Unionization and Greenhouse Gas Emissions

Published on: July 16, 2023

For decades, a “jobs versus environment” frame has boxed in conversations about labour and environmental policy. From the battles over owl habitat in the Pacific Northwest that pitted loggers against environmentalists to the current conflicts between fossil fuel workers and governments moving slowly toward greenhouse gas reductions, workers and their unions have been cast as obstacles to ecological progress. In a forthcoming piece in Labour/Le Travail, scholars Anupam Das, Ian Hudson, and Mark Hudson call into question the inevitability of this alleged conflict by looking at the longer history of union environmentalism and through an interprovincial quantitative analysis of whether unions across Canada act as a drag on environmental outcomes.