolving those disagreements together.

Through those difficult conversations, we’re getting a really clear picture of what workers want our response to climate change to look like. They want better training and job security for themselves and their kids, they want to see investment in their communities, and new opportunities to use their skills while they earn a decent wage in a secure job. But most of all they want a plan. They want a vision for how things can get better and the things that they love – their family, their community and their region – can be protected when times are tough.

Our Government is offering these workers nothing but empty promises, so the AMWU and the Hunter Jobs Alliance are proud to step in and start doing this important work.

We know that we need climate action and job creation.