Hilary Wainwright,3 Jake Woodier4 and Philip Proudfoot5
Abstract The role of organised labour is an essential, yet overlooked, driver for a just transition to a low-carbon economy. This article explores how worker agency – rooted in place, memory, and collective organisation – is central to climate and economic transformation. Drawing on historical and contemporary examples of worker-led industrial conversion in the UK, it illustrates how trade unions and allied community movements have organised for, and in some cases, successfully implemented socially useful alternative forms of production. Through historical case studies such as the Lucas Aerospace workers’ plan, and more recent experiences – Broughton Airbus’ conversion and Just Transition Wakefield – the article illuminates how organised workers can align climate action with job security and community resilience. We conclude that for decarbonisation to be equitable and effective, labour must reclaim power over wages and conditions, and over the direction of technological and industrial change, through expanded collective bargaining and broader place-based alliances.
Resumen El papel de los trabajadores organizados es un motor esencial, aunque a menudo pasado por alto, para una transición justa hacia una economía baja en carbono. Este artículo explora cómo la agencia de los trabajadores —enraizada en el territorio, la memoria y la organización colectiva— resulta central para la transformación climática y económica. A partir de ejemplos históricos y contemporáneos de reconversión industrial liderada por trabajadores en el Reino Unido, se ilustra cómo los sindicatos y los movimientos comunitarios aliados se han organizado para impulsar, y en algunos casos implementar con éxito, formas alternativas de producción socialmente útiles. Mediante estudios de caso históricos, como el plan de los trabajadores de Lucas Aerospace, y experiencias más recientes, como la reconversión en Broughton Airbus y Just Transition Wakefield, el artículo muestra cómo los trabajadores organizados pueden alinear los objetivos de la acción climática con la seguridad laboral y la resiliencia comunitaria. Se concluye que, para que la descarbonización sea equitativa y eficaz, el trabajo debe recuperar poder sobre los salarios y las condiciones, así como sobre la dirección del cambio tecnológico e industrial, mediante una negociación colectiva ampliada y alianzas territoriales más extensas.
Resumo O trabalho organizado desempenha um papel essencial, mas muitas vezes esquecido, numa transição justa para uma economia de baixo carbono. Este artigo explora de que forma a agência dos trabalhadores – enraizada no território, na memória e na organização colectiva – é central para a transformação climática e económica. Com base em exemplos históricos e contemporâneos de conversão industrial liderada por trabalhadores no Reino Unido, ilustra como os sindicatos e os movimentos comunitários aliados se organizaram para, e nalguns casos, implementarem com êxito formas alternativas de produção socialmente úteis. Usando estudos de caso históricos, como o plano dos trabalhadores da Lucas Aerospace, e de experiências mais recentes – a conversão da Airbus em Broughton e a Just Transition Wakefield – o artigo evidencia como trabalhadores organizados podem alinhar a acção climática com a segurança no emprego e a resiliência comunitária. Conclui-se que, para que a descarbonização seja equitativa e eficaz, o trabalho deve recuperar o poder sobre os salários e as condições, bem como sobre a orientação da mudança tecnológica e industrial, através da expansão da negociação colectiva e de alianças territoriais mais amplas.
Keywords just transition, place, agency, decarbonisation, power, industrial conversion, organised labour.
In the meticulously reconstructed pit village at Beamish – a 140-hectare open-air museum in County Durham, North East England – buildings and artefacts of the North East’s past conjure up everyday life in the region’s once-thriving coal economy (Atkinson 1978; Brown 2009). Visitors wander around miners’ cottages, watch museum workers carry out traditional crafts, or descend a preserved drift mine. The lesson is clear: coal, steel, and manufacturing not only provided livelihoods but forged a distinctive working-class identity built on collective struggle; ambiguous pride in toil and technical ingenuity; all deeply bound up in a particular geographic experience of the industrial revolution.
Though the pits and shipyards have closed, heavy industry – and its absence – remains woven into the region’s social fabric (Byrne 2002). Indeed, if Beamish built a ‘2000s town’ museum, it would depict a very different legacy: call centres, chain stores, Amazon warehouses, and derelict high streets. Such an uninspiring exhibit would nevertheless reveal something essential about the region: the persistent failure of political and economic elites to forge a coherent post-industrial future. A ‘2000s town’ would stand as a physical record of what in the UK is often referred to as ‘managed decline’ (Kitson and Michie 2014; Dawley, Pike and Tomaney 2010).
Today, a quarter of the North East lives below the poverty line, and more than half of all households experience at least one form of deprivation (JRF 2024; Leach 2022). Decades of neglect have created fertile ground for reactionary, far-right politics. Following the assault on organised labour during the premiership of Margaret Thatcher (1979–90), symbolised by the creation of enterprise zones which offered tax breaks and a deregulated labour market for companies, work in the region became increasingly precarious and poorly paid (Jones 2006; Chaudhary and Potter 2019). Many firms took advantage of lower taxes without creating new jobs, shifting operations rather than expanding them. Like other post-industrial parts of Britain, any employment that did emerge in the North East contrasted starkly with the skilled and formally stable work once offered by the mining and steel industries (Jones and Munday 2010).
In recent years, new visions of renewal have taken shape – most notably the Teesside Freeport, backed by substantial Saudi Arabian investment, the same investors who had recently acquired Newcastle United Football Club (Proudfoot and Reda 2022). Through seeking foreign investment, the freeport initiative emphasises the development of a hydrogen economy, carbon capture utilisation and storage (CCUS), and renewable energy technologies – pillars that are touted as central to Britain’s broader net-zero agenda. The premise is that by attracting foreign (petro)capital, the region can leverage its existing infrastructure – ports, pipelines, and engineering expertise – to pioneer green industries (Department for Business & Trade n.d.).
Proponents of the Freeport present it as a forward-looking strategy that tackles climate change while ushering in a new wave of industrial jobs, shifting the region from ‘managed decline’ to a post-fossil-fuel ‘transition’. Yet these projects reproduce familiar patterns of corporate–state partnership, in which local workers and communities are once again sidelined. The earlier dismantling of the North East’s traditional industries tore apart livelihoods, community bonds, and working-class organisation – damage that current plans do little to repair. A ‘just transition’ town at Beamish, where visitors might stroll through a wind turbine factory or hydrogen hub, remains, for now, a distant fiction.
In contrast, this article focuses on workers as positive agents of the transition to low-carbon production. This focus is important to highlight in a context where debates about action to protect the planet tend only to be interested in citizen action, through citizens as consumers. In these debates, production has tended to be treated as a given, as if the technology and the choice of products are somehow neutral and separate from social relations. We argue that they are shaped by social relationships, imbued with social values, and the product of human choice.
For workers to be in a position to choose the technology they design and use, they need to be organised and have power at the point of production. The processes by which such organisations were built, usually around day-to-day issues of wages and conditions, are also a background theme of our analysis. They are a condition for workers – as producers – to gain the power to identify and bargain for alternative directions for technological change. And to defend and improve wages and conditions, with the wider interests of society and the planet in mind.
The trajectory of North East England – from industrial powerhouse to post-industrial periphery – captures the stakes of the climate and ecological crisis today. The scale of decarbonisation now required is massive and urgent, demanding the wholesale transformation of an economic system built on fossil fuels. For this shift to occur, it would be necessary to break up the outcome of centuries of concentrated structural power, accumulated through the exploitation of labour and resources from the peripheries of the global South to the core industrial economies of the global North (Chagnon et al. 2022). Yet, as the region’s experience with initiatives such as the Teesside Freeport shows, ‘green’ development risks simply reproducing the exclusions of past economic transitions.
Against this backdrop, we argue that a just transition (Stevis and Felli 2015) must be driven by the agency of workers, rooted in the places, histories, and social relations that have long sustained working-class life. Workers’ agency offers a critical but often overlooked resource for challenging exploitative capital and shaping democratic, equitable decarbonisation. This agency can emerge through the intersection of workplace organisation, local identity, collective memory and tradition, skills, and struggle. However, it must be said that this is contested terrain. Far-right forces are working in opposition to decarbonisation, sometimes exploiting powerlessness in regions where workingclass organisations had been strong. They are capturing the hearts and minds of working-class people, by speaking to their immediate concerns about livelihoods and living standards.
Documentation of worker-led conversion initiatives is the product of several decades of research by co-author Hilary Wainright, including interview-based research with trade unionists in the 1970s and 1980s. In addition, Hilary Wainwright and Jake Woodier undertook observations and interviews with several contemporary groups of workers and trade union figures exploring low-carbon alternatives in the past six years. Furthermore, these co-authors convened an in-person and online workshop in Leeds, UK on 8 March 2025 at which representatives of the conversion initiatives, and wider Labour and Green initiatives, presented their experiences and explored the collective and structural challenges they face in worker-led decarbonisation. The workshop contributed to the research material upon which this article draws, alongside additional inputs from desk research on decarbonisation initiatives.
To develop our argument, the article proceeds as follows. In Section 2, we examine experiences of place-based worker organising and worker-led transition. In Section 3, we analyse contemporary cases of worker-led organising for a just transition, including efforts around industrial conversion, green bargaining, and alliances between trade unions and community groups. In Section 4, we describe the changing balance of power which has generated a new set of structural and political conditions necessary for organised labour to act as a transformative agent in the transition to a low-carbon economy, as explored in Section 5. We note that there is a constellation of cross-cutting issues that intersect with the role of organised labour in the transition to a low-carbon economy to which this article cannot do justice due to space limitations – this is not to say they are any less important, but they deserve greater attention than possible here.
2.1 Workplace unions respond to the Covid-19 public health crisis
The idea of a worker-led transition has a historical and contemporary precedent in the UK. A recent example comes in 2020 from Broughton, North Wales during the Covid-19 pandemic. Highly organised engineering workers at the Airbus factory in Broughton took matters into their own hands. Faced with the collapse of aviation demand and looming job losses, the factory’s union branch (Unite – one of the largest workers’ unions in the UK) – representing over 4,000 workers in Broughton – rapidly converted a production line from manufacturing aircraft wings to assembling ventilator components for the National Health Service (NHS) (Woodier and Wainwright 2024) to treat acute Covid‑19 cases.
Broughton has a rich industrial history linked to aviation, with a shadow factory of Vickers-Armstrongs – one of the largest, historic British armaments firms – constructed prior to the Second World War. At the now Airbus-owned site, the workers’ organisation of the manufacturing conversion process, the speed at which it was achieved, and the capacity of the workforce to collaborate to meet the challenge of conversion were impressive. This was largely due to the role of the union branch and its shop stewards who organised the aircraft-turned-ventilator workers. Their response to the potential loss of jobs was influenced by their involvement in the community, where the priority was public health. The idea of converting aeroplane production – no longer in sufficient demand to keep the factory sustainable – was as much driven by the strength of feeling in the local community about the need to unite to overcome the health emergency, as by the need to resist job loss. This experience provides a strong example of how the social relations of a locality become the conduits of values and priorities distinct from and sometimes in conflict with corporate priorities.
Darren Reynolds, Unite convenor, explained: ‘Without the union, it would have been chaos, lots of problems without any procedure to resolve them. We have built up a tried and tested organisation and established procedures for problem resolution’ (Wainwright 2024). He cites the all-important role of workers’ elected health and safety representatives in turning the Welsh governmentfunded Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre (part of the Airbus site) into an adapted sterile environment: ‘Our 60 health and safety reps have been able to pre-empt the problems and solve them in advance’, he explained (ibid.).
In this way, 500 Airbus workers, previously producing aircraft wings, turned their skills to producing ventilator parts, meeting social needs, securing jobs, and strengthening their union organisation in the process. In the context of a crisis in the supply of ventilators to meet the needs of Covid-19 patients, and a call from a Conservative prime minister for companies to make them, management could hardly resist the union’s public-spirited efforts to find a solution. The worker-led organising potentially prevented the mass lay-off of workers and the impact that could have had on a community which has been shaped by aviation and is in many ways reliant on it for the prosperity of the local economy.
This experience of successful industrial conversion also offers a glimpse of the potential role of workplace trade unions in supporting the move from a high-carbon to a low-carbon economy without job losses. Significantly, the experience points to the importance of a well-unionised workplace and a context where the wider political priority was the public good, for achieving such a transition.
2.2 From pandemic to climate emergency
While much of the (limited) news agenda dedicated to climate breakdown covers impacts such as extreme weather, an enormous economic storm is threatening the livelihoods of the communities rooted in particular territories. The power to halt and reverse the trend towards climate and ecological breakdown will have to come from those with a long-term vested interest in lowering carbon emissions: working people, their workplaces, community organisations and their allies in ‘anchor’ institutions, such as universities and local councils. However, forces of reactionary and far-right ideology are mobilising in opposition to decarbonisation. The emergence of this type of politics in recent years in many parts of the world, and the draw it has for working people, can be seen in British politics in the meteoric rise of the Reform UK party. In 2025, the party headed by Nigel Farage – a long-time advocate for the UK leaving the European Union – achieved significant electoral success at the local government level, and at the time of writing, political polling projects it to win just under 300 (of 650) seats in the UK parliament, up from their current level of 5 (English 2025). The party and its spokespeople regularly oppose ‘net-zero’, in favour of scrapping subsidies for renewable energy, while also promising cash for the poorest working families generated through a type of ‘golden visa’ scheme for the global super-rich to reside in the UK.
However, in pursuit of global decarbonisation, a growing coalition of activists, union members, researchers, and frontline communities are fighting for the transition to be rooted in economic justice. Often, a primary goal is to avoid replicating or entrenching regional as well as class inequalities and marginalisations of the carbon economy. Ben Crawford and David Whyte insist in their important pamphlet Working for Climate Justice that ‘It may be that workers are the only group of people in capitalist societies who have the power to slow down climate change’ (2024: 2). We would qualify this to say ‘potential power’ in order to avoid implying that this power is already mobilised. The authors conclude that ‘To repoliticise the debate on the causes of climate change, workers and their trade unions need to be central to strategies for a just transition’ (ibid.).
After all, though capital is increasingly mobile, corporations need to invest somewhere, in some place, whether to extract value from the earth in the form of critical minerals or to exploit and profit from the labour power of local populations both in what is left of manufacturing (including high-tech manufacturing) and the increasingly privatised service sector. Place is not simply a geographic location; it is also a constellation of social relations where people live, bring up families, and are part of historically created continuities replete with memories and social and physical legacies. Capital’s dependence on labour power, which in reality is not abstract but rather, located and embodied, is also, as Marx made clear, potentially workers’ source of strength against globalised capital. To realise that potential, workers need to be organised.
The social relations and histories of place also shape the needs, aspirations, and social and cultural bonds that motivate workers to deploy this bargaining power. The social relations of place produce traditions, alliances, and institutions that can act as resources in the exertion of such power. The architecture of international diplomacy through which decarbonisation negotiations take place is completely cut off from and ignorant of such place-based organising. Place-based organising, however, is not bounded by place. The struggles over deindustrialisation of the past 50 years offer several significant – even if not all ultimately successful – examples of place-based working-class organisations reaching across places to build national, and sometimes international, organisations that gain strength from their diverse territorial roots and sources of power.
Framing and understanding worker-led organising as tied to place, as well as organising across places, provides a useful framework for identifying structural alliances rooted in the community that can serve to enhance workplace power. For many, workplace organising may not be immediately visible beyond the walls of the factory or the shopfloor. But history shows us how entire villages, towns, and regions have had their fortunes tied to worker organising and industrial action, as exemplified by industrial decline in the wake of the 1984/5 UK miners’ strike (Beynon and Hudson 2024). There is no greater immediate threat to the fortunes of places – some more than others – than climate and ecological breakdown. The importance, therefore, of organising for workers to realise their potential power in the struggle for a liveable future, has never been greater.
The experience of workers becoming organised across local factories in the face of the increasingly centralised and spatially nimble character of profit-maximising corporations – typical of the neoliberal global economy and the accompanying processes of deindustrialisation – is well illustrated by the case of Vickers Engineering Ltd, which we will present next. The company, with its origins in the North of England, became a multi-plant, multinational company with factories across the UK and the world. The efforts of workplace leaders to build a counter-power across the places in which these workplaces were based played a crucial role in this expansion (Beynon and Wainwright 1979).
2.3 Workers’ place-based organisation versus capital’s (global) mobility – the case of Vickers Engineering Ltd
‘The North’ is sometimes used to refer to the North East – the most intensely industrialised region of the North – or sometimes, vaguely, to all those parts of the UK which, their economic life shaped by the industrial revolution, have become almost synonymous with ‘the periphery’. These include all those regions that are home to the nation’s coalfields, that also tend to have rich deposits of iron ore – South Yorkshire, South Wales, and Central Scotland, as well as the North East and parts of the North West. Proximity to one of the UK’s fast-flowing rivers or natural harbours made Tyneside, Teesside, Liverpool, Cardiff, Newport, and Glasgow/Clydeside industrial centres of different kinds. All of these areas became regions from which value was extracted and then concentrated in the financial institutions of London and the South East. In several Northern English cities, notably Manchester, Leeds, and Bradford, it was the textile industry of the 1750s, later mechanised and moving from home‑based production to large factories for mass production, that made them industrial centres and sources of considerable wealth. Relations of extraction in the UK hence extended beyond the ‘the North’; and the industries involved varied across the main industrial centres. In all cases, however, the same geography of financial power was at work, through which value ended up in the banks and insurance companies of London and the South East (Featherstone and Kelliher 2022).
Tyneside in North East England saw the beginnings of the industrial revolution founded on coalfields and iron ore deposits and led by the genius and/or wealth of local engineers and entrepreneurs – Stephenson, Swan, Armstrong, and Parsons. Newcastle (part of Tyneside) was built around Armstrong’s gun and tank factories, and in the North West, the town of Barrow-inFurness (240km from Tyneside) was built around the shipbuilding of Vickers. The two heavy engineering armaments companies merged in 1928 to become Vickers–Armstrongs and eventually Vickers Engineering Ltd. The company’s historical strength lay in its role as a government contractor, where it had a virtual monopoly on heavy defence contracts which guaranteed an exorbitant rate of profit. A report describes how Vickers was based on ‘works that employed people rather than businesses that made a profit’ (Turner 1971: 33).
Despite competitive gains and profits in the 1930s, the company failed to adapt to innovations that led to electronic engineering and a transformation of the armaments industry. By the 1960s, problems became obvious as borrowings escalated (Scott 1962). The over-optimism of central management meant that local factories had been left to their own devices; there was no centralised plan or detailed cost controls. The result of ad hoc local decision-making was a sprawl of unintegrated products and production systems.
Institutional shareholders, who owned more than 50 per cent of the total shares, exerted pressure, and the company employed a team of management consultants from McKinsey. By 1970, the company’s annual report announced that management would be pursuing a more ruthless and profit-oriented approach. The Times (cited in Benyon and Wainwright 1979) explained: ‘What is necessary is a careful pruning out of unprofitable or marginally profitable work. This would certainly involve the concentration of such varied engineering work in a smaller number of factories.’ Behind these news-lines are questions of what was to become of the towns, communities, and workers – reduced to numbers in the accounting system.
Representing the interests of the workers was the combine committee – designed to combine the power of each local factory. The model was an implicit challenge to the existing trade union structures whose officials would negotiate with central management on national matters without significant involvement of the shop stewards. In that sense, the role of place had no effective part in national trade union institutions – other than the somewhat marginalised role of trades councils.6 With the new combine committee trade unionism of the 1970s, the needs and demands generated by place fed into and influenced the national combine committee. The campaign of the Lucas Aerospace Combine Shop Stewards’ Committee for socially useful production described in Section 3 provides a good example.
Regional working-class mobilisation on Tyneside, in the North East of England, reached a peak in the early 1970s. Corporateled deindustrialisation scythed its way through the shipbuilding and heavy engineering industries along the River Tyne. Opposing deindustrialisation, an alliance of trade unions, community groups, and local councillors came together around the theme and slogan ‘Don’t Let the North East Die’. The political economy of the region did not die, but it radically changed, as the traditional labour movement was all but wiped out and new predator corporate investors moved in, reshaping the industrial structure and sources of livelihood in the North East.
Those organising for a transition that is just and equitable for workers (Stevis 2018), as well as safeguarding the voices of communities or places in determining their future, are establishing alliances between different groups of workers and communities in the towns and cities which they come from.
One such example is ‘Just Transition Wakefield’ in West Yorkshire, formed in 2019 between the Wakefield and District Trades Council and Wakefield Friends of the Earth (Just Transition Wakefield n.d.). This Labour and Green alliance includes community activists and local campaigners alongside politicians of both the Labour and Green parties. They put forward their intention that ‘This transition is socially, economically and environmentally just – that it improves lives, and does not leave people behind’ (ibid.). This accords with the trade union commitment that the ‘economic and employment transition does not leave communities on the scrap heap in the way that the closure of the mills, the pits and the steelworks did’ (ibid.).
This strength of conviction about ensuring equity in the area’s economic and employment transition is unsurprising given Wakefield’s rich industrial history as a centre of textile manufacturing from the 1700s to the 1900s. The area, alongside textile workers more broadly, suffered an unjust transition as textile manufacturing and production faltered, and significantly cheaper foreign labour and materials replaced them. More recently, Wakefield has a significant cultural history at the heart of the mining industry and is home to the national mining museum.
It also has rich traditions of industrial action which have no doubt informed the collective imagination of those organising for a just climate transition.
In pursuit of a vision of an equitable transition, Just Transition Wakefield acts as a critical friend in support of relatively ambitious local government emissions reduction targets. The organising model in Wakefield draws together workers, individuals, and community groups to harness their collective power to support, challenge, and critique the local government and ensure workers and their communities have a voice in critical decisionmaking about their lives, and the future of the place they call home. Moreover, the unions and workers represented in the partnership have not ‘outsourced’ their environmentalism to the environment groups in the partnership. This outsourcing has been a critique of the partnership between unions and environmental groups in the BlueGreen Alliance in the US, whereby the environmentalism of the unions has been outsourced to the environmental groups in the Alliance (Stevis 2018).
Alongside community-focused place-based organising, some workers are attempting to bring about the conversion of manufacturing and industry away from harmful products and outputs (e.g. polluting internal combustion engine cars, aerospace, armaments) towards those with social use (wind turbine manufacture, zero-carbon heating technology, and so forth). The examples we have investigated during our desk research and unstructured interviews demonstrate workers organising and sharing the tacit knowledge expressed through their acquired workplace skills, to extend collective bargaining to address problems of health, safety, and the social consequences of different forms of technology (Wainwright 2024). This has contributed to the development of alternative plans with which workers resist job losses and redundancies, which in turn serve to protect the wider economic and cultural fortunes of the places in which they are based.
There are several examples of workers responding to existential or material crises by organising themselves for industrial conversion towards socially useful production and job protection. Perhaps most notable is the Lucas Aerospace Combine Shop Stewards’ Committee’s alternative plan for socially useful production in the 1970s. The plan was a proposal for the manufacture of over 150 products to meet transport, health, and ecological needs using the machinery and skill of Lucas Aerospace and its employees which management considered redundant. The idea was to insist that this be the subject of collective bargaining as an alternative to the loss of jobs. Workers in Lucas Aerospace factories in 11 different places responded to corporate rationalisations (the outcome of accountants’ calculations) with proposals driven by social needs. More recent, though less developed, examples include the partially successful defence of jobs at the Harland & Wolff shipyard in Belfast in Northern Ireland (Clinton 2019) and the resistance to job losses in Rolls Royce in England in 2022 (Minio-Paluello 2021). Such organising is not limited to manufacturing and production jobs. Academics and education staff, for instance, at the University of Liverpool (in the North West of England) have also been organising in pursuit of ‘green bargaining’ (Hobson 2022) to influence the university as a site of education production and economic justice for workers, from the bottom up.
Workers at the Harland & Wolff shipyards in Belfast Docks (Northern Ireland), facing the threat of job losses in 2019, came together with the union branch to outline an alternative plan (Wainwright 2019). The plan would see them utilise their skills and experience to manufacture crucial elements of offshore wind turbines. In pursuit of the protection of their jobs and the commitment to playing an active part in the just transition, a group of workers occupied a part of the shipyard for nine weeks (ibid.). The workers at Harland & Wolff were particularly aware of their own productive and skilled capacity (ibid.), which, with minimal effort (particularly if backed by the state), could repurpose production and immediately get to work and play an active role in reducing the UK’s reliance on erratic global prices of fossil fuels and decarbonising the electricity grid. This was taking place in a context of a positive national agenda emerging around offshore wind.
Former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced in 2020 that the UK would be the ‘Saudi Arabia of offshore wind’ (Rincon 2020). Yet the Harland & Wolff workers and their plan lacked support from those in power. The workers and the community behind them were able to tap into the rich cultural and historic significance of the dockyard company, evoking nostalgia as well as industrial tradition, as part of the public narrative in efforts to safeguard jobs and pivot production. A Belfast Telegraph journalist recently wrote of Harland & Wolff’s significance to the city, ‘It’s not just a place of work, it’s history’, going on to posit that if East Belfast had a logo, ‘It would be the two iconic cranes’ (McNaney 2024).
The energy infrastructure group InfraStrata saved Belfast’s Harland & Wolff in 2019 from collapse, with the intention to diversify the shipbuilding company’s outputs into renewable energy infrastructure projects (O’Keeffe 2024). Just a few years later, under its new management, the shipbuilder was an active lead in a UK consortium to build zero-emissions harbour and coastal tugs (Harland & Wolff 2023). The organising and alternative plan put forward by the workers – alongside the place-based cultural resonance and history of the shipbuilder – were pivotal reasons why these decisions were made.
In 2021, Rolls Royce aerospace workers in the Midlands took a similar approach to those at Lucas and Harland & Wolf (Woodier and Wainwright 2024). As redundancies loomed in the aftermath of the pandemic, union shop stewards built on their alliance with the local campaign group Coventry Green New Deal (initiated by Coventry Trades Council) and increased public awareness of the climate crisis (Morell 2023). They took concerted industrial action, with campaigning support from local activists, against job losses, while insisting the company explore low-carbon production alternatives, such as mechanisms for wind turbines (ibid.). As with Lucas Aerospace, management resisted. However, in contrast to the 1970s, Rolls Royce shop stewards were able to secure a written agreement by leveraging the Rolls Royce brand’s vulnerability: the company needed to at least be seen to be reducing emissions. The agreement involved a commitment to exploring environmentally useful products if existing employment opportunities were to come to an end. This commitment has yet to be put to the test.
The Yorkshire and Humber region Trades Union Congress (TUC) in the UK has been at the forefront of developing some of the resources and infrastructure for workers to realise their potential power in the just transition. The organisation, employing staff dedicated to supporting a regional alliance of public, private, and trade union organisations for just transition, has led a number of training and education programmes to equip workers with the skills and knowledge required to embed climate breakdown and the environment centrally in their organisation. Additionally, and likely as a result of a reputation for leading on this type of work, the organisation and framework it has created has the potential to catalyse further action and act as an incubator for worker‑led organising around the transition. One interviewee, a previous employee of the Yorkshire and Humber region TUC, told us that alongside their proactive training and transition work, they were reactive to initiatives outside of their own organisational reach. For example, gas boiler installation engineers from British Gas – one of the biggest UK boiler installers and energy companies – asked for support to organise their workplace to acquire the green skills for the transition. The engineers were concerned that as domestic heating changes towards low and zero-carbon methods, the company was not offering the type of retraining, and therefore job security, they needed.
Whether in the North East, Yorkshire, North Wales, or the Midlands, examples of workers organising to protect their jobs and livelihoods, as well as the fortunes and prosperity of their localities in the UK, are all emblematic of place-based resistance to the forces of extractivist capital that is driving climate breakdown. The organising of workers – often in demonstrated synchronicity with civil society organisations, local political figures, community groups, and supported by their neighbourhoods – gives power to providing people and places with a voice and the agency to participate on their own terms in the economic and climate transition. This is a marked break from top-down approaches which have exploited and extracted workers and the places they represent in service of capital accumulation sought by the agents of fossil-fuel extraction centred in seats of power, be that London or Riyadh.
Like recent worker-led initiatives, industrial conversion has a historic precedent, with numerous examples of industrial manufacturing conversion coming about in response to moments of crisis. One of the most systemic and well-known examples can be found in the mass retooling of industries, particularly the automobile sector, in response to defence/war needs during the Second World War. When deemed politically necessary, the state intervened at the highest level to oversee industrial conversion. In the UK, the Ministry of Production and Combined Production and Resources Board (jointly housed in Washington DC and London) oversaw ‘altering and changing entirely the conditions of war production in Great Britain – changing them altogether’ (Hansard HL Deb 1942). In the US, industrial conversion was governed by the War Production Board with the purpose of converting peacetime industries into manufacturing centres for wartime equipment and weaponry (Vergun 2020).
Thus, industrial conversion is certainly a realistic possibility when developing a vision and a strategy for the transition to a low‑carbon economy. There are extensive examples of conversion in practice, whether led by or supported by workers and their communities, or directed and governed by the state and industry. The climate and ecological breakdown are clearly yet to meet the required threshold for emergency state intervention into industry as seen during wartime or the pandemic. In the next section, we further explore the conditions under which workers and organised labour can influence the transition to a lowcarbon economy and the challenges they face.
A useful approach to some of the challenges we face today would be to compare the conditions with those that the Shop Stewards’ Combine Committee (SSCC) faced in the late 1970s and early 1980s, within a frame that centres places and their social needs as factors in industrial conflict. Such a comparison will point to the lasting and deep constraints facing even the best organised worker-led conversion initiative. It will also highlight specific barriers to such initiatives even getting off the ground in the first quarter of the twenty‑first century. There are political implications of this distinction between, on the one hand, the deep constraints integral to modern capitalism – the corporate profit- and private market-led industrial system – and on the other, historically specific problems that could be addressed without radical political change: for example, a strengthening of trade union rights to organise in the workplace and the community and to extend collective bargaining to issues of product choice and other environmentally relevant decisions, as we explore below.
Vital to the ability of the SSCC to develop its alternative corporate plan for socially useful manufacture of 150 products was the favourable balance of power at play. This was between, on one side, the union organisation on the shop floors, design offices, across the factory, and – via the combine committee – the company as a whole, and on the other side, the central management of Lucas Aerospace. Another important factor was the effective right to ‘facility’ time – giving shop stewards and the workers the right to whatever time off work was needed to carry out trade union duties.
This important right had been successfully negotiated in most large engineering companies by shop stewards whose bargaining power was considerably strengthened during the UK’s post‑war manufacturing boom from the mid-1950s onwards. Facility time became law in 1975 (consequently weakened by Margaret Thatcher’s premiership). The right to time off was essential for shop stewards for combine committee meetings and duties. Paid time away from work was also an essential condition for union members to discuss and work on their proposals for the alternative plan, including producing prototypes. The prototypes of the alternative socially useful products – like, for example, the ‘road rail vehicle’ – were used as a kind of live ‘agitprop’ in popularising the alternative plan.
While it was the power of organised labour that made the SSCC alternative plan possible, it was the direct political support of then-industry minister Tony Benn that stimulated the SSCC to develop the plan, as a basis for defining their own, autonomous terms on which Lucas Aerospace should be nationalised or be given government support. Many of these stewards and Benn himself would meet throughout the 1970s through the Nottingham-based Institute for Workers’ Control. The shop stewards drew up the alternative plan to achieve a form of public ownership in which workers would collectively have a significant degree of control. The creative impact of this close relation to political power illustrates the importance of political support or alliances in creating the conditions for organised labour to be a positive actor for decarbonisation. It was short lived: in 1975, the then-prime minister Harold Wilson sacked Tony Benn from serving as Secretary of State for Industry, but in the 15 months of his tenure he did much to encourage shop stewards to develop their own corporate or industry-wide plans.
4.1 The impetus for conversion from beyond trade union structures
The Emergency Design Network (EDN) provides an interesting model for how the organisation of conversion has and could take place outside of union structures (Moss 2020). The network was made up of fashion and textile designers, sewers, garment manufacturers, and others within the wider fashion industry. They converted manufacturing lines and design studios to produce personal protective equipment (PPE) for the NHS. Given the stature (and power) of some of the actors involved, the initiative might be seen as a hybrid conversion model driven by the support and power of both decision-makers and those with related social consciousness (ibid.).
Prompted by the pandemic and shortages of PPE, fashion brand Burberry converted its production line in South Shields in the North East of England away from their high-street products and instead manufactured hundreds of thousands of non-surgical gowns. Outside of the UK, Prada and the Armani group in Italy re-tooled their production lines to manufacture medical garments and masks – altruistically or not. Much of this was coordinated by the National Chamber for Italian Fashion (CNMI) (Di Maria, Bettiol and Capestro 2023). The involvement of a membership organisation (not dissimilar to a union umbrella body like the TUC in the UK) was likely pivotal to the Italian fashion industry’s manufacturing conversion to support the Italian Health Service’s PPE requirements.
The manufacturing conversion examples cited from the 2020 pandemic – whether driven by company management or the state – were important for the survival of the corporate entity, and likely even boosted their public image.
5.1 Place in transition
While there are a (albeit limited) number of successful or otherwise examples of worker-led conversion/organising initiatives within the UK, there are also significant developments among trade unionists proactively organising around a just transition across the country and in places that are sites of struggle. Green bargaining trainings are taking place in various parts of the labour movement, while regional elements of the TUC are leading on education programmes that centralise climate and environmental issues in workplace organising. This offers both cause for hope and an emergent infrastructure within which trade unionists and their allies from across society can make serious gains in the fight for a just transition.
Climate change and a just transition are becoming key issues for organised workers in the UK, where they may not have necessarily been such a priority before. One figure in the national organised labour movement told us that the youth climate movement that erupted in 2019 in towns and cities across the UK was really important to the trade union movement, particularly as the young activists called their actions ‘strikes’. Their use of language helped connect with unions who are particularly keen to organise young people and support the elevation of climate change as a key justice issue. A national officer at one of the largest unions in the UK went as far as to say that pressure from their children questioning what they and their union were doing on climate change helped propel forward the issue personally and professionally. All this is to say that social movements and public support in places and at sites of struggle have helped to drive climate change and a just transition further up the political, social, and organising agenda, as well as putting the issue front and centre for trade unionists and workers in a way that is emotionally resonant.
Furthermore, trade unionists are recognising the need to build alliances beyond the workplace. Initiatives such as the climate commissions in Yorkshire, Humberside, and Scotland are intending to link workplace-level efforts to broader strategies for a just transition. The TUC has also appointed staff across the UK to support worker-led transition. One senior union figure who sits on the UK North Sea Transition Group described their increasing support for collaboration with wider civil society actors and climate non-governmental organisations as a way to build a louder, stronger voice that can achieve real influence. Clearly, from the organising models of Just Transition Wakefield and the alliance between local Green New Deal organisers in Coventry and Rolls Royce workers, there are vital lessons to learn about how the strength of place can come to the fore. Workers and campaigners in the UK might also look to examples of alliances between unions and green groups outside of the UK. For example, the BlueGreen Alliance of trade unions and environmental groups in the US provides learnings around agency from proactive collaborative organising, as well as about its limitations (Stevis 2018).
5.2 Workers with power
The collective knowledge and practical skills of workers as actors with power rather than purely as wage labour can help drive the transition to a low-carbon economy (Woodier and Wainwright 2024). As Andreas Malm has shown, the choice of fossil fuels over alternative energy sources was rooted in capitalists’ desire for greater control and exploitation of labour (Malm 2016). Overcoming this dependency requires a collective actor with a vested interest and power in reducing emissions and the practical know-how to transform production – a role that organised labour is uniquely positioned to play in collaboration and alliance with networks rooted in places. And the place in which they are located may be a significant determining factor influencing workers’ organising, coordination, and focus for protecting jobs, livelihoods, and a low-carbon future.
Realising this potential, however, demands that trade unions move beyond their traditional focus on exchange value (wages and working conditions) and engage with the use value and purpose of production. This, in turn, necessitates rethinking the relationship between workplace unionism and broader political and economic transformation that encompasses local organising beyond the union to forge alliances and networks of power, as demonstrated in Wakefield, Coventry, and elsewhere in the UK.
Ultimately, overcoming the climate crisis requires a fundamental shift in the balance of power, both within production and in relation to the state. While the British state has historically been designed to protect the ruling order, the political establishment’s crumbling legitimacy creates new openings for movement-driven transformation. By building alliances with wider civil society and local actors that move beyond the workplace, fully encapsulating the needs of localities and developing practical alternatives, organised labour has the potential to extend the scope of collective bargaining.
1 This issue of the IDS Bulletin was supported in part by a Ford Foundation grant entitled ‘Learning at the Intersections of Just Transitions: Spaces for Engagement, Voices from the Margins and Cross-Sectoral Alliances in Resource-Rich Countries of the Global South’. The British Academy also provided earlier support for the project ‘Making Space for Dialogue on Just Transitions in Africa’s Oil and Gas Producing Regions’ (2022) which helped to lay the foundation for much of this work. The opinions expressed are the authors’ own and do not reflect the views of the funders.
2 Hilary Wainwright and Jake Woodier would like to thank the Network for Social Change and the Barry Amiel and Norman Milburn Trust for funding their documentation of worker-led initiatives towards decarbonisation in the UK and of the workshop in Leeds that enabled them to bring together those involved in these initiatives to reflect on shared strategic challenges.
3 Hilary Wainwright, Senior Research Associate, Institute of Development Studies, UK.
4 Jake Woodier, Researcher, UK.
5 Philip Proudfoot, Research Fellow, Institute of Development Studies, UK.
6 Local delegate bodies formally bring together representatives of different local branches. They have no power in the Trades Union Congress (TUC) structure, and increasingly, little influence. In some localities, however, they play an important role in initiating campaigns beyond the workplace, including on climate change.
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© 2025 The Authors. IDS Bulletin © Institute of Development Studies | DOI: 10.19088/1968-2025.144 This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC BY), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original authors and source are credited and any modifications or adaptations are indicated.
The IDS Bulletin is published by Institute of Development Studies, Library Road, Brighton, BN1 9RE, UK. This article is part of IDS Bulletin Vol. 56 No. 2 November 2025 ‘Struggles for Justice in the Energy Transition: Voices from the Front Lines’; the Introduction is also recommended reading.