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Workers, Trade Unions, and the Imperial Mode of Living: Labour Environmentalism from the Perspective of Hegemony Theory

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The Palgrave Handbook of Environmental Labour Studies

Abstract

Beginning with Fordism, wage labour in the global North has been a central component of an imperial mode of living: The exploitation of labour power has been facilitated by the possibility of externalising socio-ecological costs in space and time. More recently, multiple crises phenomena have indicated that this constellation could have come to an end. The promises of the imperial mode of living seem to be less and less realisable, not only for most of the people in the global South but also for an increasing number of workers in the global North. Against this background, there is the chance to strengthen an environmentalism that organically links labour and the environment and thus contributes to rethinking and reorganising the economy from the perspective of social reproduction.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    As part of its 2009 ‘Recovery Package’, the German government promoted new auto purchases with an ‘environment bonus’ (arguing that new cars produced less emissions) of 2500 Euro (totalling 5 billion Euro). About 1.75 million new cars were bought through this programme between January and September 2009. In Austria, 30,000 new vehicles were purchased with the government subsidy of 1500 Euro per car in an effort to prop up the automotive industry.

  2. 2.

    For a typology of power resources, see Schmalz et al. (2018).

  3. 3.

    Georg Jochum (2016) has emphasized the connection between coloniality and work in an even more systematic manner than Quijano. Of course, this is not to deny the struggles in the colonized countries and the social forces fighting racism and capitalist exploitation. As Beverly Silver (2003) and Zhang Lu (2015) have pointed out, social conflicts follow the relocation of capital.

  4. 4.

    We use the term ‘subalterns’ in a broad, that is, Gramscian sense as opposed to the dominant classes of society. It thus also includes workers in capitalism.

  5. 5.

    See Dörre (2018, 13, our translation): It can be ‘justifiably doubted that the 45 richest households in the Federal Republic of Germany, which have a share of assets roughly equivalent to that of the poorer half of the population, are connected by a common mode of living, a hegemonic promise of happiness, with the one million people who never managed to get out of the benefit system since the existence of the Hartz IV basic security scheme’. See also Nachtwey (2018) and, with regard to energy, Dahm and Bannas (2011). The fact that more and more people are locked in the framework of the imperial mode of living and appealed by its ongoing attractiveness and at the same time are deprived of the capacities to benefit from it in the same way as they were used to can be seen as one of the root-causes of the rise of the social and political right (see below and Dörre et al. 2018; Sauer et al. 2018).

  6. 6.

    Migration is a multifaceted phenomenon, because it refers to, for example, people who temporarily migrate within Europe in order to achieve a higher income in other countries, but also to people who have to flee under life-threatening circumstances (cf. Lang 2017).

  7. 7.

    China, for instance, is shifting ecological costs in form of greenhouse gas emissions to other countries as part of the ‘New Silk Road’ project. See the instructive essay by Federico Demaria and Joan Martinez-Alier (2017). The authors point out that in the course of this project Chinese companies have already invested in 240 coal-fired power plants and thus contributed to spatially shifting environmental damage and conflicts. See also Hoering (2018).

  8. 8.

    See, for example, the ‘green economy’ initiative of UNEP (2011b) and the concept of a ‘European Green Deal’ (European Commission 2019).

  9. 9.

    See the cartography and analysis of socio-ecological conflicts conducted by the EU FP7 project ‘Environmental Justice Organisations, Liabilities and Trade’ (http://www.ejolt.org/).

  10. 10.

    Stevis (2018) and Stevis et al. (2018) systematize union approaches to labour and the environment according to the criteria depth (what significance does the labour-environment relationship have for a union, what is the character of the proposed socio-economic changes and how far do they reach?), breadth (the scale and scope of the measures considered necessary) and agency (is the union strategy proactive or reactive?). For our purpose, the depth criterion is the most important one, although we also include aspects of the other two.

  11. 11.

    In Germany, the miners’ union (IG BCE) has to be mentioned in this respect, whereas, for example, the metalworkers’ union (IG Metall) is more ambivalent. Being confronted with a massive structural change in the automotive sector, the central domain of IG Metall’s organisational power, some union representatives call for an ecological modernisation in the form electro-automobility. Others however strive for a more fundamental transformation that aims to overcome the car-centred mobility system. For a recent overview of the German debate on labour and ecology, see Schröder and Urban (2018).

  12. 12.

    Although this initiative was rather short-lived—actually it was marginalised in the course of German reunification and by the socio-ecologically destructive effects of neoliberal globalisation—it has become a point of reference in recent union debates again.

  13. 13.

    See the similar position of the Korean Power Plant Industry Union (KPTU) which supported the phase-out of older coal-fired power stations with the following words: ‘Although our hearts are heavy, we welcome the shutdown of worn out coal power plants because we are clear about what kind of country we want to leave for our descendants’ (statement of the KPTU, quoted in Sweeney and Treat 2018, 39).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Business and Economics, Berlin School of Economics and Law, Berlin, Germany

    Markus Wissen

  2. Department of Political Science, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria

    Ulrich Brand

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology, Umeå University, Umeå, Sweden

    Nora Räthzel

  2. Department of Political Science, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO, USA

    Dimitris Stevis

  3. School of Psychology, University of Surrey, Guildford, UK

    David Uzzell

Additional information

The text is based on our paper ‘Working-class environmentalism und sozial-ökologische Transformation. Widersprüche der imperialen Lebensweise’, published in WSI Mitteilungen 72 (1), 2019, 39–47, https://doi.org/10.5771/0342-300X-2019-1-39, which was substantially revised and further developed for the purpose of this handbook. We wish to thank the handbook editors for their patience and helpful suggestions. Furthermore, we are grateful to Bert Preiss for the English translation, to Barbara Jungwirth for the language editing and to Christopher Beil for editorial assistance.

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Wissen, M., Brand, U. (2021). Workers, Trade Unions, and the Imperial Mode of Living: Labour Environmentalism from the Perspective of Hegemony Theory. In: Räthzel, N., Stevis, D., Uzzell, D. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Environmental Labour Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71909-8_30

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