Abstract
In labor, climate and social movement organizing contexts, calls have been made for the importance of political education; yet the meaning of political education is often left poorly defined. This article argues that what is usually being called for is a model of radical (political) education. Using the example of political education developed by the UK trade union movement to address the climate crisis, the article suggests how a model of radical education can help to identify and understand gaps and limitations in attempts to develop effective political education for building power to create a more just and sustainable world.
In the context of the labor and climate movements, and social movement organizing more generally, there is now a regular call for the importance of political education. Political education is “the buzzword on the left at the moment,” notes Sasha Josette, an organizer with The World Transformed in the UK (Moran et al. 2019, 103). In the labor movement, the call for political education is often made from a concern for the debilitating effects of the loss of earlier traditions of political education for workers and depoliticization of much labor education today. “Politics, philosophy and economics … are exactly the subjects that trade unions have stripped out of their programmes for decades” writes Nicholls (2017, 8–9) and “must be restored,” because “political and economic illiteracy lie at the heart of our difficulties in rebuilding our movement.” In the climate movement, activists and educators call for a turn to “political education” and “political literacy” in recognition of the need to go beyond prevailing technocratic, apolitical, and individualistic models of climate education to build an effective and transformative climate movement (Kranz et al. 2022; Niebert 2019). In social movement organizing generally, arguments for the importance of political education are being made by organizers with Black Lives Matter and abolition movements, education justice movements, and socialist political movements in the US and UK.
Yet, despite this apparent consensus, the term “political education” is often left undefined or poorly defined, whether by activists or researchers. Many of the definitions and conceptualizations that may be found in the academic literature on political education do not seem to fit what labor, climate, and social movement activists are really talking about. Consider, for example, Gutmann's (1999, 287) argument that political education consists of “the cultivation of the virtues, knowledge, and skills necessary for political participation,” that “prepares citizens to participate in consciously reproducing their society.” Much of this academic literature, as Ranford (2022, 19) notes, is “focused on school or university education and on politics with a capital P—that is, the functioning of Westminster and formal political processes.” Even those definitions offered by writers engaged in movement contexts do not always seem to capture all of the core issues at stake. “Broadly defined, political education entails a critical awareness of historical and political events” write Zavala and Henning (2021, 1141), for example, in their study of political education run by a teacher activist organization in California. “What is this word that people keep using?” asks Josette (Moran et al. 2019, 103). As Vaquas (2018) argues, “it's not enough to simply reiterate that we need more political education,” we also “need to get to grips with what a good political education means.”
In this article, I argue that the call for political education in contemporary labor, climate, and social movement contexts is effectively a call for radical education, a broad set of education traditions with a long history that are oriented explicitly to supporting projects of radical (or substantive) social change (Cooper 2020; Foley 2001; Lovett 1994; Tannock 2021). The value in recognizing this link with radical education is not only to differentiate this kind of education from other political education approaches but also to be able to draw on the radical education literature to identify the core components of this education. For this opens the possibility of evaluating projects of (radical) political education now being developed in current movement contexts. In the following pages, I explain some of the conceptual dilemmas raised by current calls in movement contexts for political education and suggest that these dilemmas can be addressed by making the link with radical education. After sketching out a framework of the components of radical education, I use this framework to analyze some of the new experiments in political education on the climate crisis currently being forged in the UK trade union movement. For as union activists seek to grapple with the challenges of the climate crisis, and climate activists seek to engage trade unions in their movement struggles, there has been a proliferation in the UK of a range of political education projects for workers on the climate crisis that are promising, albeit fragmented and small in scale. Using an analytical framework of radical education can help to highlight what some of these projects have to offer for building a powerful labor climate justice movement; and identify where there are limitations and gaps.
What Is Political Education (In the Context of Labor, Climate, and Social Movements)?
Calls for the importance of political education in movement building contexts run into several conceptual challenges. One is that, as the academic literature on political education points out, all education is political, as it is shaped by and contributes to reproducing or transforming power differentials, material and cultural interests, and group conflicts in society. The idea of political education can be seen as a redundant misdirection that erroneously suggests the possibility of there being a nonpolitical education in contrast (Frazer 1999). In this sense, “political education, whether overt or covert, intended or not, is unavoidable” (Sant 2021, 3). A second is that overt, intentional political education is not just one thing; rather, there are a range of models that have conflicting political interests at stake. Sant (2021), for example, identifies seven approaches to political education: neoliberal, liberal, deliberative, critical, participatory, radical, and decolonial. The term political education also often overlaps or is used interchangeably with concepts such as citizenship, civic, and democratic education. Here, too, there are many different, competing models (e.g., Westheimer and Kahne 2004). As politics “is such a highly contested subject,” writes Leftwich (2004, 2), “debates about its proper definition and the scope of its subject matter are themselves political.” Much the same can be said about political education.
To understand what the call for political education means in movement contexts, there is a need to look closely at what organizers and activists themselves say. Here, the simplest explanations are the most helpful. “Understand the world in order to change it,” reads the tagline of the socialist Political Education Project in the UK (Chacko 2021). In the United States, the leftist Center for Political Education defines political education “as the practice of studying the history and analysis of struggles for social, political, geographic, and economic power with the explicit purpose of strengthening political organizations and movements for social change” (Herzing 2020). In other words, the call for political education in movement contexts constitutes a call for a form of radical education, defined as education that explicitly seeks to support projects of substantive social change, that can help to make the world more just, equal, democratic, inclusive, and sustainable (Charkin and Suissa 2019; Sukarieh and Tannock 2016). Radical education is not a single tradition but encompasses traditions of popular, progressive, feminist, antiracist, anticolonial, labor, and democratic education (among others).
While there is variety and conflict among these different traditions, radical education generally has several shared essential components. First, it begins by engaging with the experiences and interests of a particular, often marginalized or oppressed community. This gives radical education its core raison d’être: it embraces, in Freireian terms, “a pedagogy which must be forged with, not for the oppressed” (Freire 2000, 48). This is a strategic and principled democratic commitment to grounding education in the experiences and interests of learners, to develop what Johnson (1983, 27) refers to as “really useful knowledge” that is “relevant to the experienced problems of life.” Second, radical education seeks to analyze and understand the root causes of the problems afflicting a community, through the study of social, political, and economic history and theory. This is the literal meaning of the term “radical,” from where radical education gets its name, which is “to seek (practically or theoretically) to uncover and uproot the roots, foundations, or origins of a problem or a project” (McLaughlin 2012, 19), and is seen as essential for any project seeking substantive change in society. Here, radical education often entails a process of learning, unlearning, and relearning different ways of understanding the world, of critically analyzing both the formal and hidden curriculum. Third, radical education works to develop an alternative vision of how the world could and should be different—what is sometimes referred to as a “pedagogy of hope” (hooks 2003) or “utopian pedagogy” (Coté, Day and de Peuter 2007). Haiven and Khasnabish (2014, 3) describe this as fostering the “radical imagination,” that they define as “the ability to imagine the world, life and social institutions not as they are but as they might otherwise be,” and “the courage and intelligence to recognize that the world can and should be changed.” Finally, radical education seeks to develop practical, strategic steps for collective action that can start to make changes in society and help get us from here to there. After all, the point of radical political education is not just to do “education about politics” or “education for education's sake” but to engage in education to enhance one's collective ability to change the world (Herzing 2020).
This framework is useful for two reasons. One is that it opens the possibility of learning from the long and rich history of radical education traditions. But also, it helps to guide judgments of what might be present or missing, effective or ineffective, in current projects of (radical) political education. For example, political education is often defined in terms of its content. If you search for “political education” online, you will find courses, modules and workshops listed on topics such as Marxism 101, What is Capitalism?, or What is Socialism and How to Get There. But in radical education, such content may or may not be helpful and relevant, depending on the community and context being worked with, and is certainly not sufficient: for there is also a core concern of engaging with the experiences and interests of local groups of learners, and moving toward concrete, practical, and strategic collective actions. This bias on the left—and in many trade union contexts—of assuming that political education means learning socialist theory in classroom settings is why some movement commentators warn that “the idea of political education, as a phrase or concept” is “difficult” and “exclusionary,” for it invokes “a silo, a little space where political education happens, and that it happens only in a particular space” (Moran et al. 2019, 95). As Harmony Goldberg warns, narrow framings of political education as principally being about developing the most “correct” political analysis can foster “a ‘purity’ orientation” that makes people “not want to work with anybody who doesn’t agree with them on every question,” and can make it “incredibly difficult … to relate to poor and working-class communities as they really are” (quoted in Engler and Engler 2023).
Recent research on political education in movement contexts in the United States emphasizes that political education can and should take place in a range of different forms and sites, that may include but also extend beyond classroom or workshop settings (Maton and Stark 2023; Zavala and Henning 2021). Political education, as Nafziger, Strong and Tarlau (2023, 17) argue, in their study of Black Lives Matter organizing in Philadelphia, “must take on different forms” when working across different communities, “does not have to teach people how to think or what to think” but “can start from the lived experiences of people,” and should attend not just to “political consciousness raising but also the material needs of the community,” by doing things like “showing up with food and clothes at a rally but also organizing mutual aid, food banks and fighting for the rights of families with incarcerated members.” From the holistic perspective of radical education, this is what one would expect in any powerful and effective radical (political) educational engagement.
The Research Study: Worker Education on the Climate Crisis in the UK
This article draws on an empirical study of worker education on the climate crisis developed by trade unions and other worker organizations in the UK. The rationale for this study is the argument that an effective climate movement needs the involvement of the trade union movement, to ensure that efforts to tackle the climate crisis support the needs, interests, and concerns of workers, and to marshall the power of organized labor to fight against elite, vested interests that seek to preserve the fossil fuel status quo; and secondly, that a sustained, transformative program of climate change education for workers will be essential for building a powerful labor climate justice movement (Aronoff et al. 2019).
Between October 2022 and January 2024, I conducted interviews with 55 union staff, labor educators, and activists engaged in worker education on the climate crisis. This included speaking with leads on education and/or environment at six of the ten largest unions in the UK, and the Trades Union Congress (TUC) and General Federation of Trade Unions, which are umbrella organizations of unions; it also included labor educators running workshops on climate issues, and rank and file union activists engaged in climate activism. I identified participants through trade union websites, media, and social media reporting on labor climate organizing, and snowball sampling. I spoke with individuals across England, Wales, and Scotland, but not in Northern Ireland: thus, while the unions and other organizations discussed here have a UK wide scale, the individuals interviewed for this research were located within Britain. Post-Covid era familiarity of many trade unionists with speaking over Zoom made doing a national study relatively easy. Quotations in this article are drawn from this set of research interviews, unless otherwise specified. In addition to conducting interviews, I collected curriculum materials and documents produced by unions and other groups about workers, unions, and the climate crisis; and I observed labor and climate focused conferences, workshops, and demonstrations. The individuals I spoke with were engaged in all sectors of the economy, including transport, health, education, culture, government, communications, retail, hospitality, manufacturing, and energy.
Two broad findings from this research are relevant for this article. One is that, since 2019, when the school climate strikes motivated many trade unions in the UK to increase their focus on the climate crisis, there has been a proliferation of education and organizing efforts on climate across many trade unions and worker organizations. Indeed, the climate crisis has been a trigger for developing political education that looks beyond the pragmatic, collective bargaining and representation training model that has prevailed in the UK trade union movement for decades (Seal 2017). This has not happened in all UK unions, and some large unions (e.g., GMB and Usdaw) still do little in the way of climate education or organizing. At the same time, this education and organizing on climate is generally small in scale, fragmentary, limited in impact, and too easily pushed off the agenda by other crises of wages, working conditions and job security. Even those unions most engaged with climate issues face real challenges in mobilizing worker interest, union capacity and collective action around fighting the climate crisis in a sustained and effective manner (see Tannock 2023b, 2024). There is a need to learn from best practices across the movement and find ways to link these together. Here is where a framework of radical political education can be useful.
Building Theory and Knowledge for a Labor Climate Justice Movement
There has been extensive work done now building a solid base of theory and knowledge for a labor climate justice movement, both within the UK and globally. The concept of a “just transition” is one of the most important frameworks for linking labor and environment concerns. Originally developed by organizers with the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers Union in the United States in the 1970s, the just transition concept has been embraced by many unions as “a pedagogical tool of workers education” (Azzi 2021, 228). There are many different models of a just transition, ranging from managerialist and reactive to more radical and transformative interpretations. The concept provides a focus for thinking “about what we should be doing in the face of a worsening ecological crisis,” as envisioning a just transition “means having to answer three fundamental questions: why is the world we live in not desirable anymore, what world do we want and how to get from here to there?” (Laurent 2019). Other key concepts have been developed as well, including: energy democracy, Green New Deals (GND), green jobs and climate jobs, greenwashing, degrowth and postgrowth, green political economy, ecosocialism, and so forth. Extended discussion of these ideas may be found in both an academic and activist literature, for example, in collections such as The Palgrave Handbook of Environmental Labour Studies (Räthzel, Stevis and Uzzell 2021) and Power Lines: Building a Labor-Climate Justice Movement (Ordower and Zafir 2024). The labor movement does not lack a critical, theoretical, and visionary language for addressing the climate crisis.
Much of this knowledge and theory is created and circulated by trade union staff and activists, along with academic partners, through publications, conferences, workshops, and trainings. The Greener Jobs Alliance, a trade union affiliated group, produces a monthly newsletter focusing on national labor and climate issues. CACCTU (the Campaign Against Climate Change Trade Union Group) runs conferences, workshops, and webinars on labor and climate issues across the country, as does the Climate Justice Coalition Trade Union Caucus. International labor organizations such as TUED (Trade Unions for Energy Democracy), Education International and Public Services International, and overseas labor partners such as COSATU (Congress of South African Trade Unions) are sources of ideas and information on labor and climate matters, and, as one labor climate movement activist says, provide “a trade union space where we get to have a real debate … about the energy transition.” The TUC and unions such as Unite, Unison, PCS, University and College Union (UCU), and the NEU run training workshops for union activists on topics such as “Negotiating for a Just Transition,” “Greener Workplaces and a Just Transition,” and “Climate and Just Transition Awareness.” They also have union websites and publications dedicated to labor and climate concerns. Many of these unions have created dedicated roles of green or environmental union reps, who receive targeted education on climate and environment issues, but also themselves act as climate and environment educators and activists in their workplace, their union and beyond. Annual trade union conferences regularly have sessions focused on climate and environment, as well as member-sponsored motions to develop and shift official union policy on these topics. The Bakers Union (BFAWU), for example, recently added a set of educational workshops to their annual conference that address issues such as climate change.
One of the problems with this educational and organizing work, however, is it risks circulating in something of a closed echo chamber. On the one hand, cross-union staff and rank and file activist groups on climate such as CACCTU and the Greener Jobs Alliance, and within-union networks of environment reps and union climate activists constitute vital spaces for pushing forward union policy on climate matters, and expanding labor climate education and organizing. But on the other hand, many labor climate activists point to the problem of the same small group participating across many workshops, conferences, and events on labor and climate, both within and across unions. “We have to be really careful of not living in a bubble,” says an activist involved with CACCTU and the Greener Jobs Alliance, “that just because we’re talking to certain people in the union, that across the union movement this [concern with climate] is widespread and understood.” “It's always the same five to ten people turning up to the meetings,” says another activist with the newly formed XRTU (Extinction Rebellion Trade Unionists) group. The labor climate events I saw during the 2022–2024 period were predominantly attended by an older, often retired group of union activists. While the recent proliferation of union education sessions on labor and climate has been impressive, these tend to reach very small numbers. For example, Unite has over a million members, many of whom work in the most carbon-intensive sectors in the country; but its multiday “Reps and the Environment” course only pulls in about 16 activists at a time. As one of the union educators involved in developing the Unite course says, one of the problems “we have come up against is just people not applying, … or not in the numbers we’d like.”
In part, such struggles are shaped by the decline of UK trade union membership over the past four decades, the shift to a narrow servicing model of trade unionism, as well as the overall collapse of labor education in the country, driven by a shift in state policy away from the support of labor education and by diminishing union education resources (Holgate 2021). Union reps and activists are often unable to get time off work or funding to attend classes on the climate crisis (or any other topic). In the UK's further education colleges, trade union studies centers are vanishing, from 150 in the late 1980s to about a dozen left in England today (Tannock 2023a). In part, too, much union education on environment and climate remains relatively siloed, largely treated as a special interest topic, rather than being deeply embedded within broader and core union rep and activist education and organizing work, and thus accessible to only relatively small numbers of union members. However, part of the issue is also that much of the theory and knowledge on labor and climate is failing to connect with many union members in the country. “Just transition,” says one activist, “I’ve come across it a lot in top-down union events with union officials talking about it,” but “it's not coming from the grassroots, and that's the problem.” A project by Platform with North Sea oil workers found that 91% had never heard of the term “just transition” (Lennon 2020). A union rep from the aviation sector says many of his colleagues see “just transition” as just “something that is thrown out … by climate activists,” and “there's quite a bit of antipathy towards the phrase.” More generally, there is not a clear sense for many union members in the UK that climate action ranks among their most urgent priorities. “Climate was at the forefront for a while,” says a teacher trade unionist, “but in the last couple of years, there's been other things that were more pressing,” such as “the Covid crisis [and] cost of living crisis.” Unions may have developed a potent political education theory and analysis about labor and climate issues, but workers themselves are often just not fully present.
One of the rare, and important, exceptions to this pattern can be found in Equity for a Green New Deal (E4GND), a grassroots network within Equity, the performing arts trade union, that organizes for climate justice in the sector. Alongside campaigning for greening the Equity pension fund and negotiating for sustainability commitments in theater, film, and TV production, E4GND runs a political education reading group about two to three times a year. The group was inspired by The World Transformed, a UK political education initiative (Mayo and Ranford 2023), and is seen by E4GND leaders as “essential for the ideological health” of the network, by helping to flesh out “some ideological grey areas for us.” One session focused on the question of what a “Green New Deal” actually means, and asked activists to think about “why are we called Equity for a Green New Deal?,” and reflect on differences between neoliberal, Keynesian, and radical or socialist GND visions. The aim, as one of the founders explains, is “to define things so that we as a group are better equipped for talking about it,” and can look at any climate action “and describe it articulately, as opposed to saying any action is good, [explain] if this is good, why is it good?” E4GND activists emphasize the importance of their political education being run by grassroots members rather than union officials, as they say members are generally better connected with other members than paid union staff. Such grassroots efforts, though, are difficult to sustain or run at scale without being integrated into and supported by formal union education structures.
Making Links with Workers
Radical approaches to political education seek not just to develop strong critical analyses of the present and utopian visions of social transformation in the future but to ground and motivate these through the local experiences, needs and interests of workers, their families, and communities. “It's essential that you start where people are,” says Myles Horton of the Highlander Folk School, “with what they [perceive] their problems to be” (Horton and Freire 1990, 99, 163). Freireian approaches to popular education begin with a process of researching and learning about the communities that educators are working in. While radical traditions of worker education, as Cooper (2020, 12) notes, are likewise characterized by a deep “respect for the knowledge and skills of workers gained primarily from life experience and the experience of organising and active struggle.”
Most union classes on climate and labor (though not all conferences, workshops, or webinars) start by seeking to make such links in one way or another. “We start off where people are,” says one of the creators of Unite's “Reps and the Environment” course, “talking about their lives, their workplaces, their community,” asking “why are you interested in this, is there anything going on in your workplace in relation to the environment, how about your community?” Common activities in these union classes include doing such things as getting members to carry out an environmental audit of their workplaces, map their supply chains and overall work process in order to think through where there are significant climate and environmental problems in the places where they work and live. There are other strategies used here as well. One of the more creative elements of Unite's environment course is an activity where members are invited to design a t-shirt with all the stereotypes they know about climate and environment activists. The aim, as one of the course leaders explains, is to have some fun but also “get it out of the system” any of the mistrust and conflict that might exist between the labor and climate movements. But the problem with all these approaches is that workers had to have already made a choice to take the time and make the investment to enroll in a class on labor and climate, amid all the other competing concerns and pressures in their lives. Workers, in other words, must have already made a link to the importance of climate change, climate education and action themselves.
Here is where an alternative approach holds promise, one which embeds education in a research and organizing campaign or project—and indeed, which often is not framed or conceptualized as being about education at all. One of the best recent examples was run by Platform, an environmental and social justice collective, as part of a three-year project with North Sea oil and gas workers to develop a set of demands for a worker-led just transition away from fossil fuels (Platform 2023b). After two years of building relationships, learning of key issues for offshore workers, and developing campaigns in support of offshore workers’ interests, Platform developed a series of participatory research workshops with offshore workers to talk about core problems in the sector, ideal solutions, and how to build power to make a change (Platform 2023a). As one of the Platform leads on the project explains, the aim was to create “a space where workers felt they were leading the conversation,” so organizers did not go in with the idea that “we are going to teach you about why we need to stop extracting oil and gas,” but instead, “with the intention to find out what was wrong with the industry.” Though framed as research and campaigning, Platform's workshops were deeply educative, enabling workers to think through their own core interests in relation to energy sector work, overcome cynicism that nothing would ever change, develop an understanding of their own collective power, identify common ground, and build a shared language with climate activists (Platform 2023a). Through the process, an organizer says, many offshore workers went from never having heard of the concept of a just transition to adopting the phrase as their own: We did use the word “just transition” a lot and explained what it meant. But that was only after months of talking to [the offshore workers]. We didn’t say “just transition” when we met them at the pub for the first time…. Now a lot of them use the word “just transition” a lot…. Now a lot of [offshore] workers that we talk to will say, “We’re not getting a just transition, we need to be doing this.” It's cool that they’ve adopted it. But it was kind of a phase in.
Most of these projects would not be immediately recognized as constituting political education, as conventionally understood. Indeed, one of the Platform leads on the offshore workers project says that organizers made a deliberate decision to “leave out the political education around a just transition” from their participatory workshops. These projects tend to be limited in terms of theoretical discussions of the broader structures that are driving the climate crisis, or developing utopian visions of social change in the future. Nonetheless, they contain seeds of something vital to radical political education, which is their focus on generating ideas and insights from the experiences and voices of workers themselves. Currently, these projects tend to be run as ad hoc, one-off exercises, often by allied partners outside of core trade union structures, and not integrated into any sustained worker climate education program. But one might hope that this is something that could change in the future, as a core component for developing an effective labor climate justice movement in the country.
Developing Strategies of Action
Harmony Goldberg, a social movement political educator in the United States, recently reflected on the shift in her own work from thinking of political education as being principally about developing “the most correct analysis”—for example, trying “to integrate radical critiques of patriarchy and white supremacy into our critique of capitalism”—to approaching it more as “strategic education,” in which “our job is to figure out how to make people as ambitious and as strategically oriented to building power as possible” (Engler and Engler 2023). In this, Goldberg highlights a key concern of radical political education, namely, to increase our ability to actually make a change in the world. Radical education, as Cooper (2020, 27) writes, seeks to foster learning that not only “opens up visions of an alternative future” but also “enables social action aimed at transforming unequal power relations and inequities in the distribution of social goods.” Goldberg's reflection also points to one of the biggest challenges for the UK labor movement in developing an effective (radical) political education on the climate crisis. “I think we’re struggling to frame what it is we want [union activists] to do” on the climate issue, says a TUC labor educator: “You say, ‘just transition,’ but what do you want [our activists] to do?”
Labor educators and organizers are trying to address the question of labor climate action. Some focus on learning how to engage with the labor movement effectively in order to push it toward taking climate action. In Unite, a member-led Grassroots Climate Justice Caucus has run education workshops on internal union structures and how to put forward union motions on climate policy, to learn “how you can engage with the democracy of your union.” Extinction Rebellion Trade Unionists has run trainings on alliance building through picket line strike support, with pointers on what to do when you arrive at the picket line, and effective ways to bring up the climate crisis and link it with strikers’ workplace issues. Earth Strike (2021) is a grassroots group calling for changes in UK labor law to make it easier for unions to take lawful strike action on the climate crisis; while authors such as Allinson (2022) and Crawford and Whyte (2023) offer unionists guidance on how to strike on climate issues under current labor law. All of this work not only constitutes essential labor climate education and action in and of itself but also is key for pushing union leadership to do more education and organizing on climate, and to raise interest among workers for further climate education and action. Picket line support, for example, is not only about establishing collective practices of mutual solidarity and building relationships of respect and trust between different groups of activists but it is also about helping workers trace the links between the crises afflicting their lives, to understand that the cost of living crisis is linked to a fossil fuel and climate crisis, and move beyond the current situation where climate keeps getting pushed off the agenda due to the need to attend to immediate matters of wages, pensions, and working conditions.
Others focus more directly on labor climate action itself. Many UK unions are greening their own pension funds and work processes. For more than a decade, unions in the UK have participated in greening the workplace agendas: though these have tended to be localized, apolitical and technical, and dependent on employer and state support for success (Farnhill 2018; Zbyszewska 2021). More recently, there has been a focus by several unions to push for workplace climate adaptation measures (Tannock 2024). For example, a coalition of worker groups has developed trainings and toolkits to mobilize for a national “heat strike” to protest the lack of regulation on maximum workplace temperatures (Tipping Point 2024). A common point of reference is the Lucas Plan, the 1976 document produced by organized workers at Lucas Aerospace that drew on worker knowledge and experience to develop a plan to save jobs at their company by shifting production to focus on making socially useful and environmentally sustainable products (Hampton 2015). Groups such as Safe Landing and the Unite Grassroots Climate Justice Caucus thus call for the creation of similar “worker assemblies” on the climate crisis, envisaged as spaces for deliberative democracy, discussion, and learning (Safe Landing 2023).
However, despite such efforts, when one looks at the UK labor climate justice movement over the past decade, there are few examples of unions taking collective action to challenge employer and state resistance, in order to directly tackle actors responsible for the root causes of the climate crisis (Crawford and Whyte 2023). Hampton's (2015, 191) ideal vision of a “class-based and worker-focused climate politics” that is centered around “radical conceptions of just transition, climate jobs and energy democracy” may be readily found in many of the education workshops, conferences, online discussions, newsletters, and activist networks in the labor climate justice movement in the UK today. But it is less readily found on the ground, in actual trade union collective action. The successful national campaign against fracking that ran from 2012 to 2019, and which had strong trade union participation from both union leadership and rank and file activists, who joined other social movement actors in contesting UK government and fossil fuel company power and policy, is one example; as is, at a smaller scale, the successful PCS campaign against fossil fuel sponsorship in the museums and galleries where some of its members work, that has been run in collaboration with other climate action groups since 2015 (Tannock 2023b).
One of the important areas of work for the movement now is thus learning how to take collective action and negotiate for climate justice (Crawford and Whyte 2023); a project exemplified by the Bargaining for a GND agenda of the UCU. A central motivation for this UCU agenda was to shift climate from being mostly a policy concern for national union staff to a bargaining agenda in which branches could be empowered to make climate claims, negotiate with employers, and take industrial action. As a UCU lead on the project explains, “it's fine for us [as a union] to say, ‘we need to reduce carbon emissions, … but in terms of action and activism, what does that mean?’” UCU has developed training materials and workshops for activists on how to develop a GND claim and negotiate with university and college management over the claim (UCU 2021). In 2022, the first local GND bargaining claim was made by the UCU branch at the University of Liverpool, with other staff and student unions (UCU 2022). While the aim of the UCU climate bargaining project is clear, its prospects for success are less certain.
“Climate is not something our members see as an immediate [concern],” acknowledges a UCU negotiator, as “their immediate struggle is around the cost-of-living crisis” (Quick and Crawford 2022). Indeed, the union has engaged in years of strike action against university employers to fight against layoffs, wage, and pension loss. The University of Liverpool has been a major center of union-management conflict over threatened redundancies (BBC 2021). University and College Union activists involved in the GND claim at Liverpool say that university management appear to welcome climate and sustainability discussions as a place to “build more positive collaborative relationships” with the union, in contrast to the “acrimonious” and “threatening” interactions that have characterized wage, pension, and job security talks on campus. Much of the discussion at Liverpool thus far over the UCU GND claim has been about including union representatives on management sustainability committees, rather than agreeing to any demands made in the claim. While this is understandable and welcome, it is not exactly in line with the vision of some in the climate movement, who call for the power of organized labor to force employers to act on climate through the threat and use of collective strike action.
Conclusion: Possibilities and Limitations
In the context of South Africa, Cooper (2020, 3) observes that “radical traditions of workers’ education,” that seek “to challenge and transform culture and societal power structures,” have been “seriously weakened” in recent decades. “There is a need to reclaim the political and ideological premises” of these radical traditions, argues Cooper, “if we are to challenge and transform a global system that not only relegates large parts of humanity as irrelevant to ‘social progress’, but which also threatens ecological disaster” (186). As noted at the beginning of this article, others have made similar calls in the context of labor, climate, and social movement organizing in the UK, US, and elsewhere—although often the frame used is a call for political education. What the recent experience of the UK labor movement shows is that the climate crisis has been a trigger for developing radical forms of political education by trade unions and other worker organizations: this includes creating new theory and knowledge to understand the root causes of the climate crisis, articulate the interests of labor in relation to the crisis, and envision an alternative, better future; forming new networks and organizations that seek to foster education and organizing as part of an emergent labor climate justice movement; and embracing different spaces for labor climate education, from XRTU's focus on the picket line as a space for climate learning and alliance building to other spaces, such as the use of encampments and occupations as key learning sites in the antifracking movement and elsewhere (Tannock 2023b), or the calls from Safe Landing and the Unite Grassroots Climate Justice Caucus for worker assemblies on the climate crisis.
While one aim of this article has been to review some of this emergent labor education on the climate crisis as a vital part of building an effective labor climate justice movement, a second aim has been to argue for the value of recognizing or interpreting this work through the lens of radical education. This is not just a matter of semantics. Rather, such a holistic framing helps to think through the different components that are essential to this form of education and highlight key areas of strength and weakness in this collective educational endeavor. Political education is often framed, in labor and social movement contexts, as primarily being about developing particular kinds of (socialist, feminist, antiracist, anti-imperialist, etc.) theory and knowledge—what Goldberg describes above as establishing a “correct analysis” of the present. What a frame of radical education suggests is that the theory and knowledge being developed by the labor climate justice movement is already quite robust. Where there is most need for critical work and attention is in linking this issue to immediate worker experiences and interests, and identifying practical, strategic collective actions that can help to address the climate crisis directly. Finally, the radical frame helps to remind us that when it comes to the climate crisis (and, arguably, many of the other crises and problems faced by the labor movement), the task at hand is to push for radical social transformation, not just incremental or technical reform. For the call for radicalism, in the context of the climate crisis, is no longer a marginal concern or demand: mainstream organizations such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2018) now argue that fighting the climate crisis effectively will “require rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society.”
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Research Ethics
Ethics approval for this research was given by the UCL IOE Research Ethics Committee (REC 1692). All subjects have provided appropriate informed consent.