On March 10, the Greener Jobs Alliance held its Annual General Meeting at UCU HQ in Camden with around 30-plus attendees in person and online.  We heard from GJA’s Graham Petersen about the ongoing great work being carried out by the Trade Union Clean Air Network on workplace air quality, pollution and temperatures, including consultation with the Greater London Authority (GLA) on the Mayor’s Clean Air Delivery Plan and through a submission to the Environment Audit Committee’s ‘Air Pollution In England’ inquiry.  You can read more about both of these pieces of work here.

GJA newsletter editor Paul Atkin launched the updated Climate Change Awareness course on our website (see here), which replaces the previous course which was becoming outdated.  It remains an ideal introductory course for any trade unionist or activist wishing to develop their understanding of the fundamental issues around climate change.  The intention is to follow this with updates to the other two courses (A Trade Union Guide to Just Transition and Air Quality – a trade union issue) over the coming months.

We also heard two excellent speakers.  First was Matthew Crighton, Secretary of the Just Transition Partnership, a collaboration between Friends of the Earth Scotland, the Scottish TUC and five individual trade unions.  Matthew talked through successes and setbacks in pursuit of a Just Transition in Scotland: the former include the good relationships developed between trade unions and environmental language and the widespread adoption of the language of just transition, while the latter reflects the unjust nature of the transition as experienced by many thus far and the failure of government policy to address this.  The slide set accompanying Matthew’s presentation can be found here.

The second speaker was Sean Sweeney, from the global justice organisation Trade Unions for Energy Democracy, whose presentation had been given previously at a meeting in Belem during COP30 entitled ‘Their Climate Reset and Ours’.  Sean focused on the call by figures such as Tony Blair for a ‘climate reset’ based on the fact that their own neoliberal approach to climate change was failing, and posed in contrast to this capitulation the idea of a ‘public pathway’ to just transition, renewable energy etc. rooted in public ownership, democratic participation and a new international energy order.  Sean’s paper, Towards A New International Energy Order, can be found here and is recommended reading, while the slide set accompanying the presentation is here.

Tahir Latif

GJA Secretary