Jobs vs. climate justice? Contentious narratives of labor and climate movements in the coal transition in Germany

ABSTRACT

Climate and labor movements clash over the need to keep fossil fuels in the ground versus protecting industrial jobs. In examining movement-countermovement dynamics in the coal transition in Germany, I analyze how labor and climate movements engage in discursive struggles about the meaning of justice in the just transition. In combining Gramscian theory with a narrative approach, my focus is on how labor and climate movements construct narratives around justice claims in the struggle over the hegemony of coal. In the case examined, claims about distributional, restorative, procedural and recognition justice are pitted against each other in jobs versus climate narratives. The results show that the inability to resolve the justice dilemma ultimately weakened counterhegemonic challenges and delayed the coal transition. This points to the need for transformative just transitions that bridge jobs versus climate divides and for a closer look at conflicts, contradictions and tensions in just transitions.

KEYWORDS:

• Energy transition
• just transition
• climate justice
• labor-environmental relations
• hegemony
• narratives

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the Editors and the three anonymous reviewers as well as Dimitris Stevis, Yvonne Kunz, Franziska Müller, Simone Claar, Manuel Neumann and Carsten Elsner for their comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. I define social movements broadly as ‘collective challenges by people with common purposes and solidarity in sustained interactions with elites, opponents and authorities’ (Tarrow 1994, pp. 3–4). This encompasses both climate activists and organized labor. In the case examined, workers and unions engaged in collective action typical of social movements such as manifestations, demonstrations and even civil disobedience.

2. I use ‘hegemony’ in a narrow sense that leaves aside coal’s place within the hegemonic alliance and competitions between ‘brown’ and ‘green’ hegemonic projects (see Ougaard 2016).

3. For an overview and assessment of the Coal Commission, see Litz (2019).

4. The major criticism of the law is its incompatibility with the 1.5°C Paris target. Other controversial issues are the high compensatory payments for coal companies that might work as perverse incentives delaying the earlier market-driven decommissioning of power plants, a cascading instead of linear decommissioning path, the commissioning of a new coal plant and the removal of seven more villages for mine expansion (Heilmann and Popp 2020). A fourth of the Coal Commission members publicly distanced themselves from the law.

5. All quotes are taken from the text corpus as defined above and are my own translations.

6. Due to deindustrialization in East Germany after reunification, employment numbers in lignite dropped sharply from 130,000 in 1990 to 20,000 by 2000 (Federal Environmental Agency 2018, p. 13). While hard coal mining in West Germany lost its competitiveness in the 1960s, production was kept going with state subsidies and only gradually reduced over half a century. The IG BCE played an important role in securing social and transition plans (Abraham 2017). Though largely considered a successful transition, the Ruhr region today nonetheless struggles with above-average unemployment rates and child poverty and is labeled as Germany’s ‘poorhouse’ (Just Transition Research Collaborative 2018, pp. 20–22).

7. Jobs in renewable energy outnumber remaining coal jobs with the renewable energy sector in Germany employing 338,500 people in 2016 (Institute for Economic Structures Research 2018, p. 14).

8. According to a representative Greenpeace (2018) survey, 75% of respondents approved the successive phasing out of coal (Rhineland: 54%; Lusatia: 43%). However, 48% cautioned a phase-out should only start once regional socio-economic alternatives are in place (Rhineland: 55%; Lusatia: 72%).