I was delighted to be invited to participate in the Workshop, Weather and Work: How Climate Change Relates to Workers' Rights"/Mëtéo et Travail: Comment le Changement climatique se rapporte aux droits des travailleurs, held at Osgoode Hall, York University, Toronto, Canada on 8 December 2022. For more information, program, and concept note, please see here.
For my contribution, Climate Impacts, Labor Rights, and Pathways to Remedy, I spoke to the complicated issue of labor rights in the shadow of climate impacts. The issue of climate action has produced three quite distinct lenses of analysis that have tended to drive debate. One seeks to de-center the human from the issue of sustainability and climate change, to reduce toward zero the human imprint. The second centers the human but from an idealized baseline the indicator of which some point before industrialization. The last lends centers the human in climate change and sustainability. It accepts the inevitability of climate degradation but acknowledges it as a variable. These lenses are reflected and are embedded in the approaches of liberal democratic, Marxist-Leninist, and developing states. None of the three, however, have focused much on labor. And when they have, they tend to view the issue from the lens of damage to workers--most notably as a consequence of heat. And yet the issues around labor, labor rights, and labor participation in climate mitigating measures are far broader and more complex. This presentation then explored some of this complexity. Among the most interesting features of this complexity is the role of labor as both an instrument of climate degradation and as a group whose rights would be harmed. The expansion of rights to refuse work that threatens safety is also considered.
The PowerPoint follows and may also be accessed here.
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