Making a transition away from fossil fuels is going to require a lot of work. But there’s a real concern that it will also require a lot fewer workers.
All of the workers in fossil fuel industries, for instance, are acutely aware that their jobs are at risk, if not immediately then at some point in the future. Along with automation, the energy transition also threatens to reduce the ranks of those in sectors dependent on fossil fuel, like plastics, steel, and petrochemicals. And unions are particularly concerned that unionized jobs in these sectors will be replaced with lower-paid non-union positions if they aren’t outsourced to lower-wage countries altogether.
In 2023, employment in the fossil fuel sector has rebounded from pandemic lows but hasn’t returned to pre-pandemic levels—even though oil and gas companies posted record revenues in 2022.
New jobs, of course, beckon in the “clean energy” production of solar panels, wind turbines, and the batteries and other infrastructure necessary to remake the electricity sector. According to the International Energy Agency, this sector actually overtook the fossil fuel sector in 2021. More than half of the job growth in the energy sector in 2022 was in just five categories: photovoltaic, wind, electric vehicles and batteries, heat pumps, and critical minerals mining.
But according to one U.S. study looking at employment figures from 2005 to 2021, less than one percent of workers in dirty industries ended up with “green” jobs. The prospect of new, “clean energy” jobs shimmers in the distance, but for many workers it looks like a mirage.
That’s especially the case in the Global South. Jobs in the new sustainable energy sector are not distributed evenly across the world. China, the European Union, the United States, Brazil, and India have already emerged as employment hubs. But Germany alone has considerably more jobs in this sector than all of Africa.
“One of the issues that still worries a number of workers, especially the ones that are going to migrate from either coal or fossil fuel to clean energy is: where are the alternative jobs?” says Everline Aketch, the Uganda-based sub-regional secretary for English-Speaking Africa for Public Services International. “They keep saying that the just transition will be able to provide a number of alternative jobs. But the jobs are still not there.”
One of the chief problems has been that the energy transition has largely been corporate-led rather than public-led, and companies prefer to keep labor costs low. “The class warfare between workers and owners is not going to change with the energy transition because capital is always going to be there,” points out Igor Díaz of Sintracarbón trade union in Colombia.
The energy transition also threatens to widen the gap between North and South, with the latter serving as a vast “sacrifice zone” that provides the inputs—extracted in environmentally damaging ways—that the former needs for its “clean energy” products. “Our countries cannot be forced simply to provide the resources of the North,” argues Ibis Fernández of the Confederación Intersectorial de Trabajadores Estatales del Perú. “This is all a new colonialism, right?”
Felipe Diaz, of the Colombian research institute Centro de Innovación e Investigación para el Desarrollo Justo del Sector Minero Energético, agrees. “Especially in Latin America, every government that emphasizes its own sovereignty is sabotaged either internally or externally,” he points out. “The cases have been very, very clear in Uruguay and Brazil. They tried to not depend on other countries, specifically the expansionist model of the United States, but they were literally squashed.”
The stakes could not be higher. The global economy is already undergoing its most fundamental transformation since the Industrial Revolution. If workers and trade unions are at the table negotiating the transition, the process has a greater chance of being equitable. But as the four abovementioned participants explained in the recent seminar Labor and Green Colonialism, sponsored by the Pacto Ecosocial y Intercultural del Sur and the Global Just Transition project of the Institute for Policy Studies, the current corporate-led transition will continue to disadvantage workers and widen the gap between North and South.
Some countries have a tradition of involving workers and trade unions in economic planning. The co-determination process in Germany, for instance, provides workers with a say in company policies and, though trade unions, in government policy as well.
The new government of Gustavo Petro and Francia Márquez in Colombia, meanwhile, has established a new tradition of expanding the policymaking circle. “This is a progressive government,” Felipe Diaz points out. “For the first time they want a dialogue with the actors that have historically been displaced and ignored by previous administrations.”
More commonly, however, governments and corporations leave workers out of the decision-making process. “We have been talking about energy transitions that are fair and just and that’s not something that we’ve seen in Peru,” says Ibis Fernández. “The extractive sector is a very precarious sector. There’s a lot of exploitation, and the large multinational country companies are always trying to avoid respecting the rights of workers.”
It’s ironic, Everline Aketch points out, that workers coined the phrase “just transition” only to have “this terminology hijacked by the multinational corporations. And active participation from workers in terms of defining how to move forward with the blueprint is absent. Currently there’s no clear blueprint in terms of how, for instance, Africa and particularly sub-Saharan Africa is going to be able to achieve this just transition.”
It’s not just corporations—governments, too, often pay little more than lip service to workers. “When it comes to the workers in South Africa, for instance, many of them don’t understand what the just transition is all about,” she continues. “The government comes in and says, ‘In the next five or six years, we’re going to actually close some of the mining sector.’ But they’re not explaining to the workers why they are closing the mining sector. And they’re not explaining the provisions they’ve put in place to absorb the workers who will lose their jobs.”
It comes down to a matter of equity and justice, explains Igor Diaz: “Part of justice in this transition process has to do with the involvement of unions, of workers and also the communities in the region.”
According to the neoliberal model, an unfettered market spurs economic development and the public sector should step out of the way. International financial institutions and powerful governments have for decades urged countries in the Global South to cut government expenditures, reduce government regulations, and privatize government enterprises. Many countries are applying this model to the current energy transition.
“Currently just transitions are being led by multinational corporations whose major interest is actually profit maximization,” Everline Aketch points out. “This transition, which should be led by the government, is currently being overtaken by the multinational corporations, which developed countries and the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development are also pushing.
In terms of the tenets of justice, energy itself should not only be affordable but also accessible.”
Indeed, the corporate-led development strategy brought countries like Peru to its current economic crisis. “The mining boom is finished, and the precarity of the country is growing,” reports Ibis Fernández. “The state didn’t manage its resources, never redistributed wealth, and took most of the pie.
The multinational countries did not address essential rights, did not invest in health and education, did not invest in people and workers so that they would actually have dignified work.”
Everline Aketch agrees. “The same neoliberal policies are still driving the agenda of just transition, which is quite unfair to many developing countries,” she notes. “And the Green financing program is taking the model of structural adjustment programs from the 1980s and 1990s. Those same programs forced many of our countries, including Uganda, to privatize the energy sector and many workers lost their jobs. And there was an almost threefold increase in energy prices after privatization.”
She points out that 70 percent of Kenya’s energy now comes from clean energy. “But the IMF and World Bank are forcing Kenya to privatize this sector,” she reports. And to qualify for Green financing funds from the IMF, she says that “the Kenyan government is being told first of all to plant trees.
This is not fair. To achieve a global just transition, there should be a level playing field. Africa should be provided the policy space to determine how it wants the trajectory of the just transition to take place. We have different levels and stages of development.”
John Feffer is the director of Foreign Policy In Focus, where this article originally appeared
