Colorado’s move to the New Energy Economy offers lessons on the challenges facing the US transition away from coal towards renewables

While climate change is one of the most pressing issues facing the US and the world, efforts towards transitioning away from fossil fuels are often deeply political, as last month’s ruling by the US Supreme Court stalling the implementation of President Obama’s Clean Power Plan shows. In new research, Michele Betsill and Dimitris Stevis look at Colorado’s political transition to a New Energy Economy in the late 2000s as an example of the complex politics of how such transitions can be achieved. They write that Colorado’s experience shows that building a counter-coalition against entrenched interests requires compromises in how goals are articulated by campaigners, and in the policies that are pursued

The global and the local of framework agreements in the USA

Global Framework Agreements (GFAs) are still a marginal topic in political and academic discourses over global governance and corporate responsibility. In functional terms, GFAs are a commitment to include global labor standards with respect to human resource management as part of this broader turn to CR. But to what extent are these intentions and goals actually realized? Are corporations able and willing to implement GFAs in a joint effort together with the unions across a vastly diverse range of institutional settings and national arrangements? And do GFAs have an influence on core elements of a company’s business policy decisions? Drawing on the insights from an interdisciplinary and multinational project, this paper uses four case studies to explore the conditions and variations in GFA implementation in the USA. Although we observe, as have others before us, that key matters of business strategy such as investments, acquisitions, restructuring, or relocation are more centralized than corporate policies on labor relations, we provide some evidence that the implementation of GFAs can be moved forward by a confluence of external actor involvement and of corporate strategies motivated by a desire to streamline HRM practices (that include the goals covered by GFAs in their core business practices). This finding of the influence of external actor voice in implementation processes may also have broader explanatory power with respect to CR initiatives in general. And in theoretical terms it allows us to explore the interplay between macro structural explanations like the Varieties of Capitalism approach, and the strategic “micro-political” explanations. Our study, in fact, suggests a strong need to combine these in a more systematic fashion

Labour Unions and Green Transitions in the USA: Contestations and Explanations

This report asks: have US labour unions, declining in numbers and divided on climate policy, adopted any initiatives to address climate change? The goal here is to both outline the deep cleavages with respect to climate policy and to show that the views of unions are more complex and contradictory than the opposition-support dichotomy. In the second part of the report, the author explains the internal and external factors which account for the variability in union responses to climate change and policy, amongst and within unions.Adapting Canadian Work and Workplaces to Respond to Climate Chang

Islands of Green in a Dark Sea? Climate Politics in Trump’s USA

Presentation by Dimitris Stevis, Colorado State University, U.S., at ACW All Team Meeting Researcher’s Workshop. Vancouver, November 2016Adapting Canadian Work and Workplaces to Respond to Climate Chang

Translating European Labor Relations Practices to the United States Through Global Framework Agreements? German and Swedish Multinationals Compared

Extensive research has shown that European multinational enterprises (MNEs) have a propensity to avoid collective employee representation when going abroad. This study investigates whether Global Framework Agreements (GFAs) can reverse this pattern by comparing how four European MNEs—two from Germany and two from Sweden—implement GFAs in the United States, a country with weak collective representation rights. The authors find that an MNE’s home country labor relations (LR) system mediates whether GFAs support collective representation in the United States. Sweden’s monistic LR system, in which unions are the dominant organizations legally representing workers, gives unions the power to directly influence the negotiation and implementation of GFAs. By contrast, Germany’s dualistic LR system, in which unions and works councils share worker representation, weakens the influence of unions on implementing the GFA. MNEs’ home country LR systems thus influence how transnational instruments are used to improve collective representation in host countries

Planetary justice:a systematic analysis of an emerging discourse [8403]

Justice concerns have been central to contemporary social and ecological debates for decades but have only recently made inroads into the Earth system centric discourses on the Anthropocene and planetary boundaries. Our focus here is the emerging discourse on planetary justice which has aimed to be a corrective to this lacuna. Our goals in this paper are to delineate the general parameters and novel contributions of planetary justice while also recognizing the emergent variability within this discourse. In order to accomplish these goals we analyze the discourse through three interrelated analytical themes: First, how approaches to planetary justice envision scope across different human practices and categories of humanity and nature. Second, how they envision scale across space and time. Third, how they envision the ecosocial purpose of planetary justice

ACW Baseline Sub-Report: Labor Unions and Green Transitions in the US

This Draft Baseline Report was prepared for the ACW Project, December 7, 2015 (edited April 15, 2016). This report provides an exploratory overview of U.S. labor union proposals and practices regarding a green transition. It focuses, primarily, on national level unions. One goal of the report is to explore whether workers and unions are striving to be the agents and authors of a green transition and what political dynamics may prevent or enable them to do so. A second goal is to explore how inclusive or exclusive the green transitions envisioned by unions may be.Adapting Canadian Work and Workplaces to Respond to Climate Chang

Green Transitions in the US and Europe: Breadth, Depth and Worker Agency

Presentation by Linda Clarke, University of Westminster, UK, and Dimitris Stevis, Colorado State University, to the ACW All Team Meeting, York University, Toronto in November 2017. Outlines their research to date, which was later translated into an ACW database of specific examples of labour union green initiatives in Europe and the US.Adapting Canadian Work and Workplaces to Respond to Climate Chang

Why Achieving the Paris Agreement Requires Reduced Overall Consumption and Production

Technological solutions to the challenge of dangerous climate change are urgent and necessary but to be effective they need to be accompanied by reductions in the total level of consumption and production of goods and services. This is for three reasons. First, private consumption and its associated production are among the key drivers of greenhouse-gas (GHG) emissions, especially among highly emitting industrialized economies. There is no evidence that decoupling of the economy from GHG emissions is possible at the scale and speed needed. Second, investments in more sustainable infrastructure, including renewable energy, needed in coming decades will require extensive amounts of energy, largely from fossil sources, which will use up a significant share of the two-degree carbon budget. Third, improving the standard of living of the world’s poor will consume a major portion of the available carbon allowance. The scholarly community has a responsibility to put the issue of consumption and the associated production on the research and policy agenda