Ep 5 - Ecotopianism and the Future of Labour in 21st Century - Professor Emerita Verity Burgmann - a podcast by Common Alternatives

The potential role of organized workers in combatting environmental problems and global warming is rarely discussed in academic considerations of these problems. For example, Ulrich Beck on The Risk Society ignores the role of working-class organisations when dealing with the question of how to confront ecological irresponsibility. The ecotopian imagination is similarly unreceptive to the potential of labour movements to bring about significant social change towards an egalitarian and sustainable green future. Environmental philosophers and speculative fiction writers alike evince little interest in the working-class as a subject potentially capable of exhibiting agency to achieve ecotopian ends. Yet workers have power at the point of production; and are not the dying force depicted in neoliberal media. Globalisation has hugely expanded the size of the international proletariat, inadvertently creating militant labour movements in developing economies and encouraging novel strategies from embattled workers everywhere. Workers can withdraw their labour from exploitative and environmentally damaging production, as the green bans movement in the 1970s dramatically demonstrated. And in their everyday working lives, workers are in the frontline of improvements in production practices to decarbonise economies. ‘Climate Change is Union Business’, according to an ACTU pamphlet. Internationally, Trade Unions for Energy Democracy is ensuring that Just Transition is no longer merely a redundancy policy but a transformative agenda that brings trade unions into radical collaboration with climate activists to build a better, greener future. Workers not only have the capacity to effect sustainability, if not ecotopia, but also the greatest interest in so doing, because they are much more vulnerable than richer people to environmental problems and climate change, including extreme weather events, as Hurricane Katrina vividly demonstrated.  Professor Emerita Verity Burgmann (Fellow of ASSA) is Adjunct Professor of Politics in the School of Social Sciences at Monash University and Honorary Professorial Fellow in the eScholarship Research Centre at the University of Melbourne, where she is Director of the Reason in Revolt website. Burgmann's research interests are international labour movement responses to globalization, radical political ideologies, contemporary protest movements, environmental politics, anti-globalization and anti-corporate politics, and Australian labour history. She has established a significant reputation both as a labour historian and as a political scientist of social movements and social change. 

Alternative Futures and Regional Prospects Symposium Working across Differences, beyond Carbon, Capital and Commodity  Thursday 22nd & Friday 23rd of November 2018 Organizers: The University of Newcastle Alternative Futures Network, Common Alternatives Network (http://thecommonalts.com/); hosted by The University of Technology Sydney

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