Resources for Worker Climate Organizing
Fixing the climate means massive technology change in the workplace. To steer it our way, we can learn from decades of creative fights over automation, monitoring, and other new tech on the job. Charley Richardson’s collection of articles on workplace change and continuous bargaining, here, sums up union rights and organizing tools to bring workers "into every decision about new technologies and the restructuring of work."
The California Federation of Teachers’ Climate Justice Toolkit offers fact-filled flyers and union resolutions for educators working to confront the climate crisis. A collection of climate-oriented lesson plans across subject areas and grade levels helps educators address global warming in the classroom, and a fact sheet addresses common myths and misconceptions about global warming from a labor perspective.
“The developers make a fortune. The laborers make a living.” So begins Pat Fiske’s film Rocking the Foundations, an intimate portrait of the New South Wales Builders Labourers Federation and its Green Bans, a series of strike actions to protect Sydney’s historic neighborhoods and public spaces at the request of the local community. It’s a story of newfound militancy in a moment of political upheaval; of worker experiments with new tactics that built shop floor power. You can watch it here.
Les Leopold’s book The Man Who Hated Work and Loved Labor is a gripping account of Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers officer Tony Mazzocchi’s fight for safe working conditions and his challenge to a stagnant culture of business unionism. Mazzocchi “conjured up a labor movement that didn’t really exist, but just might,” writes Leopold: a movement that didn’t shy away from big fights, that could bring about “radical changes that would stop global warming.” He coined the term "just transition" and helped build the movement that won OSHA. It's out of print, but get it where you get used books or check the library.
The National Council for Occupational Safety and Health’s Fired Up! Workers for Heat Justice toolkit includes printable posters that identify heat illness symptoms and your right to safe working conditions, organizing tips for demanding heat illness protections at work, first aid steps for heat illness, and a step-by-step guide to filing OSHA complaints.
For pro-worker research on green transitions, search for reports by the Labor Network for Sustainability, Trade Unions for Energy Democracy, or the Climate and Community Institute.
Fight the Boss, Build a Green Future
by Kari Thompson
As the Trump administration sows chaos, it is only intensifying global heating—and the storms, heat waves, and fires that come with it—while gutting the safety nets that should support working people in times of crisis.
If the “cost of living” is angering and dividing folks now, imagine what compounding climate disasters will do to food, water, energy, and housing costs.
We have to keep our eyes on the prize: an economy that sustains workers and their families, and allows us the free time to enjoy the wealth and communities we create.
Right now, we won’t get far with efforts to win new federal laws for climate. But workplace fights are more important than ever.
We won’t get the world we want until we demand it. We can’t just react to crisis after crisis—we have to stay on offense, to force our bosses to either come along or get out of the way.
We have plenty of good ideas for a fossil-fuel-free future, but the perfect policy platform won’t matter if it’s never enacted. What’s often missing from environmental plans is the power to beat corporate opposition.
In this issue, you’ll find practical ideas to organize for better jobs and working conditions, solidarity for safety in a dangerous climate, and organizing the unorganized in growing green industries. As stories from Mexico and Canada show, it’s not just workers in the U.S. who are rising to meet our planet-wide climate challenges.
It takes practical organizing skills to move your co-workers into action—whether on climate change or any other topic. Which issues are widely and deeply felt, and have clear solutions? Who has the power to grant the demand, and what will it take to move that person?
The stories in our Jobs and Climate special issue connect those dots. See all the stories below, originally published in Labor Notes Issue #553, April 2025. (Subscribe and get one year for $30.)
Construction Unions Grab Hold of Clean Energy Jobs
by Paul Prescod
Workers in the building trades need to more aggressively organize non-union clean energy workers.
Locomotive Builders Forge Green Rail Project
by Kari Thompson
Workers aim to clean up railroad pollution while also revitalizing their locomotive engine manufacturing plant.
Coping with Climate Crises on the Job
by Alexandra Bradbury
These defensive fights can help us build the power to go on offense.
Chicago Teachers Win Greener Schools
by Nick Limbeck and Lauren Bianchi
Chicago teachers’ environmental justice victory stems from a collaboration between teachers and environmental activists to expose urgent problems facing us and our students—and link those problems to larger struggles.
Stewards Corner: Organizing to ‘Green’ Your Job: What Works?
by Keith Brower Brown
Stewards often build fights around small issues, and they need to. But stewards also have a special charge to stay ahead of the boss—to think big about shifting power on the job, including by driving the move to green production.
Mexico City’s Electric Trolleybus Workers Took on Austerity and Won
by Natascha Elena Uhlmann
Trolleybus, rail, and cable car workers reached a tentative agreement, averting a strike. The union saved hundreds of jobs in a campaign that brought public transit workers into their funding fight.
Bargaining for the Climate
Rather than wait for bosses and politicians to act, unions are making—and sometimes winning—contract demands to cut pollution.
United Teachers Los Angeles won more electric school buses, union-built and maintained, in its 2022 contract, along with more green space on campuses.
The Canadian Union of Postal Workers has been demanding the transition of its entire fleet to union-made electric vehicles, plus retrofitting Canada Post buildings with solar panels to cut costs and pollution.
A thousand University of California lab and medical workers won free regional bus and rail passes in 2024.
The Oklahoma Education Association struck statewide for nine days in 2018. Among its demands were higher taxes on oil and gas production and motor fuels to fund public education.
Refinery Steelworkers in 2022 demanded that managers install every emissions reduction technology that could get a public subsidy. Their employers have so far refused to bargain on this subject.
Then there are contract demands to address the impacts of climate change that workers are already enduring on the job, like extreme heat.
UPS Teamsters in 2023 won fans and exhaust shields in package delivery trucks, and air conditioning in new ones.
Workers at the Homegrown sandwich shop chain in Seattle won heat pay in their first contract: once the inside hits 86 degrees, they get paid double, or the right to leave work without punishment. The goal is to push managers to keep temperatures safer.
—Batul Hassan and Keith Brower Brown. Batul Hassan is labor director of the Climate and Community Institute.