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The Palgrave Handbook of Environmental Labour Studies pp 769–792Cite as

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Labour and Societal Relationships with Nature. Conceptual Implications for Trade Unions

Abstract

The authors argue that labour should become a topic of focus in the analysis of unsustainability in order to establish practical paths towards sustainability. They present the concept of ‘societal relationships with nature’ and demonstrate the need for a stronger consideration of the connections between labour and nature. The authors reveal the power structures that are intricately linked with the organisation, distribution, and valuation of labour in society. To take them into account, they argue, is crucial for an adequate assessment of the recent introduction of labour into the political and scientific sustainability debates, for example, through the UN’s ‘sustainable work’ concept. Taking trade unions in Germany and Austria as an example, the implications of this theoretical perspective for labour environmentalism are explained.

Keywords

  • Labour and nature
  • Sustainability
  • Trade unions
  • Sustainable work
  • Germany
  • Austria

The work on this text was funded by the Vienna Science and Technology Fund (WWTF) through project ESR17-067.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    By ‘borrowing’ this term, its German equivalent being Arbeitsgesellschaft, we seek to draw attention to three things. First, to satisfy human needs, each society is dependent upon the appropriation of nature through work (Arbeit). Second, modern capitalist societies can be fittingly described as societies based on paid work (Erwerbsarbeitsgesellschaften), which means that only this kind of work is defined as work. Nevertheless, these societies remain, thirdly, always structurally dependent on access to unpaid reproductive work.

  2. 2.

    We use this term in the way suggested by Görg (2011). For more on the difficulty of translating the German term gesellschaftliche Naturverhältnisse, see Görg et al. (2017, 2).

  3. 3.

    These include above all the prominent approaches developed in the German-speaking world at the Institute for Social-Ecological Research (ISOE, Frankfurt, Germany) and the Vienna School of Social Ecology (Austria) (for an overview, see Kramm et al. 2017b).

  4. 4.

    For an overview of various such theories, see, for example, Robbins et al. (2014).

  5. 5.

    A comprehensive discussion of this long-standing discourse would exceed the scope of this chapter since it is a separate theoretical debate in its own right, the value of which is ultimately determined by its contribution to practical research (e.g. see Braun and Castree (1998), Haraway (2008), or Malm (2018), who offers a harsh critique of the elimination of the difference between nature and society).

  6. 6.

    While we concentrate in the following on highly industrialised northern nations like Germany and Austria, ‘classic’ political ecology focuses primarily on conflicts in the appropriation of nature in the Global South (e.g. Peet and Watts 2004). Barca and Bridge (2015), however, rightly demonstrate that the political ecology perspective should also be applied to the industrialised nations. This would allow the specific forms of regulating relations to nature encountered in the rich capitalist nations of the North to be analysed with regard to the inevitable links between both regions of the world in the globaldivision of labour context.

  7. 7.

    Patel and Moore (2018) distinguish a total of seven related ‘cheap things’ that facilitate the global, capitalist exploitation: nature, money, work, care, food, energy, and lives.

  8. 8.

    While a discussion of the long-standing and differentiated feminist critique and development of Marxist concepts would exceed the scope of this chapter, further details on this topic can be found, for example, in Salleh (1997), Saave/Muraca, Chap. 32, Räthzel, Chap. 34.

  9. 9.

    This is revealed, for instance, in the topics and indices found in relevant environmental sociology handbooks (see, for instance, Redclift and Woodgate 2010; Dunlap and Brulle 2015). Aside from a few limited exceptions (see footnote 6), only eco-Marxist and eco-feminist works take a different path.

  10. 10.

    The German government’s 2018 updated sustainability strategy also uses GDP growth and the employment rate as indicators for Goal 8 and thus remains within the limited parameters of a classic industrial society labour regime (Deutsche Bundesregierung 2018, 55). The ILO (2019) likewise refers explicitly to SDG 8 in its outline of ‘decent and sustainable work’. It thus also seeks to reach this goal primarily through investments in a green economy, increased competitiveness and growth (ibid., 49): ‘[h]uman centred growth, […] decent jobs, gender equality and sustainable development’ (ibid., 46) should primarily be achieved through the formalisation of work and therefore through the expansion of paid work.

  11. 11.

    Obviously ‘the’ trade unions as such do not exist, not least because of the different business sectors, specific national trade union cultures and different logics applied at different levels within the trade union apparatus, including this level of detail for each trade union would exceed the scope of this chapter.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology, LMU Munich, Munich, Germany

    Thomas Barth

  2. Socio-Ecological Transformation, Institute for Advanced Studies, Vienna, Austria

    Beate Littig

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  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

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Barth, T., Littig, B. (2021). Labour and Societal Relationships with Nature. Conceptual Implications for Trade Unions. 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_33

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