Climate on the Horizon?: Gothenburg dockworkers’ framings of their political horizon regarding climate change

Abstract

The climate is rapidly warming, and this has triggered a global trend in mobilisation against climate change. Due to workers’ unique position within the capitalist mode of production the interest in the potential for labour mobilisation against climate change is growing. Workers in environmentally degrading industries prove an interesting contradiction, and a window into thinking about the relation between labour and nature, as they are both dependent on nature, i.e. their living conditions, but also seemingly on the survival of the polluting industries. This has led some to pose a dichotomy between ‘jobs’ and ‘the environment’. Unsatisfied with that explanation, this qualitative interview study with members of the dockworkers’ union Hamnarbetarförbundet in the Port of Gothenburg instead explores the framings of the dockworkers’ political horizon regarding climate change. Drawing on recent research and theoretical debates in the nascent field of Environmental Labour Studies, along with an engagement with Marxist debates on ecology, this explorative study attempts to stake out new paths for labour environmentalisms. My findings show the workers’ framings are bound up in the practical experiences of work and the institutional arrangements of the labour market, limiting the focus of climate mitigating measures to the workplace. I argue that these narrow workplace environment-related issues could be the initial focus of alliance building between unionists and climate activists for I find that Critical Materialism reveals the potential for a radical critique residing in the workers’ intuitive sense of capital’s joint degradation of workers and their environment.