The cause of labour is the hope of the world.
We’re organising for a socialist Green New Deal —
a transformative programme to mobilise every political and economic resource to achieve rapid decarbonisation and economic justice.
THE GREEN NEW DEAL IS A VISION FOR TRANSFORMING OUR ECONOMY…
…rooted in the recognition that climate change is fundamentally a class issue, and a product of our broken capitalist system. It is a plan that recognises that economic, social and climate justice go hand-in-hand. That’s why our Green New Deal goes beyond just the demand for rapid decarbonisation.
The Green New Deal calls for concrete, transformative changes to our current economic, social and political model. But the Green New Deal is more than just a series of demands, it's a movement of people building power for radical change.
To learn more about what a socialist Green New Deal looks like take a look at our policy papers.
LGND IS EXPANDING ITS SCOPE TO REACH BEYOND PARTY POLITICS AND INTO THE WIDER LABOUR MOVEMENT
Five years since the launch of Labour for a Green New Deal (LGND), the political landscape has shifted dramatically. Under Starmer’s leadership, the socialist climate platform we had successfully campaigned for in 2019 has been entirely stripped away. In this context, LGND has focused on collaborating with trade unionists to scale their climate organising into a powerful worker-climate movement.
Not content with simply advocating for a worker-led just transition, our Worker-Climate Project has started building it from the bottom-up. We have identified a series of existing pro-climate initiatives within the labour movement, including: trade union-led workshops on industrial transitions, cross-union bargaining claims prioritising climate justice, and developing educational courses within union structures aiming to develop action plans for key sectors.
We see the role of our Worker-Climate Project as bringing these relatively disparate initiatives together to forge a new worker-climate organising base.
An important starting point for the project was our Worker-Climate Conference, in 2022, which brought together trade unionists from a range of sectors and unions. They worked through the key strategic questions with their discussion contributing to a series of practical resources to help trade unionists confront the challenges of just transition work, such as worker engagement levels and corporate greenwashing. The resources also mapped different strategies of transition organising that workers are experimenting with, for example the collaborations within the energy sector in Scotland between Platform, Friends of the Earth Scotland (FOES), and the Scottish TUC.
Since the conference, this work has evolved into a wider project with a growing network of 150 trade unionists from across 29 unions and organisations. These include workers from the most carbon-intensive industries who can offer invaluable insights and experience on what will be required for full economic transition.
In practice, the project facilitated in-depth interviews with trade unionists and activists within our network, where we have drawn out key points of intervention. From here we discuss potential tactics and map out how these can be implemented in different industries and regions to have the greatest impact.
By bringing people with a range of experiences and backgrounds together, an organically creative and experimental approach for developing transitional strategies has emerged. Our aim is also to be expansive and so we are committed to seeking out new areas of collaboration and forging new solidarities to grow the network into a strong power base. As our network expands, so too does our capacity to propose radical democratic ownership of industries at both local and national levels.
In this way, LGND remains committed to putting forward a vision for a socialist Green New Deal. Our view has always been that such a proposition must be based on trade union leadership. This was true when trade unions overwhelmingly supported our successful motion at the Labour Party Conference in 2019. It is of course truer than ever now that Starmer’s Labour has abandoned even its own commitments to the climate in a recent U-turn on his green prosperity plan of £28bn. When it comes to the climate, it is clear where Starmer’s priorities lie. With a general election looming, some continue to hold out hope that a Labour government will put the demands of a Green New Deal into action, but we must now be clear that it is only through a worker-led movement that we will achieve these ambitions.
While LGND will continue to act as a critical base that applies pressure to the Labour Party, our Worker-Climate project enables us to organise with workers and other activists to scale up the existing work of transition organising into a powerful worker-climate movement.
Without such a mass movement, economic transition risks prioritising the profiteering interests of the corporate elite at the expense of further exploitation of workers. Conversely, if we build on the existing work of transition organising we can develop resources from the specific knowledge workers have of production processes and global supply chains across all industries to create the worker-led just transition that is needed to rapidly decarbonise.
The Worker-Climate Project is an ongoing process of developing resources and engaging with those within our network so if you are interested in getting involved please visit our Worker-Climate Team page to join our network as a trade unionist or complete the sign-up form to become part of the team.