Ask former power station operator Ron Ipsen about the phrase “just transition”, and you’ll get a laugh. Not the sort of laugh Ron gives when something tickles his sense of humour, which happens often enough as we sit drinking tea in his good-sized shed, crammed with machinery of all sorts, outside the town of Moe in Victoria’s Latrobe Valley.
Mention “just transition” to Ron, and you’ll get a pointed, bitter laugh—the sort that indicates that bullshit is being called. This surprises me. After all, on several accounts, Ron is the person responsible for introducing the phrase to Australia.
Ron Ipsen’s shed was an early stop on my visit to three of Australia’s main coal districts last year to discuss coal and climate, workers and politics—and this elusive concept of a “just transition”.
The smoke had only just cleared from the catastrophic bushfire season of 2019-20. An incredible 7 percent of the vast land mass of New South Wales had just been incinerated. Thirty-four people were dead from the fires. Another 400 were dead from the smoke, and probably another 4,000 had been admitted to hospital, with an unknown number (including newborns) suffering ongoing health problems.
This, it seems, is the new normal. If we’re lucky. The phenomenal heat of 2019—the hottest year on record in Australia—will be typical in a world that is 1.5 degrees warmer, according to the Bureau of Meteorology and the CSIRO. And on our current disastrous settings we’re headed for much, much more than 1.5 degrees of warming.
As well as the bushfires and the approach of further catastrophe, the results of the May 2019 federal election cast a long shadow. Significant swings against Labor in some coal districts led to a chorus of media and political pundits declaring that the main blockage to effective climate action in Australia was the unshakeable commitment to coal on the part of working-class communities in regional areas.
Of course, anyone who actually goes to these communities will find something quite different from this stereotype. There’s a vigorous discussion, and sometimes a sharp argument, about coal, climate and the energy “transition”.
In Victoria’s Latrobe Valley, it’s easy to find an acute awareness of the declining returns, and heavy costs, of the fossil fuel economy.
The brown coal-fired power stations of the Latrobe Valley generate two-thirds of Victoria’s electricity, down from 90 percent a little over a decade ago. The benefits flowing from Victoria’s power industry to Latrobe Valley workers and communities have been in steep decline since privatisation in the 1990s, however.
And the heavy—and sometimes horrific—cost of coal was dramatically demonstrated in February 2014. On a searing hot day, following a record-breaking heat wave, a fire took hold in the Hazelwood open cut coal mine. The sprinklers and water pipes which had, years earlier, kept disused parts of the mine safe from fire, had been ripped up and sold for scrap by the new owners after privatisation.
So, for 45 days in February and March of 2014, a plume of poisonous smoke billowed uncontrollably from a massive, burning section of the vast Hazelwood open cut mine into the town of Morwell and the wider Latrobe Valley.
Ron Ipsen and Wendy Farmer were part of a team of locals who scrambled to respond. They demanded relocation assistance for all who needed it, as well as immediate medical check-ups, and regular health check-ups to follow.
They called a rally in Morwell. More than a thousand people turned up.
And they counted the dead.
With Births Deaths and Marriages refusing to release the figures, Ron and Wendy formed a team that combed through the death notices in the local papers and found a spike in deaths of 30 to 40 percent in nearby towns.
The activists founded Voices of the Valley, signed up hundreds of members, and campaigned successfully for the incoming Victorian Labor government to reopen an inquiry into the mine fire and its health effects after the 2014 election. A long-term health study was commissioned as a result of their campaigning, which found a decrease in lung function equivalent to ten years of ageing among residents exposed to mine fire smoke. Children exposed to the smoke during their mother’s pregnancy were found to exhibit more respiratory symptoms. The Hazelwood health study is the only one in Australia to measure the health effects of major smoke exposures; it proved a grim and useful benchmark for studies after the 2019-20 bushfires.
Over time, Voices of the Valley shifted their focus to the economic effects of the looming closure of coal-fired power stations in the Latrobe Valley. They’ve won around $400 million channelled into local projects through the Latrobe Valley Authority over the past few years. An enormous number of community projects have been funded—refurbishing local halls, rebuilding sporting facilities and promoting community engagement.
Not all the projects associated with an energy transition have been executed well, or at all. Ron is frustrated that, despite his best efforts, there was no move by government to get a solar panel factory built in the valley. But despite these problems, both Ron and Wendy give points to the Latrobe Valley Authority for listening, adapting and funding a string of projects.
Wendy’s husband Brett worked in the Hazelwood open cut for years, operating the colossal dredging machinery that ploughed up the brown coal to supply the power station. It’s a skilled and specialised job. But when Hazelwood shut with just a few months’ notice in 2017, Brett and his workmates didn’t have tickets that would allow them to apply for other work. So retraining organised by the authority was useful, along with a scheme in which 90 Hazelwood workers replaced workers who took early retirement at nearby stations.
This brings us back to Ron Ipsen in his good-sized shed outside of Moe—and his reluctance to embrace the term “just transition” to describe these achievements.
Ron is happy enough to talk about his role in popularising the “transition” part of the phrase. A few years back, he had an encounter with Greens activists campaigning to shut Hazelwood. At that time, Hazelwood was the most polluting power station in the country. “Don’t come into our community saying shut things down”, he told them. “All you’ll do is get people’s backs up.”
“Coal-powered stations are like dinosaurs”, Ron tells me. “They are incredible pieces of machinery, but the economics is killing them. You don’t have to hang banners or protest out the front for them to die out. What you do have to do is help the community move forward in that transition. Talk about what we can transition to.” Within a few days of this exchange, the Greens shifted their emphasis from “shutting Hazelwood” to instead talking about a “transition to” a new grid.
But adding the word “just” to the idea of a “transition” doesn’t strengthen the phrase, in Ron’s view. In fact, the opposite.
Ron recounts hearing a local union leader and political candidate state that, because power station operators can earn a wage of $140,000 per year, a “just transition” consists of each of these workers transitioning to an equivalent job, on the same rate of pay, for the rest of their lives. Ron, a former power station operator himself, isn’t impressed.
I tell Ron that I don’t really understand his objection.
For most of the past century, every cent of wealth that has flowed through Melbourne’s financial heart of Collins Street has depended on the work of people in the Latrobe Valley, digging the coal and working the power stations. It seems to me that if some of those workers are on good money, then that’s good—and it’s entirely reasonable for them to insist they should stay on the same wage. Not only that, but power station operators have surely got the industrial power to win a guarantee of something like that, on this side of the “transition” anyway.
None of this impresses Ron. But rather than directly contradicting me, he gives me a stern look and takes me around the long way.
Before privatisation in the 1990s, Ron explains, Victoria’s State Electricity Commission (SEC) was an enormous industrial enterprise. The SEC employed 12,000 people at its height. There were not only power station operators who had risen through the ranks like Ron but maintenance crews, a dedicated firefighting force, massive workshops including foundries, and plenty more.
“The thing with the SEC was, no-one got left behind”, Ron says. “Not everyone has a trade. Not everyone is going to be a power station operator. But every light bulb in that power station has to be changed. So someone had the job of doing that—replacing every light bulb. Someone had the job of cleaning.” These workers were often well paid, with many coming in at the top 5 percent of blue-collar wages.
An incredible 9,000 workers were thrown onto the scrapheap as a result of privatisation in the 1990s. Most of the workers in the workshops and maintenance crews were promised jobs that never materialised, explains Ron. Or if they did, it was on much lower rates of pay, with outsourced contracting companies. Most of the less skilled jobs were simply abolished. No-one, Ron points out, is talking about a “just transition” for any of these workers, decades after the event.
This sickening wave of sackings left the power station operators and a few other highly specialised roles, the section of the workforce that is hardest to replace, as the only people still directly employed by the new, privately owned, power-generating companies. It’s the idea of advocating for this limited section of the workforce, and calling this a “just transition”, that produces Ron’s scornful laugh. Wendy Farmer puts essentially the same idea to me: “A just transition is about more than someone on $140,000 staying on $140,000. A just transition is about the community moving forward”.
Shaking $400 million out of a government for a community in transition is no small feat. Wendy points out that unemployment actually fell in the Latrobe local government area, from 11.1 percent to 7.1 percent, in the three years following the closure of Hazelwood power station in 2017.
This level of community organisation and government engagement is the best current example anyone in Australia can point to of what a successful “transition”, or even a “just” transition, might look like. There’s been interest from around the country and around the world.
These achievements have their limitations though.
Wendy’s daughter, Naomi, gives a perspective as a long-time socialist activist, who grew up in the Latrobe Valley and has lived there on and off since. Naomi uses the term “neoliberal money” to describe many of the projects, meaning “individual solutions for collective problems”.
Latrobe Valley residents, Naomi tells me, die five years earlier than other Victorians. It’s difficult and expensive to do a lot about the main factors behind this— emissions from power stations, concrete works, the pulp mill—as well as the poverty and grinding stress that have been part of the valley’s lot in the decades following privatisation.
Naomi points out that subsidising triathlon courses or organising sunflower planting to attract native birds and beautify the place is a whole lot easier than tackling these chronic issues. Naomi completed the triathlon training. She appreciates the sunflowers and the native birds they bring. She’s obviously proud of the role her family and the other activists of Voices of the Valley have played, but she wants the limitations recognised as well.
Politically, there’s certainly a strong nostalgia for the secure, well-paid jobs of the past, which can translate to a political attachment to coal. Ron chuckles as he recounts how his cousin stopped speaking to him for 18 months after Ron started advocating for a solar panel factory in the Latrobe Valley. But electorally, the situation in the Latrobe Valley seems a world away from the picture in the Hunter Valley of New South Wales, where One Nation got more than 20 percent of the vote in 2019 and nearly cost Labor MP Joel Fitzgibbon his seat.
The Latrobe Valley is split between two largely rural federal seats, both of which are safe for the Coalition. But unlike in the Hunter, both seats saw small swings to Labor in 2019. The grab bag of right-wing independents and parties, including One Nation and Clive Palmer’s party, failed to increase their votes significantly from 2016.
So the electoral figures for the Latrobe Valley don’t support the lazy right-wing talking points about coal communities everywhere embracing reactionary parties due to disenchantment over Labor climate policies.
Overall, a visitor to the Latrobe Valley is left with plenty to think about. Amidst all the verbiage about a “just” transition, I’d never really put it together, until Ron pointed it out, that the vast majority of the workers from the power industry had already had a brutal and very unjust “transition” imposed on them, decades ago.
The money won by Voices of the Valley campaigning—$400 million over five years—has done a lot of good. It’s also a figure totally dwarfed by the (largely tax-free) profits of the private operators of the region’s power stations. Earnings before interest and tax have been estimated at around $400 million in 2018 alone for each of Yallourn and Loy Yang B, and more like $700 million for the giant Loy Yang A power station.
Given the colossal amount of wealth that has flowed from the labour of generations of workers in the Latrobe Valley, and given the scale of the health and environmental impacts that will persist for generations to come, the word “just” seems out of place.
The profitability of all these power stations is under serious pressure. But still, I’m sceptical about Ron’s argument that coal-fuelled power stations are going the way of the dinosaurs. The dinosaurs, after all, didn’t have an army of political fixers and corporate ex-staffers making policy for the Australian and other governments, rewriting market rules in order to put off the day of reckoning.
So after 170 million years on the planet, the huge majority of dinosaurs, along with most other species, were wiped out in a few hours, it seems. Short of an asteroid hitting, nothing at all similar is going to happen to fossil fuels. Most coal-fired power stations have years to run, or even decades.
Not only that, but electricity is only one part of the equation. If we include transport and other energy use (for instance, gas burned for domestic cooking or industrial purposes), fossil fuels still make up 93 percent of Australia’s energy mix.
It’s not that we lack the technical ability to rapidly reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Rather, it’s that our economic and political systems are stopping the solutions being applied rapidly, at the massive scale we need. It’s this which means that, barring an extraordinary event, we’re in the early stages of a hothouse Earth.
This becomes even clearer after a day and a half of driving, from the Latrobe Valley to Mallacoota and then up the south coast of New South Wales, through landscapes dominated by charred and leafless forests, stretching as far as the eye can see.
Port Kembla: The problem of steel
“The higher you go, the less interest there is.” It’s early 2020, and I’m talking with a white-collar worker at Australia’s biggest steel mill, operated by BlueScope at Port Kembla in Wollongong. We’re discussing the remarkable lack of interest in climate change among various layers of management, at a site which produces 1 percent of the annual greenhouse gas emissions of the entire country.
Carbon dioxide (CO2) is the main greenhouse gas causing the heating of Earth. The last time there was this much CO2 in the atmosphere, our ancestors still hadn’t come down from the trees and the site of the Port Kembla steelworks, along with most of the rest of the city of Wollongong, was under water. As were most other coastal cities on Earth.
But for now, the Port Kembla steelworks is still above the waterline, and pouring out the CO2. Every year, the blast furnace at Port Kembla sucks in 3 million tonnes of coal along with 5 million tonnes of iron ore and various other industrial inputs. The result is around 3 million tonnes of steel—and close to double that amount of CO2. The steel industry produces 8 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. It’s a massive problem for all of us.
So it’s startling to learn that the limit of management ambition at this key industrial facility is a reduction in “carbon intensity” of around 1 percent per year. This is just a fraction of the 8 percent annual reduction in greenhouse gases which would be needed as a minimum, worldwide, to cut greenhouse emissions by half in the current decade. If the world as a whole subscribes to the same level of “ambition” as management at BlueScope Port Kembla, we’re headed for hell on Earth.
The particular worker I’m talking with doesn’t want to be named, so we’ll call him Donald. He’s involved in the local climate movement, and he’s one of around 3,000 employees and 2,000 contractors—blue collar and white collar—whose labour keeps the Port Kembla steelworks operating.
Donald has thought about possible accusations of hypocrisy that could be directed at a climate activist who earns their living at the steelworks, and rejected them. If we’re going to win on climate, we’ll win because of the movements we build and the social changes we collectively make, not because individual workers drift out of the steel industry—or the construction industry (7 percent of global emissions), or electricity (31 percent), or agriculture (11 percent), or transport (15 percent), or any of the world’s productive systems—all of which need rapid and far-reaching transitions within the next decade if we are to limit global warming.
Technically, the path to coal-free steel-making seems strangely straightforward. Donald explains that the blast furnace is the first and most CO2-intensive step in manufacturing steel. Coal and iron ore—basically carbon and iron oxide—are heated to around 2,000 degrees in the blast furnace. The carbon in the coal draws off the oxygen in the iron oxide. The result is crude iron (usually called “pig iron”) for further processing, and around double that amount of CO2 as a waste gas.
The effect of replacing carbon with hydrogen in the blast furnace is to change the main by-product from CO2 to H2O (water). Donald explains that existing blast furnaces don’t have to be rebuilt in order for this process to work: in late 2019, German steel corporation Thyssenkrupp successfully injected hydrogen, instead of coal, into an operating blast furnace.
Of course, there’s a huge and expensive infrastructure of hydrogen production and transport which would have to stand behind a large-scale substitution of green hydrogen for coal in steel making. With current technology, less than a quarter of the coal in a blast furnace could be replaced by hydrogen. A steel-making method known as “direct reduction” that can support zero carbon production would require a major rebuild of existing facilities. There are a bunch of technical challenges to do with the iron content of the iron ore, and handling hydrogen. But it’s doable, with enough financial backing and political will.
The thing that frustrated Donald the most about management at the steelworks in early 2020 was their complete lack of curiosity, let alone practical interest, in green steel- making. Donald interacts with management at various levels. Whenever climate change comes up as a topic, it’s shut down almost immediately, he tells me. “‘It’s not my area’, is one common response, or ‘I don’t have time’, or ‘Are we even going to be here in ten years?’ The higher you go, the less interest there is.”
No-one would have this impression from BlueScope’s corporate sustainability report, which trumpets “the integral role of climate action for our business, incorporating climate change as a key pillar in our revised corporate strategy—a defining signal of our commitment to action ...” And so on.
But BlueScope’s “key pillars”, “integral roles” and “defining signals” start to look a lot less grand as soon as we leave the hypothetical, hyperventilating world of corporate social-responsibility-speak, and enter the real world in which CO2 is emitted and profits have to be made. “A significant challenge for BlueScope is matching the desire to decarbonise operations with the need to remain competitive”, notes the company’s sustainability report.
And here we have the heart of the problem.
Every steel producer—and every government—draws the same conclusion as BlueScope management: the “desire to decarbonise operations” has to take second place to “the need to remain competitive”. We live in a global, dog-eat-dog system of competing corporations and states. The pace of change is dictated by the limits of profitability. What humanity and the planet require simply doesn’t feature in that calculation.
Management might be limited in what they can do to limit climate change, but there are no such limits on expressing good intentions. An ocean of corporate spin is the result. In 2017, BlueScope was one of the corporate co-founders of ResponsibleSteel™. ResponsibleSteel™ exists to formulate a definition of “sustainability”, and then certify its corporate founders as “sustainable”. Unsurprisingly, BlueScope is set to achieve “sustainable” status from ResponsibleSteel™ sometime in 2021. If you can’t be good, the old saying goes, you can at least try to look good.
Unsurprisingly, management take a dim view of their employees speaking out publicly to demand real action on climate. One worker mentions an informal warning from management after being seen at a climate protest. Workers in carbon-intensive industries can have a powerful voice in any discussion on climate change. BlueScope’s management doesn’t want its workers using that voice to challenge the carbon economy—or anything else, for that matter.
In 2015, management forced every worker to sign a code of silence, while the company took advantage of a crisis to cut 500 jobs and impose a three-year wage freeze. “They made us sign to say if anything comes out, instant dismissal”, one worker told Red Flag at the time.
Helen is another worker in the steelworks. She remarks on the lively discussions among her work group on climate and every other topic, with every shade of politics represented from left-wing to far- right. Everyone has an opinion, and no-one is shy about sharing it. But all of them know to change the topic from anything controversial, including climate change, when management come around.
Work is a dictatorship. The most widespread repression of free speech in the country is employers silencing their workers, and BlueScope is no exception.
In the past, unionised workers at Port Kembla have exercised free speech collectively, and backed their views with real industrial power. A working-class movement infused with radical politics agitated and struck against militarism in the 1930s, famously banning shipments of pig iron to Japan, where it would be used to make munitions for a brutal war against China. Unionists used their industrial power to back the campaign for Aboriginal rights in the 1960s, and struck for public education in the 1970s.
Remarkably, this tradition of political activism backed by industrial power even extended to the economic foundation of the region—the coal industry itself. In 1970, a community campaign sprang up against a new coal loader being developed by Clutha Development Corporation at Coalcliff, north of Wollongong. Opponents of the mine included industrial workers who knew all too well the toxic hazards of working in coal dust.
Prominent local leaders of the main construction workers’ union called on workers to ban construction on the facility. Despite strong backing from the NSW government of the time, an effective community campaign backed by the threat of union action led to the planned coal loader being quietly scrapped.
But at the Port Kembla steelworks today, there’s a problem.
“The union is useless”, remarks Helen. Her tone is matter of fact. There’s no sense of shock or outrage, no sign of a realistic expectation that the union could be better.
Helen, and probably everyone else in the steelworks, knows stories about the old days when workers would strike for days to reverse an unjust sacking. But they are stories, not the living, breathing reality of working-class power at the point of production.
Coming up with a collective working-class response to climate change is pretty difficult if the workers, collectively or even individually, are banned from publicly debating what’s needed. And a union that has failed to build real industrial power in the workplace is not going to be effective at challenging this repression of free speech, or at contributing much to social movements to win real action on climate change.
In the coal mines dug into the Illawarra escarpment overlooking Wollongong, the union movement seems to have maintained more of a hold than in the steelworks. Every year, 12 million tonnes of coal—for the Port Kembla steelworks and for export—are dug out of the coal mines in the district by around 3,000 workers. Through more than a century of struggle, these workers built a union with a proud history of militancy and radical politics.
Coal mining was once marked by frequent local strikes organised at pit-top meetings, with regional or national strikes to win conditions across the whole industry. But it’s been decades since the last national stoppage. And in every part of the industry, miners’ wages and conditions are under enormous pressure from contractors.
Martin, who doesn’t want me to use his real name, has worked underground in the coal mines around Wollongong for his entire working life. He’s positive about coal miners having an ongoing dialogue with climate activists. He very generously gives me a lot of his time on my last day in Wollongong. The picture he paints is of a union under siege.
Martin outlines the significant disputes over contracting. There has been some success for the workers at the Peabody mine in Helensburgh and South32’s Dendrobium mine. However, at Appin West, hundreds of contractors are earning $400 per week less than the permanent workforce. The hourly rate is $4 per hour less, and much of the wage of the permanents is from production bonuses, which don’t apply to the workers employed by contractors.
Martin’s generosity with his time doesn’t imply agreement with environmental or climate campaigners’ talking points. He’s not impressed with arguments about subsidence and water, which are the basis for a campaign against the expansion of the Dendrobium mine underneath the main catchment for Sydney’s drinking water. Martin’s sentiments match those on the union’s website, which features a steady trickle of articles in favour of coal mine extensions as well as on the many legal and industrial battles to maintain wages and conditions.
When it comes to coal and climate, Martin is matter of fact. The mines around Wollongong produce coking coal for steel. So long as there is a steel industry using coal (which could be a long time yet, given the lethargy among the corporations that dominate the steel industry globally) Martin’s view is that the coal may as well be mined here in the Illawarra.
I ask Martin if he’s heard of the concept of a “just transition”. He smiles: “You’re swearing at me now”. He explains his dislike of the phrase: “There’s nothing ‘just’ about going from a high wage job to a low wage, insecure job”. Coal mining jobs are still some of the best paid blue-collar jobs in the Illawarra district. Many miners thrown out of work in a “transition” won’t be paid anything like the same money locally. Martin references the closure of Hazelwood power station in Victoria’s Latrobe Valley in 2017.
Martin’s scepticism about achieving well-paid jobs as part of a climate transition is understandable, given recent history. In 2009, the South Coast Labour Council (SCLC) produced a plan for Port Kembla and the rest of the Illawarra region to spearhead the production needed for a green economy. However, as SCLC secretary Arthur Rorris noted in 2019 in the aftermath of the climate strike, little action has been forthcoming: “This week marks 10 years since the release of the Green Jobs Illawarra Action Plan. The premier, council, Wollongong University, TAFE and unions all backed it. But nothing has happened. Our industrial capacity and the challenge of climate change are still there but the political will has disappeared, and with it the investment and policy backing needed to make the plan a reality”.
Radical politics and real industrial power, exercised at the point of production, have made history often enough in the Illawarra. Unions supporting a decent political position, but with no realistic threat of industrial action to back it, have nothing like the same effect.
Martin, Helen, Donald and 8,000 other Illawarra workers and contractors in the coal and steel industries are faced with the reality of the climate crisis. They choked on as much bushfire smoke as anyone else in the 2019 bushfires. They have a repressive management and pretty much zero free speech, on climate or many other issues. Their unions are under siege and suffering from many years of retreat, leaving the workers without a collective vehicle through which to act—on climate change or much else.
One thing workers in the Illawarra are not doing is following the simplistic media narrative of “blue-collar workers desert Labor in climate backlash”. Wollongong is in the federal seat of Cunningham, which remained solid Labor territory in 2019, as did the neighbouring seats of Whitlam and Macarthur. Two neighbouring seats remained Liberal (Hume, which is mainly rural, and Craig Kelly’s seat of Hughes in southern Sydney), but without any major swing.
The problem is, the low ebb of the union movement leaves workers with no way to intervene collectively into the debate—let alone to shape the outcome of that debate by using their own considerable industrial power. So it’s no surprise that Helen says the number one way her workmates act to address climate change is purely individual: installing rooftop solar panels.
An incredible 2.68 million houses in Australia have rooftop solar according to Clean Energy Regulator data, or more than one quarter. This is remarkable evidence of ordinary people wanting to do something about the climate, as well as saving money. But as a strategy, it can’t deliver anything like the scale of change we need.
According to one federal government estimate, the combined total of electricity generated by every single small-scale solar system in Australia last year was 14,000 gigawatt hours. This is not far off what might be needed to produce enough green hydrogen to replace all of the coal used in the Port Kembla steel works, and produce 3 million tonnes of carbon-free steel.
This would be a remarkable achievement. But the Port Kembla steelworks produces just 1 percent of Australia’s annual greenhouse gas emissions. So while the vast extent of rooftop solar tells us something about the popularity of action on climate, we’re going to need a very different outlet for ordinary people’s decent sentiments if we’re actually going to change course.
Prospects for a ‘just transition’
The good news first. We have the task of transforming every single productive system on Earth as fast as humanly possible. Fortunately, “as fast as humanly possible” is actually very fast indeed.
Climate activist and researcher Jonathan Neale draws on a wealth of material to argue that greenhouse gas emissions from all sources (energy, agriculture and industry) could be reduced by 87 percent worldwide within 15 years, using only currently existing technology. Neale deliberately excludes non-solutions such as gas (barely better than coal once leaks of methane are taken into account), biofuels (which use up land needed for carbon sinks and food) and so-called “carbon capture and storage” (a myth, propagated by the fossil fuel industry as cover for future developments, which has never worked at anything like the scale needed).
Retooling every one of our productive systems would be a huge project requiring millions of workers. Neale draws on years of research to argue that a workforce of around 8 million in the US, a million in the UK, a million in South Africa, for example, would be capable of achieving this transformation. That’s a huge number of workers – a few less than the total existing construction workforce in each country. But it’s not outside the bounds of imagination.
In technical terms, the transition is achievable. In human terms, it’s essential. There’s only one problem: the psychopaths are in charge.
Joel Bakan in his 2003 movie The Corporation compared the profit-maximising logic followed by corporations and their chief executives with a list of psychopathic indicators. These traits include ruthlessness, lack of empathy, inability to form lasting relationships and the reckless disregard of consequences.
Bakan argued that there is a close match. The characteristic mentality produced by the dominant form of economic organisation on planet Earth matches the standard definition of a psychopath. This observation has now become a commonplace. The business magazine Forbes reports that “corporate psychopaths” are “rushing to the executive suite”, while academic researchers study the phenomenon.
The point isn’t so much about individual CEOs. It’s that each company, each bloc of capital, must expand regardless of consequences, or risk being overtaken or overwhelmed by other capitals. Profits have to come first, regardless of the murderous consequences, even when those profits depend on fuelling the climate catastrophe.
We see this in the steel industry, and far beyond. Each bloc of capital—Europe, China, the US—is looking over its shoulders at its rivals. Each is unwilling to risk being put at a competitive disadvantage by committing to the rapid, gigantic and expensive transformation of all productive systems that we require.
We can put this another way: a wholesale overhaul of the forces of production—that is, the entire productive system—is desperately needed. But it’s being thwarted by the relations of production—that is, who owns the economy.
So where does this leave us?
A practical solution
Our demands most moderate are
We only want the Earth
– James Connolly, 1907
Removing the psychopaths from control of the extraordinary productive network that spans the globe would remove the single greatest obstacle to rapid, effective action to tackle the climate crisis. Take out the enormous power of capital, embedded in states and corporations, and we would be left with the technical, human job—enormous, but definitely achievable—of rapidly driving down emissions, retooling productive systems and dealing with the multiple planetary crises, environmental and social, that we face.
This would require the vast majority of humanity, who currently build and operate the world’s productive systems but who own none of them, to seize collective control.
This would not only be our best chance to limit the developing catastrophe; it would also be our best chance to survive it. A world divided up into rival blocs of military and monetary power, driven by a psychopathic, dog-eat-dog logic, means brutal wars in an unstable and rapidly warming world.
In other words, not for the first time in human history, we need a revolution. Slave societies and feudalism, both powerful social systems that survived centuries of crisis, have been overthrown in previous eras. Capitalism and its ruling psychopathic clique will have to follow if we are to avert the worst scenarios awaiting us.
This colossal task has been the project of the most militant and politically radical wing of the working-class movement since the time of Karl Marx. The argument of revolutionaries is that, just as capitalists engaged in competitive accumulation are pushed to adopt a psychopathic logic, workers engaged in collective struggle are pushed by that struggle in the direction of a very different logic, of solidarity and cooperation. The antithesis of the corporate psychopath is the collective worker in struggle.
We get a glimpse of what this looks like in one of the most famous working-class upsurges this country has seen.
*****
‘It is magnificent that so many people think, like the Builders Labourers’ Federation, that the environment must be protected at all costs’
– Jack Mundey, 1972
In my drive around the coal districts, plenty of conversations end with me offering to send a link for Rocking the Foundations. The film tells the extraordinary story of the NSW Builders Labourers’ Federation (BLF), from the 1950s up to 1975.
The story starts in 1951 with a small group of communists setting out to transform their union. After years of workplace organising, a reform ticket swept to victory in the NSW BLF in 1961, overturning decades of corrupt, right-wing rule. In the years that followed, a network of politicised militants led strikes that won safety, site amenities, workers’ compensation, decent pay and dignity on major construction sites around Sydney and beyond. The movement was part of a rising tide of union militancy, which was intertwined with a growing, society-wide radicalisation generated by the mass movement against the US and Australian war in Vietnam.
Builders labourers in this era had an extraordinarily high level of participation and control over their union and their industry. In the early 1970s, major construction sites, including the massive Sydney Opera House site, operated under a system of workers’ control, where an elected committee of workers assessed requests from management and organised the work.
In 1971, the BLF placed a ban on the development of Kelly’s Bush in the posh suburb of Hunter’s Hill in Sydney. In the years that followed, builders labourers and other construction workers wrote themselves into the history books, placing “green bans” and refusing to work on environmentally or socially damaging projects. The NSW BLF was smashed in 1974, and most of the green bans along with them. But the legacy of these workers’ struggles is still visible today in streets and parks in Sydney, Melbourne and beyond.
The green bans are an incredible piece of history. They blow apart the myth of the supposed eternal hostility of blue-collar workers to environmental and social justice issues. They demonstrate the extraordinary strength that organised workers can bring to a social movement.
But to tell the story of the BLF in the 1970s is to describe a series of differences with today.
Social issues including climate, war and racism have sparked significant mobilisations in recent years. But there’s been no equivalent of the radicalisation generated by the movement against the Vietnam War, a mass worldwide radical movement that inspired and trained thousands of activists. These activists went on to transform unions and social movements over the following decade.
Even in the early 1970s, most other union officials detested the freewheeling, participatory style of the leadership of the NSW BLF. Few did anything to help the BLF resist deregistration. This conservatism was reinforced by the economic crash of the mid-1970s. Victories became harder to achieve, and the political limitations of Australia’s union movement became more exposed.
Most of the leadership of the union movement had already ditched militancy in favour of collaboration with employers by the early 1980s. Then from 1983, the ALP-ACTU Accord consciously crushed the surviving outposts of worker militancy, dismembering the remaining militant branches of the BLF and other unions.
The legacy of this history is still with us. So, rather than a union movement which rocked the country with a strike wave in 1969 that smashed the anti-union laws and freed union leader Clarrie O’Shea from prison, we find a movement under siege and on the defensive. Some sections are in a state of abject industrial surrender. Rather than radical political currents being well established in important sections of unions, we find well-organised class collaboration dominating. Rather than a rising tide of industrial action, social media and email campaigns proliferate.
Bringing together a union movement at a low ebb with a climate movement which is far from mass or radical most of the time, is not going to recreate the dynamic of the BLF. The rather underwhelming union presence at the largest climate protests in Australian history—the September 2019 school strikes for the climate—is evidence of this. It is, however, possible to work systematically to rebuild the three crucial, interconnected components of the BLF story—class-struggle unionism, a defiant mass social movement and organised radical political currents.
What are our prospects?
It’s easy to be glib about the prospects for a “just transition”. But no-one should be under any illusion about the enormous level of struggle, organisation and radical politics that will be required to win anything that lives up to that name.
For starters, for there to be a “just” transition, there has to actually be a transition. Despite 30 years of platitudes and pledges, the proportion of energy produced by wind and solar worldwide—once we include transport and “stationary energy” (for instance gas burned in home appliances and in industry)—is less than 2 percent. Neale draws on the work of Trade Unions for Energy Democracy when he writes (in early 2021): “We have been told for two decades that the proportion of renewable energy in total global energy has been continually rising. And yet, in 2019 wind and solar produced less than 2% of the total energy used globally. Less than 2%. And that proportion has not been growing. For the last four years, the amount of new wind and solar each year has been flat, and not increasing”.
Eighty-eight percent of global energy still comes from coal, oil and gas. Of the remainder, half is from burning wood and cow dung, mainly in villages in the poorest countries. Most of the remaining 6 percent of global energy is sourced from biofuels, nuclear and hydropower. None of these energy sources are going to get us where we need to be.
The good news is that a transition is possible. The bad news is that the work to achieve it has barely started.
The “just” part of the phrase “just transition”, promising not only a transition but one that affords justice to the workers, is also very far from assured. There’s no guarantee that jobs in renewables will have anything like the conditions in the fossil fuel industries they are meant to replace.
In the US, workers in power stations are paid an average of US$41 per hour, more than double the median wage of US$19 per hour. US coal miners average US$36 per hour. Workers in the solar power industry, by contrast, are paid an average of only US$24 per hour.
In Australia it’s harder to find comparative figures like this. But stories of cut-price operations are widespread in the barely regulated and sparsely unionised renewable sector. A host of private sector construction projects are dispersed all over the country, without union agreements. The Electrical Trades Union says lack of basic regulation means solar farm construction is a “cowboy industry” with “widespread unsafe practices”. It’s a huge organising challenge.
To the extent that decent wages and conditions exist in the carbon economy, they are the product of bitter, protracted struggles in coal mines and oil and gas platforms, in power plants and refineries. Of course, those conditions are under relentless attack—often from the same forces that proclaim their supposed love of “high-paying blue-collar regional jobs”.
Pretty much any new industry, including renewable electricity generation, starts as a mainly non-union endeavour. To win decent wages and conditions in the renewables industry in a world run by psychopaths will take struggles at least as long and bitter as those that have marked the fossil fuel industries over the past century and more.
These battles will have to happen in an industrial landscape that is rapidly and profoundly changing.
*****
We make our own history, as Karl Marx once observed, but not in circumstances of our own choosing. One of those “circumstances not of our choosing” is how crucial the labour of particular groups of workers is, for production and for profit. Struggles over wages, conditions, permanency and safety occur over this ever shifting industrial terrain.
The industrial power of workers in fossil fuel industries is significantly boosted by how crucial their labour is to every productive system. In a coal-fired power station, workers’ labour is essential to production as well as maintenance. If key workers in a power station or the mine feeding it walk out on strike, the electricity will soon stop flowing.
This has a huge impact on the entire economy and society. A strike of a few hundred power station operators can throw production and profits into crisis in an entire state. There is probably no other group of workers with anything like this degree of industrial power.
Of course, working in a power station is not some automatic path to industrial victory. It took the efforts of political radicals, many of them communists, to build strong union organisation in the power stations after World War Two—often in defiance of their own more conservative union leaders. It’s possible for sections of the workforce to be ground down and defeated, as with the maintenance workers’ strike in the Latrobe Valley in 1977, and the South East Queensland Electricity Board dispute in 1985. Once conditions are lost, it takes a serious dispute, like the 100-day lockout at Yallourn in 2013, to win them back. Still, the indispensable role of workers in a power plant gives them a head start on winning decent wages and conditions.
The labour of coal miners and oil and gas workers is also central to the entire economy. However, as coal miners have known for 200 years, the industry is one of booms and busts. And unlike electricity, coal and other fossil fuels can be stored and traded in huge quantities across regions and around the world, allowing management and governments to organise around the effects of strikes.
Nevertheless, local strikes can seriously mess with production chains far removed from the mine. And where mine workers are organised on a big enough scale, and especially when national and international coal markets are tight, coal miners can exercise enormous industrial power because of the potential impact of a strike on electricity and steel (and in the past, other crucial industries such as transport).
All of this is very different from the industrial power of workers in renewables. Once installed, solar panels and wind turbines generate electricity without a production workforce on site. Workers are needed for maintenance – more so on wind farms than in solar—but it would take a long time for a strike in the maintenance workforce to cut the amount of electricity being generated.
This doesn’t make it impossible to organise for decent wages and conditions in renewables, but it’s a big change to the terrain on which the struggle is conducted, and a change that weakens workers’ industrial power.
*****
There are other problems. For most of the twentieth century, the structure of industrial relations laws in Australia—the product of a colossal level of struggle in the decades immediately before and after 1900—meant that a relatively small group of workers could win gains that would then “flow on” to other sectors.
This design feature was intended to contain militancy, by allowing more moderate unions to win gains without taking industrial action. But it meant that militant sections of the class were a vanguard in a very direct way: their gains would very often flow on to other groups of workers. So the impressive wage gains made by the NSW BLF in the spectacular mass strike of May 1970 flowed through to construction workers in other states. Shorter hours won by fitters and turners in the metal trades would flow on to other industries, and so on.
The Hawke/Keating government destroyed this system in the early 1990s. Industry bargaining was replaced with a system of enterprise bargaining, still with us today. Each group of workers has to win and keep its gains in its bargaining unit (usually a single employer or even a single workplace), or face stagnation or going backwards.
Industrially strong and well-organised workers in power stations, mines, construction and elsewhere could keep their conditions intact—for a time, anyway. However, it was no longer the case that gains made by these strong groups of workers flowed through to the less strong. What had in practice been an industrial vanguard, winning gains for the class as a whole, was reduced to strong sectional organisation (at best), which had little direct effect in lifting conditions for the rest of the working class.
It’s this shift that’s the basis for the widely held view that well-paid power station operators (or coal miners, or any other group which has held on to decent conditions) represent only sectional privilege, rather than having something to do with the aspirations of the whole class. A brutal “transition” to insecure and lower paid work has already been imposed on the big majority of the workforce in the Latrobe Valley, largely without a fight. The same “transition” has been imposed on workers in oil and gas platforms, especially those with the most widely held skills. Hanging on to good wages and conditions for the power station operators is a worthwhile aim, but it doesn’t address this fact.
The terrain of the class struggle, always changing under capitalism, has changed again. To the extent that a vanguard existed, it has been either smashed, demobilised or isolated from the rest of the class. This throws up significant organising challenges that we are not well placed to meet.
Any actual vanguard, any leading section of the working class, is constructed politically at least as much as by the blind luck of where people happen to work. Forging a united workforce in power stations or coal mines has always depended on political militants, as it has in other workforces.
Building organisations on new terrain has never happened by accident. It’s always been the result of conscious work of worker militants and organisers, often in opposition to the more established forces in the labour movement. A lot of things contributed to the famous history of the NSW BLF: the rise of concrete as a material, giving labourers more industrial power; the concentration and size of jobs in inner city CBD, giving workers confidence; a relatively tight labour market; new work processes demanding increased skills of riggers, dogmen and scaffolders.
The only factor that the worker militants who led those struggles could directly control, however, was the strength of worker organisation, measured both politically and industrially. It’s here that history will have to be made.
There’s no way of telling which section of the working class will be the base of any new vanguard. It might be in expanding sectors of the economy, in energy or in a totally unrelated sector. Or perhaps, against the run of play, workers in an industry in decline might make a contribution to the labour movement that long outlasts their own jobs.
It wouldn’t be the first time.
The ancient craft of the stonemasons was already in steep decline by the 1850s. Their skills were hard to replace, meaning their industrial power was still high, but new construction materials and techniques were fast making these specialised skills redundant.
This didn’t stop the masons from spearheading a movement for the eight-hour day in the boom conditions of Melbourne in 1856. A crucial role was played by political radicals like James Stephens, veterans of the radical wing of the Chartist movement, one of the world’s first mass working-class radical movements.
Perhaps the masons could have fought only for themselves, but politicised militants like Stephens instead organised to win this breakthrough for every worker in the construction industry. So when the eight-hour movement triumphed in Melbourne’s construction industry in 1856, no worker in the industry was left behind.
This achievement was lost in the recession of the early 1860s, then won again in fits and starts—across construction and many other industries—in the 1870s and 1880s. By this time, the eight-hour day had become a rallying cry of a brand new phenomenon, the international working-class movement. The eight-hour day became a crucial demand: a decent society had to allow the time for workers to participate in civic and political life.
None of this stopped the continued decline of the stonemasons as an occupational group. Their union perished, never to revive as an independent force, in the catastrophe of economic depression and industrial defeat of the 1890s. But more than a century after that, their achievement continues to set the terrain for struggles throughout the world.
A century after the stonemasons of Melbourne gave their enduring contribution to the world, it was a group of radicals in a very different, rising section of the construction workforce—the builders labourers—who were able to build on their legacy. We don’t know which group of workers will be next, on climate or other issues.
*****
Eighteen months have passed since my quick visit to the coal districts. Climate change is still a massive issue, yet nothing much has actually changed. Australia’s 2020 commitment to reducing greenhouse gas emissions would see the country reach zero emissions around the year 2294, more than 250 years from now. The government’s Glasgow announcements don’t change anything about that.
In the Illawarra, BlueScope have certainly increased their output of material about how much they care about climate. Their output of CO2, however, remains more or less steady. BlueScope and Rio Tinto have recently announced, to much fanfare, the commitment of $150 million (all previously announced expenditure) to explore options for using hydrogen in steel production at Port Kembla. Meanwhile, in the here and now, BlueScope announced a $1.19 billion profit in August 2021. The company’s “ambition” of 1 percent reduction in carbon intensity across the business remains, until a “breakthrough” comes from somewhere. The “desire” to decarbonise is trumped for the foreseeable future by the need for profit.
For workers, for all the talk of supposed “well-paid blue-collar jobs” underpinned by fossil fuel industries, the relentless assault on wages and conditions continues. Management at South 32’s Appin mine imposed significant cuts to pay in August 2020 by changing contractors.
In the Hunter Valley, environmental groups have joined with a series of unions (though not the CFMEU) to form the Hunter Jobs Alliance, which at least is sparking discussion over decarbonisation and the future of the region’s economy. One Nation, having made their reputation on outspoken opposition to casualisation, voted for the government’s regressive reforms early this year, which strip many casuals of recently won legal rights. The party dumped their star candidate when he objected. With Joel Fitzgibbon set to ride into a carbon-intensive sunset, there is a lot of interest in the seat.
In the Latrobe Valley, Yallourn will shut in 2028, four years ahead of schedule. Five hundred jobs will be scrapped, but with a seven-year lead time (compared to five months notice for Hazelwood) and $40 million in compensation to the workers. Efforts to shift the industrial base of the Latrobe Valley towards green energy and green industries are hit and miss—ranging from a new battery proposal, to a scrapped electric vehicle manufacturing initiative, to a pilot plant producing “brown” hydrogen from brown coal, currently producing 88kg of CO2 for each kilo of hydrogen.
And yet, there are plenty of reasons to stay hopeful. I met a bunch of them in my quick tour of coal districts last year.
Ron in his good-sized shed along with Wendy, Naomi and Brett Farmer: all of them fully aware, from bitter experience, of the high cost and declining return of fossil fuels in the Latrobe Valley, and all of them contributing their considerable ingenuity to organising to win solutions for a community in transition. A mine worker in the Hunter Valley, politely but firmly contradicting my assumptions by asserting that all of his younger workmates accept the science of climate change.
Steel workers frustrated with management disinterest in green technologies, and with management repression around climate questions. Another mine worker who doesn’t rush to agree with my talking points—far from it—but repeatedly stresses the need for dialogue between mine workers and climate activists. A retired coal miner responding to my proposition that the coal industry will have to be rapidly phased out by agreeing that “it’s all got to change”, like it’s the most obvious thing that could be said.
Of course, these are individuals with decent attitudes, not sections of a surging movement. But the fact that such sentiments exist, and aren’t exactly hard to find, give the lie to the right-wing and often self-serving narrative of “regional blue- collar workers love coal no matter what”. And it points to the possibility of a very different politics taking organised form.
History, both for good and for ill, is made by organised political forces. Working-class insight and decent instincts only get so far when they are up against a psychopathic system and against political machines—whether of the Scott Morrison, One Nation, or Joel Fitzgibbon varieties. There is a vigorous contest to be had in building an alternative to all of these disasters.
The history of that contest is centuries old, yet for us it is still there to be made. That history will be written by people organising from scratch, turning unions from hollowed-out shells into fighting organisations. It will be written by people building a mass, defiant movement about climate and much else. It will be written by people fighting to win the radical change we need, in both the forces and the relations of production.
It won’t be written in circumstances of our own choosing. It will be written in a rapidly warming and unstable world, one where ruling classes pour endless resources into brutal wars rather than deal with the multiple crises besetting the planet and all who live on it.
But there are no two ways about it. There’s no satisfactory transition on the way. And there’s certainly no justice. There’s just us, making and remaking our history and our world, and making its productive systems our own.
