I’VE ALWAYS SAID that sustainability starts at the kitchen table. And herein lies the crux of the dilemma when it comes to uniting the labor and climate movements in the United States.

Every day, working people struggle to meet their most basic needs: putting food on the table, securing healthcare, saving for retirement and kids’ college funds, and several other such “kitchen table” issues.

Historically, the environmental and climate movements have been tone-deaf to labor issues, failing to understand that as long as workers have to worry about these basic needs, they will not have the bandwidth to focus on the climate or how their jobs might be contributing to global warming.

I’ve often been asked why unions in Europe, and other industrialized nations, can take action on climate, and have been doing so for a long time, but we cannot. The answer is: No worker in those countries has to worry about these needs. They are taken care of by their governments.

Since that’s not the case in the US, it is imperative that the US climate movement have a solid, articulated jobs plan.

Promising jobs of the future in the future offers no solace if your job today is being axed to make way for the changes needed to address global warming. This is why at the Labor Network for Sustainability (LNS) we advocate for a robust federal Just Transition program where no worker would be the roadkill on the path to a climate-safe world.

Money is not the real obstacle here. Political will is.

We believe that any worker threatened with this kind of job loss, whether a coal miner, railroad worker, public employee, or manufacturing worker, should be guaranteed five years of income maintenance, continued healthcare coverage and pension, and education or other skill training, as well as 100 percent relocation financing if needed.

Some say we can’t afford this kind of Just Transition program. But if we can afford to spend trillions of dollars on the military, we can afford to invest in saving our people and our planet. Money is not the real obstacle here. Political will is.

But it has to be said: The US labor movement is also at fault here. It has long been tone-deaf to the existential crisis global warming poses. Fact is, while it’s imperative for the climate movement to have a jobs plan, it is equally important for the labor movement to have a climate plan.

There have been some advances on this front by the building trades and energy unions, which now support renewable energy because they want the new jobs in these growing sectors to be union jobs (which they should be). However, these same unions, as well as the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations’ (AFL-CIO), the primary federation of unions in the country, support “all-of-the-above” energy policies.

They are for renewable energy but also for continued extraction and burning of fossil fuels and expansion of nuclear energy. They support carbon capture and sequestration technologies which have yet to be proven to work at scale or to be cost effective or available in a timeframe suitable to meeting the challenge of keeping global warming in check.

I don’t begrudge Labor’s defense of fossil fuel workers. Unions have a legal duty to represent all workers in the union. What I don’t like, however, is the movement’s continued advocacy of policies that expand fossil fuel use.

I’ve been watching the evolution of US Labor’s position on climate change for decades. It started with denialism, morphed to accepting it’s happening but ignoring that it is largely driven by the extraction and burning of fossil fuels, and has now moved on to sort-of accepting humans’ role in it but supporting false solutions. I consider its head-in-the-sand as dereliction of duty.

Labor, in my opinion, has a moral duty not only to watch out for worker interests today, but also to guard the future of our movement. On this, it has failed. Global warming represents a dagger pointed at the very heart of this great movement of working people. The movement leaders have known this all along. I know they knew because I had been briefing AFL-CIO leaders about it since 1988, when I joined the UN commission on global warming.

The US labor movement pushed back against the very idea of a Just Transition when veteran labor leader Tony Mazzocchi conceived of it in the 1980s, and it continued to dismiss the proposition for decades. It didn’t want to be associated with any idea that implied acceptance of the fact that jobs would be lost.

US Labor has incredible political clout. We know how to get to any table we want to be at.

When LNS advocated for a Just Transition — from day one of its founding in 2007 — we were told repeatedly: You can’t talk about Just Transition; it’s toxic.

Similarly, the movement blasted the Green New Deal when Senator Edward J. Markey and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez introduced the resolution to Congress in 2019, even though it envisioned a national mobilization that would put millions to work in good-paying, union jobs aimed at addressing the economic, social, and climate crises crippling the country. Again, we were told it’s toxic.

Labor complains about not having a seat at the table when it comes to framing policies, which is a disingenuous lie if there ever was one. First, most major labor unions were definitely consulted about how to implement a Just Transition to green jobs and the Green New Deal. And even if some weren’t, organized labor in the US has an army of lobbyists, and is perhaps the largest and strongest free trade union movement in the world. Even in its current diminished state (thanks to decades of unfair trade practices, the offshoring of manufacturing jobs, and union-busting by corporations and their pollitical allies) US Labor has incredible political clout. We know how to get to any table we want to be at.

Today, all of us who work in this space like to say that jobs vs. environment is a false choice. But the truth is, as things stand right now, it is still a very real choice. It should be a false choice, and we have to work to make it a false choice. But, so far union groups in the US have lagged in doing this work.

What do we have to do to turn this around?

I’d say, we have to build a bottom-up movement for climate protection within the labor movement that fights to end the use of fossil fuels and other petrochemical products as well as dubious climate solutions.

To do this we have to disassemble the construct that divides us. Worker solidarity is the bedrock principle of the labor movement. Naomi Klein wrote that climate change changes everything. Building off her phrase, I like to say that climate change changes everything, including how we see our role in society as trade unionists. We need to expand worker solidarity to human solidarity.

At LNS we’ve developed talking points about how climate change is the real job killer, not the efforts to address climate chaos. We need to refrain from beating around the bush about this. We have to demand more accountability from our international and national institutions, which so far have failed us. Above all, we have to build a powerful labor-climate movement that will be a relentless force for urgent, science-based climate action, and create visions of a future that will actually work for not only working people, but for all people and the planet.