This is the third instalment of CESR’s series of blogs on the just transition. The first blog situates the newly established Just Transition Mechanism within CESR’s broader work on fiscal justice and rights-based climate finance. The second blog examines what a rights-based just transition would look like in practice through the lens of critical minerals and Africa’s green industrialization. This blog will examine the role of labor, trade unions, and workers’ rights in the just transition.
By Matt Forgette, Climate Program Associate, CESR
The global movement towards a just transition has made significant advances in recent years. As the first two blogs in this series argue, the Just Transition Mechanism established at COP30 represents a hard-won but fragile victory, and the governance of critical minerals reveals how the gap between transition rhetoric and reality is often wide. But there is a another facet of this movement that is too often sidelined from the conversation: the workers.
The energy transition will not happen in negotiating texts or in focus groups at Bonn and COP. In practice, it will happen in mines, on wind farms and construction sites, in communities that have built their livelihoods around the fossil fuel economy for generations. The impacts will not be uniform. They will vary sharply by region, by sector, and by class. Women, low-income workers, and communities in the Global South face disproportionate exposure to job loss, yet are least represented in the upskilling and retraining programs being designed in their name. And the question of whether the transition destroys jobs or transforms them hinges entirely on policy choices that are still being made. If those choices do not center the rights, voice, and dignity of workers in all their diversity, then this does not deserve the label of a just transition at all.
The just transition was a labor idea, but it has not always centered workers
It is worth emphasizing where the concept of a just transition originates from. As the Climate Justice Alliance documents in detail, transition strategies were first forged by labor unions and environmental justice groups based in low-income communities who recognized the need to phase out industries that harmed workers and the environment while simultaneously providing pathways for workers to move to other jobs. The idea was not invented by policymakers or multilateral institutions. It was built by workers in frontline communities who wished to chart their own path away from polluting industries. In order to create an effective and fair transition, these communities must now be consulted as leaders. As climate policy expert J. Mijin-Cha aptly describes in her book on a just transition, “you can’t really think about what makes things just without talking to the people who are experiencing the injustice.”
Yet, far too often, workers’ concerns and wellbeing have been pushed to the side in both the discussion and implementation of the energy transition. In oil and gas-producing countries across the Global South, a growing share of the workforce consists of contract workers with precarious conditions and little or no union representation, workers who often risk being entirely invisible in transition planning. Globally, more than 60% of the working world operates in informal employment, meaning they are not subject to social protections provided by labor legislation. These workers are often those most threatened by climate disasters, yet they are largely absent from the formal architecture of just transition planning.
It’s also worth noting that, while the transition away from fossil fuels is an critically-important goal, it does not automatically deliver better conditions. Research drawing on over 300 million job transitions globally found that less than 1% of workers leaving carbon-intensive sectors end up in green jobs. In the renewable energy sector, work has frequently been characterized by low pay and an active resistance to unionization. As Jim Harrison of the Utility Workers Union of America has accurately declared, “the clean tech industry is incredibly anti-union,” noting in his research that clean jobs are often characterized by marginal work that is very difficult to organize. Meanwhile, natural gas and coal plants have unionization rates far higher than the national industrial average, meaning that the current model unfairly asks workers to transition to non-union, low-wage work in order to meet environmental concerns.
Workers can design a more just energy transition
As the first blog in this series argues, the fiscal architecture of the just transition is as important as its governance frameworks. The two are inseparable, and nowhere is this clearer than on the question of workers. The absence of binding labor protections in transition frameworks and the absence of adequate public finance are intertwined. When transition finance flows primarily and increasingly through private capital and loan-based mechanisms, it is accompanied by the implicit agenda to deregulate labor rather than strengthen it. Conversely, public, grant-based transition finance that is governed by robust human rights frameworks allows for social protection and labor unions to expand and strengthen.
Public Services International (PSI), whose global union federation represents 30 million workers in 154 countries, offers a compelling and necessary counterpoint to the current market-led approach to the energy transition. At a regional policy meeting in 2024, PSI explained that what we are currently witnessing is not an energy transition, but an energy expansion that prioritizes corporate profit and plunder over the planet. Fossil fuel use and emissions continue to rise to record levels, with even optimistic outlooks predicting that usage will not peak before 2030.
A union-led response must be built around three interconnected principles. First, state enterprises must be reinstated as the primary institutions responsible for implementing the energy transition. Second, decommodification necessitates ending the practice of tying energy revenues to the sale of electricity by volume, and prioritizing ecological value over profit. Finally, demarketization requires the reversal of neoliberal laws and regulations that have permitted energy corporations to prioritize commercial goals at the expense of communities and workers.
The Just Transition Mechanism established at COP30 includes, for the first time, the most progressive rights-based language ever adopted in a COP outcome, explicitly recognizing labor rights among its foundational commitments. That is a significant achievement, built through years of advocacy by Global South governments, trade unions, and civil society. But language without enforcement mechanisms, adequate finance, or meaningful worker participation in governance will not translate into the transformation that workers and communities need.
This is why CESR endorses a number of policy demands put forth by labor unions and workers’ rights organizations. These demands include that countries must be required to develop National Just Transition Plans, elaborated with the effective participation of workers. Additionally, a multilateral Just Transition Fund should be established, financed through mandatory contributions from industry and differentiated contributions from developed states. And mandatory social indicators, such as the reduction of informality, the strengthening of occupational health and safety, and the expansion of social protections should be integral to any transition framework.
Santa Marta and beyond
This week, the world's attention turns to Santa Marta, Colombia, where the First International Conference on the Just Transition Away from Fossil Fuels is taking place. Co-hosted by the governments of Colombia and the Netherlands, this is the first conference of its kind, a dedicated, solutions-focused forum operating outside the UNFCCC, bringing together more than 50 countries alongside trade unions, civil society, Indigenous peoples, and subnational governments. The convening is itself a direct response to the failure of COP30's final outcome text to include any reference to phasing out fossil fuels, a silence that the Belém Declaration on the Just Transition Away from Fossil Fuels, signed by 24 countries, was designed to break.
CESR will be following the conference in Santa Marta, and supporting the efforts of our allies on the ground, to ensure that it works towards a transition that is fast, fair, and adequately financed. It should work to create structural commitments which are grounded in binding labor rights, financed through public and grant-based mechanisms, and built with the full and meaningful participation of the workers who will actually live through this transformation.
