Labour in peril as ‘just transition’ hits cul-de-sac

AFTER years of promises but still no guarantee of jobs in renewable energy, unions hoping that their members will retain their employment if they cling to fossil fuel industries might miss the chance to negotiate a just transition.

An estimated 92 230 people are employed in coal industries, according to the Minerals Council South Africa figures from 2019.

Climate change labour experts have warned that a ‘just transition’ from a carbon-intensive economy to a low-carbon economy will devastate hundreds of thousands of workers in the energy and fossil fuel sectors.

This is unless workers bargain collectively for binding contracts that put each of them on “a pathway to an equivalent job of good quality” in the renewable energy sector.

“Many of our (union) members are worried about climate change, but they are more worried about keeping their jobs and being able to feed their families and have a roof over their heads.

“Our advice is that change is coming, and we have to be ready as trade unionists.

“When we are not ready, and change comes anyway, we lose our jobs, and we don’t have new jobs to go to, and no one is really ready to negotiate with us once the decision for restructuring has been made,” said Samantha Smith, an activist lawyer and director of the International Trade Union Confederation’s

Just Transition Centre in Norway, at a meeting between Cyril Ramaphosa’s Presidential Climate Commission and union federations Fedusa, Cosatu and Saftu in late October.

Recently, the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) said it supported Minister of Mineral Resources and Energy Gwede Mantashe’s call not to let coal mining go extinct.

“South Africa has an abundance of coal reserves. The NUM is opposed to the R131 billion offered to South Africa by developed countries so that it can accelerate the closure of coal power stations,” said acting general secretary William Mabapa.

This R131bn is a mixture of loans and grants, agreed at the recent COP26 meeting in Glasgow that the US, UK and EU will pay the South African government to transition away from fossil fuels.

However, the NUM and the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (Numsa), which together organise the majority of workers in the fossil fuel and energy sectors, have long held that the countries responsible for climate change must pay all costs related to the transition in developing countries.

The US, China, Russia, Brazil, Indonesia, Germany, the UK, Japan and Canada have generated the largest amount of carbon dioxide between 1850 and 2021 from their fossil fuel, cement, forestry and land use industries.

Because a just transition has not been fully funded, it is becoming heavily privatised. Billions of rand are flowing to multinational companies that have already developed the expertise and factories to make renewable-energy components.

Under these circumstances, labour has been performing the “pendulum swing” that Smith cautions against – away from renewable energy and back towards supporting fossil fuels – say former Numsa climate change researchers Dinga Sikwebu and Woodrajh Aroun.

In the Palgrave handbook, University of the Witwatersrand emeritus professor of sociology Jacklyn Cock says labour has not had any formal working relationships with community organisations for the past 10 years.

“The NUM is resuscitating the old jobs-vs-environment binary. But a lack of preparation is also evident in the labour movement. Some unions, such as the Fedusa affiliates and Solidarity, are largely silent on climate change,” she says.

The unions generally fail to organise power station workers who are on short-term contracts or working through labour brokers. There are an estimated 2 300 such workers at Eskom’s Hendrina power station alone.

Unless labour “reclaims its power and establishes closer connections with the environmental justice movement, coal workers and mining-affected communities, the case of South Africa could demonstrate what an unjust transition looks like”, says Cock.