§1. Climate jobs campaigns were active in around ten countries, with different degrees and kinds of success, between 2009 and 2023. (The countries we are aware of included the United Kingdom, South Africa, Norway, Canada, Portugal, France, the state of New York, Mauritius and the Philippines, plus a few countries where there were looser contacts.) The campaign was accompanied by a global network of the national campaigns.

The object of the Climate Jobs campaigns is defined to be a government program that creates new, public sector jobs in emission-reducing sectors of the economy while giving job priority to those workers whose job posts would be extinct. Many national campaigns produced reports on the impacts of such a government program on employment, carbon dioxide emissions and the economy. Some national campaigns sometimes focused on specific sectors (like buildings or renewable energy).

As of 2025, we are not aware of any active climate jobs campaign. At the same time, its narrative effects can be seen in the just transition debates (particularly, as opposed market-led policies) and its movement-level impacts can be traced to the positions of labor unions on the climate crisis.

As part of our effort for movement learning, we think it to be good moment to report back, take stock and share our reflections, in order to inform current and future attempts with similar objectives.

§2. We want to make some of our starting points explicit.

§2.1. Sinan first heard about the campaign in the United Kingdom on 2015, and launched the campaign in Portugal in 2016 through his involvement in the grassroots climate justice collective Climáximo. He coordinated the Portuguese campaign for several years, while also very active in the global network.

Leonor joined the campaign in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic and remained a core campaigner at the national and international level for several years, organizing international conferences and workshops.

So, we both had a good sense of how the campaigns were evolving. Even so, our more detailed analysis comes from our experience in Portugal. We will try to make explicit the possible extent of our conclusions: some of our observations are context-specific yet others seem generalizable.

§2.2. We interpret the climate jobs campaigns as “class-informed climate politics“. As such, the campaigns (and our lessons) interact with Matthew T. Huber’s book Climate Change as Class War. One can say that All In aims more for “climate-informed class politics“. These are more or less the same thing, but the focus of analysis changes. Huber analyzes class positions towards climate collapse from the capitalists’ perspective and from the working class perspective. He also emphasizes the dominant role the “professional-managerial class” has played in framing the climate debate and strategy. He then looks at class composition in the US, concludes that 75% is working class whereas the professional-managerial class remains a minority, which therefore puts a strategic ceiling unless the latter assumes a deliberate shift to working class politics.

Huber then suggests that the electricity sector workers should be a strategic target for building a mass movement for climate justice. Unfortunately, his argument remains analytical. He doesn’t provide any empirical data to argue for the feasibility of his proposal. To sustain such a specific strategic proposition, one would expect interviews with union leadership, surveys with the workers in the sector, focus groups with union delegates, or some official union position papers.

With this article, we want to give such empirical feedback for future organizers.

§2.3. This is our attempt for movement-level learning. Our aim is not to evaluate the campaigns. Our goal is that we fail forward.

We made mistakes. We also tried out some things spotlessly yet they didn’t work anyway. Other attempts worked with limited success. We discovered “embedded strategic ceilings” in some of our approaches (successful in mobilizing or building alliances, up to a certain point, yet the process itself generates constraints to go further). Yet other approaches were indeed fully successful.

Many of what you’ll read below will be applicable to and relevant for your context. Our goal is that you avoid repeating our failures and instead can take new risks and make new mistakes.

In short, we don’t claim analytical rigor, we claim organizer’s intuition. Our impressions (even if taken as pure “impressions” rather than “data”) are still useful information.

§3. This is meant to be an easy-read. We’ll now give a brief history of the campaign in Portugal (§4.) and the global climate jobs network (§5.). You might not need to read any of that, in which case you can jump to §6 where we will list all the strategic arguments in favor of launching a climate jobs campaign. Then we will go over each argument and reflect on their degrees of success, limitations, opportunities, and possible drawbacks. Finally, we will get back to All In‘s terminology and reflect on the campaign’s success as a movement-level intervention.

History of the Portuguese Climate Jobs Campaign

§4. The climate jobs campaign in Portugal, Empregos para o Clima, was launched in 2015/2016 when the anti-austerity mobilizations were coming to an end and the climate summit in Paris was set to result in an inconsequent agreement. Two left-wing parties (the Left Bloc and the Portuguese Communist Party) were to play a crucial role in the upcoming minority government by the Socialist Party. The labor unions, heavily influenced if not fully controlled by the Communist Party), have been on the streets together with the precariat for years. And the climate movement was virtually inexistent, organizing its first ever protests on the street.

§4.1. First steps: The campaign was launched by the initiative of Climáximo (a recently-formed grassroots climate justice group), Precários Inflexíveis (an association of precarious workers) and later GAIA (an environmental justice group). Over the years, more than 20 organizations endorsed the campaign and varying degrees of involvement in the campaign’s activities. These organizations included environmental NGOs (like Quercus and Zero), frontline collectives against new oil and gas projects (like Peniche Livre de Petróleo and Alentejo Literal pelo Ambiente), labor unions (like the teachers’ union, call center workers union and public workers union) and grassroots groups (like Fridays for Future), as well as organizations coming from other movements (such as feminism, housing, animal rights and global justice).

The official launch was made on 1 May 2016, at the demonstation of Workers Day, in Lisbon, and included a short introductory booklet that was also used as outreach material.

§4.2. Priorities: The campaign started by aiming for the more difficult potential allies. Instead of seeking for support from the NGO universe (which would give more endorsements but would also produce a bubble), we went to the CGTP, the main labor union confederation in Portugal, largely dominated by Communist Party cadrés. This was a strategic choice. We wanted to try building these bridges right from the start, create clean communication lines and establish a direct relationship. Over the course of the campaign, we organized hundreds of events and meetings with labor unions, ranging from public sessions to internal workshops and trainings. Sometimes they were about the campaign itself, sometimes about the climate crisis, and sometimes about specific areas (for instance transport, energy or employment).

§4.3. Maturing: In 2017, the campaign published its first serious report, titled “100 000 Climate Jobs”, already with the endorsement of CGTP as well as active engagement of the teachers’ unions SPGL (in Lisbon area) and SPN (in the north). It was also the start of increased international involvement by the Portuguese campaigners, reaching its peak with the Lisbon Just Transition Gathering in 2018.

With the rise of the school strikes of Fridays for Future and the actions of Extinction Rebellion, the campaign became central to the climate debate in 2019, providing the main talking points for the activists.

§4.4. Innovation: In 2019, with the campaign report ready and a mass movement accompanying it, the campaign entered a period of distributed strategies. While the report provided a blueprint for carbon neutrality in 2030, the campaigners realized the need for more short-term measures in order to make the campaign into a mobilization tool. So, the “10 measures to win in the next 4 years” were launched. These were the policies that were the essential first steps towards climate jobs which could be implemented separately and immediately. Examples include “one day per week for reskilliing of the workers fossil fuel industry”, “creation of a public renewable energy company”, “creation of a public electric bus company for intercity travel” and “reduction of the working week to 32 hours”. These measures would also allow for partial engagement by some groups who might not agree with the totality of the climate jobs report.

§4.5. Pandemic: During the COVID-19 pandemic, the campaign’s mass public investment and public employment argument took the main stage. With reduced possibilities of mobilization, a new and much more detailed campaign report, “200 000 Climate Jobs”, was published in 2021. This report addressed all the relevant sectors into substantial detail, and is used as the policy basis for the climate justice movements until today.

§4.6. Experimentation: Coming out of the pandemic and reaching a limit to organizational involvement, the campaigners decided in 2022 to open the processes to individuals. A first step was the creation of Workers for Climate network. A second step was the creation of working groups: Sines (an industrial hub in the south of Portugal), public transport and public renewable energy.

Up until this point, the campaign’s processes were centralized and semi-open. Organizations would endorse the campaign by simply publishing a text of support on their website and allocating a contact person. There were regular campaign meetings (sometimes as frequent as biweekly), with one annual strategy gathering (as part of the National Gathering for Climate Justice). All of these meetings were open to the members of the endorsing organizations. From 2022 onward, an individual could participate in the campaign’s internal processes.

This strategic choice was informed by the following factors: We thought that all the organizations that would agree with the campaign’s main statement were already in and that all the key organizations were already aware of the campaign. We also realized that a lot of individual workers were excited with the campaign although they couldn’t involve their union yet. We concluded that Joining these activists could activate and empower them.

The three working groups all produced their own strategic priorities, plan of activities, and ladders of engagement. A case study on just transition in Sines (English version here) was published in 2022 and a report on public renewable energy (Empowering the Future) was published in 2023. The corresponding working groups also produced pamphlets, local and thematic events.

§4.7. By 2023, Sinan and Leonor were frustrated with the campaign reaching its seventh year without any major victory, and gradually dropped out. (This was also reflected in the divestment of Climáximo in the campaign’s activities.) The campaign then decided to focus on public transport. However, the Portuguese campaign has been inactive since October 2024.

History of the Global Climate Jobs network

§5. Globally, the climate jobs campaign’s first steps can be traced back to the first One Million Climate Jobs pamphlet prepared by the Campaign Against Climate Change in 2009 in the United Kingdom, and the simultaneous launch of a climate jobs campaign in South Africa, led by The Alternative Information and Development Centre.

§5.1. The campaign was initially a loose network of activists working at the intersection of labor and climate, with a short pamphlet prepared in 2015. As of 2018 (with the dedication of the Portuguese campaigners) it became a stable platform of dialogue, skill-share and collaboration. The Lisbon Just Transition Gathering in 2018 was a major step, as were the online Global Climate Jobs conference in 2022 and the in-person Global Climate Jobs conference in 2023. The global network is inactive since then.

§5.2. Throughout the fifteen years of the network’s existence, more national campaigns were launched and individual contacts were established in the labor movement. Many of those national campaigns are also discontinued at the moment.

There was quite some positive feedback loops between the campaign and the climate mobilizations, the Trade Unions for Energy Democracy network, and the international labor movement. Campaigners were regularly invited to international conferences organized by labor union confederations.

Arguments in favor of Climate Jobs

§6. Phew, this was a long introduction. Now let’s get to business.

We will first start with listing all the opportunities and strengths that we foresaw in the campaign.

Then we will go over them one by one, recount our experience and share our learning.(Afterwards, we will return to the language of All In, reframe the campaign as a movement-level intervention, and reformulate our evaluation.)

We produced a series of talking points for the campaign. These could implemented as strategic emphasis in a meeting with new organizations, as arguments in a public debate, or as core message in a media engagement. They were:

1. solving two crises at once: Similar to the slogan “end of the world, end of the month; same fight”, the campaign would produce a net 200 000 decent public jobs, in a country that went through brutal austerity measures, while cutting the emissions to virtually zero by 2030.
   
   
2. leaving the environmentalist bubble: Engaging with social issues that engage majorities (unemployment, poverty, labor conditions) would increase the reach of the climate justice fight.
   
   
3. existing popular support: There is universal support on climate policies in Portugal, and simultaneously employment and the economy have been ranking first in people’s policy priorities for years.
   
   
4. against the austerity logic: Similar to Huber’s argument against degrowth (due to it reinforcing the echo chamber of professional class activism) and as opposed to “consuming less”, the campaign argued for massive public investment to make things differently. This would meet the people where they are and still produce a desirable vision of future in the short-term.
   
   
5. a grassroots perspective: In contrast to technocratic governance, the campaign was built bottom-up, by civil society organizations representing the working people. The campaign’s success would also come hand in hand with people’s power.
   
   
6. fighting “for” something: While many movements fought against something (fossil fuels, privatizations, austerity measures), a fight in favor of a better world could produce a different kind of motivation and a longer commitment.
   
   
7. a social plan for transition: Rather than market-oriented policies that “incentivized” companies to perhaps do something, the campaign focused on the actual task at hand: we need to shut down the fossil fuels and scale up renewables, this is a lot of work to do, so we need workers who would be willing to do those jobs. This approach focused on the social aspects (working conditions, public sector jobs, priority to workers who lose their job posts) rather than financial parameters. This social plan would be able to overcome the drawbacks of the neoliberal “green” policies.
   
   
8. the National Climate Service analogy: Opposing the “profitability” logic, the campaign underlined the non-negotiability of a livable planet. The climate jobs are necessary. In that way, the campaign’s demand resembles the National Healthcare, a completely consensual system in many countries. This would allow us to overcome the so-called “economic realism” and shift the focus away from saving the companies in favor of saving the people and the planet.
   
   
9. the analogy to Second World War economic mobilizations: Comparing the effort (in terms of public investment, resources and labour) necessary for the complete re-structuring of the economy and productive systems for the energy transitions, with the Second World War when social priorities were drastically changed.
   
   
10. addressing the false dilemma between jobs and climate: Proposing governmental programs and arguing that a socially just energy transition would actually require a lot of new jobs, even after retraining of and giving job priority to workers in the polluting industries.
    
    
11. system change can only be the outcome of class struggle: Arguing that only a working class-led mass movement could deliver the radical socio-economic transformations necessary to tackle the climate crisis, which implies rejecting market mechanisms and insisting in working class leadership.
    
    

These eleven arguments are clearly not mutually exclusive, and they all point towards the same direction. However, a careful value-based analysis showed us that some would work better than others in certain contexts.

§7. Now let’s see how the campaign put these arguments into practice. Were they effective? Were they robust? Were they successful? Were there other disabling factors that we hadn’t paid attention to? Were there specific contexts in which novel aspects came into sight?

§7.1. Solving two crises at once: This worked but only as a defensive position.

• Almost no organization whom we reached through the anti-austerity movement got inspired by a climate jobs campaign as their main answer. No political party took the campaign to its logical conclusion of producing decent jobs for hundreds of thousands of people. In short, the campaign did not effectively solve two crises at once.
  
  
• However, the fact that climate jobs (not as campaign but as public policy) could solve two crises at once is a powerful argument. The exact numbers in the campaign report gave us a strong hand against voices opposing climate action. Overall, this argument was useful in shifting active opposition to passive opposition as well as passive opposition into neutral positions, as quite some people and organizers who initially had some reserves against climate action got interested in possible outcomes.
  
  
• In concrete, this produced more logos and endorsements to the campaign, but not more engagement or commitment.
  
  

§7.2. Leaving the environmentalist bubble: This was a complete disillusionment.

• We thought the campaign would help us talk about a topic that would engage majorities and thereby take the environmentalist bubble outside of its issue-based, technocratic approach. However, environmentalist groups didn’t give the campaign more than their endorsement. This was not because NGOs did not find the campaign as the right tool to reach masses. It was because (and explicitly because) environmentalist groups, dominated by middle-class and upper-middle-class folks, did not consider it strategically relevant to have mass involvement in the movement. The campaign could serve a purpose, but they didn’t have that purpose in the first place.
  
  
• Since the bubble remained intact, we leaving it meant that we got out of it. Our relative success in reaching out to other groups was not fruitful from a hegemony-building perspective. At some point, the campaign had 25 supporting organizations. It was the most diverse civil society initiative (on any topic) with a reasonable structure, process and activity plans. This didn’t translate into convergence because as we the campaigners left the bubble, the environmentalists remained there. So it actually left us isolated from the climate movement.
  
  
• One consequence was that the campaign ended up being more left-wing than initially designed. This matters. Moderates are not only moderates, they are also disinterested in uncomfortable alliances.
  
  

§7.3. Existing popular support: This was perhaps the trickiest to evaluate.

• Obviously, “generalized concern about the climate crisis” doesn’t automatically translate into “popular support for a mass public investment program”. Climate policies are still largely defined by market logic, and energy transition policies are seen through the lens of just transition for corporate profits and redundancies for workers.
  
  
• There is however another problem with equating “support” with “action”, because they typically come as opposites. In many opinion surveys, “support” for a certain topic is itself framed as support to something that someone else is doing. At most, “support” is measured by how much sacrifice a person would make for a policy change. In all these situations, the question is never how mobilizing and mobilizable the topic is.
  
  
• When people don’t have a personal commitment with a cause, the shift from “something should be done” to “this thing should be done” becomes slippery. We observed quite some de-responsabilization (i.e. delegating responsibility to some other entity) and a lot of frustrating “abstract” discussions around climate jobs.
  
  

§7.4. Against the austerity logic: We failed to pull this off, but in this case we cannot dissociate our incompetence from other factors. So we draw little lessons for future organizers.

• By the time the campaign was launched (in 2016) the financial crisis was over in the sense that the state budget was recovering balance. Austerity policies remained intact, of course. But the austerity discourse became much less present. Therefore, being against austerity lost relevance as a mobilization narrative.
  
  
• In 2020, with COVID-19 and with the return of austerity in a “naturalized” form, we tried again. Like elsewhere, the Portuguese government injected money to companies and provided for some relief to working class people. The overarching mainstream narrative equated the pandemic with economic hardship. We tried building a mass movement around the main talking points of the climate jobs campaign. We failed in practice. This might be because of general inaction by social movements at the time, it might be that we made a wrong reading of the social context (expecting suppressed outrage that could be triggered).
  
  
• In short, we genuinely don’t know if there is something to gain by contrasting the campaign against austerity logic that would not be covered by the solving two crises approach (§7.1).
  
  

§7.5. A grassroots perspective: This is a self-contradicting expectation.

• It is the campaign’s strength that it engages with the institutional framework, proposing large-scale public policies. It is also why it appeals to large movement structures, like the labor unions or NGOs. A civil society proposal to tackle the climate crisis has social credibility.
  
  
• In contrast, these institutional actors are (by definition) inserted in the institutions of the system and therefore a civil society proposal doesn’t translate into people’s power as a strategic priority.
  
  
• Therefore, most of the campaign’s organizations found in the campaign strong talking points for lobbying rather than a genuine grassroots perspective.
  
  
• We had a few grassroots attempts. One example is when a photovoltaic panel factory in the Alentejo region was closed down and the state didn’t intervene. We went there, talked with the workers, didn’t find any militancy to insist in the maintenance of the factory (neither in the labor unions nor in the community). Our intervention, sadly, ended up being limited to some press releases and some videos of solidarity.
  
  

§7.6. Fighting “for” something: We have no reason to believe this approach works.

• There has been been a perpetuation, namely by academics and NGOs (to which we have been accomplices to, and to some extent even part of) that we must give people something to “fight for” rather than something to fight against (“because people are sick and tired of listening about what is wrong in the world, and that such a discourse demobilizes people; people become cynical if they are not presented with the alternatives; rather people need to be inspired about the possibility to fight for a better future.”).
  
  
• The campaign tried to do that by providing a vision and a plan for what addressing the climate crisis actually meant. This approach did not produce results anywhere close of a mass movement. And we haven’t seen it work elsewhere, except for electoral campaigns through populist leadership.
  
  
• Every time we have seen masses of people taking part in protests and movements, it has been because they were angry or even shocked and outraged (not necessarily about something that happened to them, or that affected them directly). Some of the people joining to mass movements actually have a vision for what they are fighting for; usually movement organizers have their own vision as well. But they don’t need an agreement between all organizers and all participants about what the solutions and alternatives would be.
  
  
• Lessons from other movements, as well as the experience of organizing the Climate Jobs Campaign taught us that mass movements have mostly mobilized people against something (a policy, a government, a regime, a system, etc.) by activating their anger and sense of justice, rather than by offering a clear something to fight for.
  
  

§7.7. A social plan for transition: This is not an entry-level argument but is useful to keep in the background for the newly engaged activists.

• Anchoring the conversation away from words like “transition” and “incentives” and in the direction of “actually cutting emissions” is helpful for keeping the conversation on-topic. We found this particularly useful when talking to new activists and new organizations, as many came up with doubts about what “climate action” would serve for in a neoliberal context.
  
  
• It was also empowering to introduce the idea of a “from the bottom and to the left” proposal, when new people got involved in the campaign.
  
  
• However, given the reign of “the market” in public discourse, insisting in a “a plan by the people for the people” is not a mobilizing language. In our experience, people who aren’t already activated are not converted by a “people’s power” language.

§7.8. The National Climate Service analogy: This analogy is helpful in specific contexts but cannot be a main talking point for tackling the climate crisis.

• Tackling the climate crises demands large scale economic planning and public investment which calls for some kind of public body to coordinate, regulate, ensure and be accountable for the necessary actions.
  
  
• However the necessary level of action means systemic changes impacting all sectors of the economy. These will indeed demand changes in all the emitting sectors: electricity, all kinds of transport (including aviation), construction, waste management, food, etc.
  
  
• So, the analogy seems helpful in arguing for the irrelevance of the costs and revenue from climate action, as it should be addressed as a public key service, comparable to the services of guaranteeing access to healthcare and education for all. However it becomes too complex and confusing of an analogy, when one tries to present it in more detail.
  
  
• Hence, we found it not always very useful and “at-hand”, and it proved to be an irrelevant argument when addressing labor unions and other forms of sectorially organized working class structures.
  
  

§7.9. The analogy to Second World War economic mobilizations: While helpful as a proof of large scale fast economic transformation, this argument reinforces a view that delegates the task to “politicians”.

• Such analogy was helpful in articulating the possibility of a having a coordinated large-scale fast economic plan for the energy transition. It requires leaving a side a key point, which is the one of the economic interests of the capitalist class in both of the examples in the analogy. We saw this work quite well.
  
  
• At the same time, the analogy is useless if people to not believe, beforehand, that the climate crisis imposes a much more radical shift in social priorities, than the one which happened during the WWII economic mobilizations.
  
  
• It seems that, even if interesting, the analogy produced nothing beyond hope that some policymaker, some government, or some entity, at some point, would act upon an upcoming emergency. It nevertheless failed to produce the right emotions that would motivate action, and to target people’s sense of responsibility to act.
  
  

§7.10 Addressing the false dilemma between jobs and climate:  This is not the right argument to win if you want to produce militancy.

• We made this argument very clearly and explicitly, as it was intrinsic to the definition of climate jobs. Nevertheless, we know (and workers also know) that under the neoliberal regime, the shutting down of fossil infrastructure and investment on “green” infrastructure will not ensure a just transition for workers. Even when there is job creation under “green investment policies”, these jobs are in no way connected to a social plan for a just transition, which means there are no guarantees that the jobs created are allocated to workers who lost their jobs. Guaranteeing this would actually demand social and transformative power from the labor movement and the climate justice movement, which none currently holds.
  
  
• It is not possible to get unions or workers to dismiss this jobs vs climate paradigm, because they know that this dilemma is only false under a different socioeconomic model. In the current one, it is a real dilemma.
  
  
• So the argument is actually not that there is no jobs vs climate dilemma, but rather that there is an existential dilemma between capitalism and life on this planet, and that there are no jobs on a dead planet.
  
  
• Similarly to what we said in §7.1, by making sure that our proposal would not reinforce the dilemma, we managed to get more logos and endorsements for the campaign, but this did not translate into more engagement or commitment.
  
  

§7.11. System change can only be the outcome of class struggle: This presupposes winning the argument on the need for system change, which the campaign on its own cannot achieve.

• This one was more directed at left-oriented organizations. But even in this subset, the argument that the climate crisis requires radical socioeconomic transformations was not a given.
  
  
• Not all organizations (including labor unions) who would agree to somehow get involved in and support the campaigns would accept capitalism as the root cause of the climate crisis. Hence, they would not look at climate collapse as a working-class issue. Rather they would be involved mostly due to an understanding that the energy transition brings “challenges” and novelty to the labor market, to which unions must be prepared for.

Arguments in favor of a Climate Jobs campaign

§8. So far, we talked about climate jobs as a strategic proposal (to the general public and to the organizers). Thus, our analysis was detached from the movement ecosystem in which the campaign lived. Now let’s direct our focus to the movement-level dimension. (This section will interact with the terminology used in All In, but we will not assume that you read the book already or that you remember everything in it.)

There were three ways in which the campaign was a movement-level intervention.

§9. The first one was to engage with the institutional capability, which can be defined as “engaging in systematizing demands and consolidating victories”.

§9.1. The most important symbolic victory here is that the Climate Law (which gives the framework for all subsequent legislation) approved in 2021 specifically says that “the State promotes a just transition to a carbon neutral economy by … creating climate jobs” (Article 69a).

§9.2. Having celebrated this symbolic victory, we must report that no political party raised climate jobs as their banner. Although we had the same intentions, we failed to build the same popular and left-populist agenda that the Green New Deal unleashed in several countries.

§9.3. On the labor union side, we had some hope in engaging in sector-specific union activity. However, in Portugal the entire energy sector (production, transmission and distribution) is fully privatized. This means that a demand for public sector jobs presupposes nationalizations of some sort, which sounded too far-fetched even for the most combative unions. This handicap is less valid for the transport sector, which is still dominated by public companies. In the case of transport, we had minor but significant moments of solidarity in anti-privatization campaigns.

In general, we failed to shift the “just transition” discussion within the unions from a defensive one (transition only if “just”) into a propositional one (just transition from the bottom to the left).

§9.4. Leonor recently wrote about the institutional capability of the European climate justice movement. Here we start with the campaign and look at the movement. In her article, she starts with the movement and situates the campaign in it.

§10. The second one was to aim at some narrative capability, which is the movement’s skills on influencing the public narrative.

§10.1. We had one substantial success. The climate justice movement as a whole, including during its peak in the Global Climate Strike of September 2019, raised climate jobs as its main banner. This contributed significantly to the politicization of the young climate activists. The campaign serving as a simple tool to engage in policy discussions, the movement was capable of highlighting (in concrete and empirical ways) how the governments were failing to tackle the climate crisis.

§10.2. Overall, the market-oriented takeover of the green jobs and just transition was too powerful for the campaign to counter. In the public debate, Climate Jobs could not provide a narrative capability as strong as Green New Deals did.

§10.3. Even within the labor movement, over the course of eight years, we did not manage to create a substantial perceived differentiation between green jobs and climate jobs.

§11. The third one was to engage with a small yet powerful percentage of the working class – organized labor from carbon intensive sectors. These are the workers that could directly engage into economical and political struggle for a just transition, and withdraw their labor from these sectors.

§11.1. Similar to in other countries, the unions who engaged the most in the campaign were those coming from sectors that are not directly affected from a fossil fuel phase-out. In Portugal, we had the support of the teachers’ union, public servants union and the call center workers union. Their engagement was therefore secondary and they wouldn’t turn the campaign into a core demand within their agenda.

§11.2. We had also hoped to open up debates on how a workers-led transition could look like, what demands this could entail, and what kind of workplace disputes could be generated through this process. These hopes did not materialize as they required a transformative political approach which the unions have lost over the decades.

§11.3. Nevertheless, CGTP’s support to the campaign played a significant role in delaying a negative public stance by the unions to climate action in general. The first outright anti-climate statement came as late as 2022 from Fiequimetal, the federation comprising workers in energy and heavy industry.

Lessons and Observations

§12. We reached this point, but we are still not being very empirical. The paragraphs §6 and §7 were applicable to almost any modern society (with some adjustments). The paragraphs §8, §9, §10 and §11 treat “the movement” as an abstraction rather than the actual living beings and actually existing organizations that we interacted with, and could therefore apply to diverse contexts. In both of the previous sections, we started analytically and provided supporting empirical evidence. However, we had promised (in §2.) to do the opposite: put the empirical evidence at the center.

So let’s shift our angle for one last time. Let’s start with our observations as campaigners, and then see how these observations relate to the abstract categories above.

§12.1. If you didn’t win the climate emergency argument, then you won’t win the ambition discussion. Climate emergency cannot be sidelined. It cannot be downgraded to climate change or climate policy.

The campaign relied on institutional actors taking up climate jobs as their banner to move into an offensive position. It therefore also relied on some kind of internal reflection within those same movement actors (NGOs, labor unions, political parties alike) on our generalized ambition deficit and how it relates to our theories of change and grand strategies.

Stepping up in such a way requires the recognition of the state of emergency in which we currently are. Without this realization, the campaign gets reduced to a mere policy research group.

§12.2. We must understand that there is no just transition for the unions themselves.

An employee of a union in a big, well-unionized refinery is experienced in the area and has gained the trust of the workers. You are typically talking to this employee as part of your alliance building process.

However, this employee knows quite well that if that refinery is closed down, even if all workers are safely transferred to climate jobs, the union power will be diminished. Firstly, renewable energy typically disperses workers and they would have to unionize from scratch. Secondly, in many cases the union itself is different (for instance if a refinery is in chemical industry but the new jobs are in the electricity sector). Thirdly, there is no “retraining” program for the specific union employee so they might actually become redundant unless they can catch up with a very step learning curve.

These are non-theoretical, non-abstract, actual concerns that unions and unionists have, for which we have no solutions.

§12.3. You must find the sweet spot between respecting the union structure and engaging with the rank and file. 

We couldn’t find it.

We were mostly cordial to the union structure and didn’t go directly to workers. This is also because we were aware of the loyalty of the workers to their unions, so we understood that jumping over the union would be taken as hostile attitude. However, this meant that unless we convinced a specific and small amount of union activists, we couldn’t make progress.

In the rare cases that we talked to the workers without mediation, it was still the case that they needed to take action through the union processes so we lost contact.

§12.4. Climate jobs was (and is) an essential policy tool for the climate justice movement.

The campaign reports informed the Global Climate Strike, the later actions by Fridays for Future, the action camps of Climáximo as well as other campaigns (fossil gas, aviation, private jets, etc.). These mobilizations therefore had a good policy background (the spokespersons were credible and could sustain sophisticated policy discussions) and had a good radicalization pipeline (well beyond the “there is no planet B”, the activists quickly understood the socioeconomic stakes at hand).

§12.5. No one from the labor movement stepped up.

Beyond a few individual sympathizers, we didn’t find any organization in the labor movement to step up, take the climate crisis seriously in its agenda, and fight for it.

This is consistent with the strategic conformism within historical unions. However, one could expect that newly emerging unions could take a different, more combative stance. This didn’t come true.

What we make out of all this

§13. We said in the beginning of this article that we were writing it because it was a good moment to take stock. There is one more reason: We believe that many of these lessons can be immediately transferred to some of the current experimentations in the climate justice movement.

We have been seeing two emerging strands within the climate justice movement: (1) those who recognize the (latent/potential) disruptive power of the unions. (2) those who focus on engaging masses in the movement. The starting premises for both are spot on: we need mass engagement in the movement and some of us have to focus on chains of value production.

Experiments in this area include the housing/tenants organizing around energy poverty and the public transport campaigns (we are not including Huber’s proposal on the electricity workers because we are not aware of a concrete working group on it).

However, we would like to highlight that we cannot afford to repeat previous mistakes because we don’t have time for them. We identify three crucial weaknesses in both of these strands.

§13.1. Firstly, they seem to depart from wishful thinking and stick to this attitude (in some cases, for years). They seem to solely rely on words like “patience”, “relationship-building” and “community organizing”, and use these words to avoid setting up measurable goals and monitoring them with a critical eye.

§13.2. Secondly, we live in times of emergency. This means that we cannot repeat the community organizing playbooks written in the 1970s. We must innovate substantially in order to fit those practices with the climate deadlines while not creating illusions of shortcuts. (Otherwise, we must drastically reduce the scope of our ambitions and claim that we are just doing outreach / awareness raising without any ambition to organize and mobilize.) For instance, we must have checks and balances mechanisms within our campaigns that are much more frequent than usual.

§13.3. Thirdly, we cannot lie to people. If we actually believe that in any country of the Global North there shall be zero emissions by 2030, then we cannot hide this information for long. We would simply be avoiding the divisive line, the main problem to solve. Therefore, diverting the conversation away is not the way to have substantial convergence nor would we be able to build trust.

Many activists are reading North American literature on community organizing but that literature in general avoids systemic change as an option. This can be compensated to some extent by the critical pedagogy strand developed by Paulo Freire, where we can also learn about how we can remain assertive of our political anchors.

§14. With this long report, we wish to contribute to movement learning. It is our hope that comrades who launch similar organizations or campaigns get to fail forwards and make new mistakes, instead of repeating ours.

***

Leonor Canadas is a climate justice activist in Climáximo, based in Lisbon. She took part in the coordination of the portuguese Climate Jobs Campaign, and in the Global Climate Jobs Network. She participated in the writing of two of the campaign’s reports. She has a masters in Organic Farming and Food Systems, and is specially interested in Agroecology and Agroforestry.

Sinan Eden is a co-author of All In.