SASE 2027 – MC08: Who builds the Transition? Trade Unions, Worker Power, and Ecological Reconstruction
We are delighted to announce that TULE will be organising our second Mini Conference, “MC 08: Who builds the Transition? Trade Unions, Worker Power, and Ecological Reconstruction“, at The Society for the Advancement of Socio-economics (SASE) 2027. This year’s conference will take place at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, Scotland, 30 June – 3 July 2027.
Submission of abstracts for paper presentations, workshops, or panels is now open! DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSIONS: 1 NOVEMBER 2026
To submit to our mini-conference, find the submission guidelines and portal here.
Call for papers: MC08 – Who builds the Transition? Trade Unions, Worker Power, and Ecological Reconstruction
Organizers: Stephanie Eccles, Bianca Luna Fabris, Vinnie Collins, Clelia Li Vigni, Brendan Davidson, Bengi Akbulut.
The ecological transition is unfolding amid profound disruptions to both work and the institutions through which workers have historically exercised collective power. Climate impacts are intensifying as resurgent reactionary right-wing and ethno-nationalist leaders and their movements, increasing militarization, much of which is funded and enabled by new technologies of machine production and surveillance (Henaway 2023). Each of these trends, in ways both great and small, worsens both local and global environmental conditions. Meanwhile, many of the institutions and policies that were expected to underpin a transition toward low-carbon economies, including green industrial policy, public investment, and international climate cooperation are contested, weakened, or redirected. Yet, moments like these can create openings for rebuilding institutions, solidarities, and relations of production. With that backdrop, labour environmentalism must not only consider how workers and trade unions respond to ecological transition but what role they can play in reconstructing its alternatives.
Take for instance the notion of “just transition”. The original notion of a just transition, advanced by Tony Mazzochi, was that just like an environmental superfund, so too should there be one for workers (Leopold 2007). Mazzochi’s vision, however, was arguably much broader and ambitious in scope than much of how “just transition” is often invoked by both scholars and policy makers today. The emphasis on the simple one-to-one replacement of carbon-intensive jobs with new ones, often of marginal quality, winnows down the political horizon of labour environmentalism. Of course, the notion of a just transition is not the only idea advanced by labour environmentalists. New strategies for collective bargaining, public ownership proposals, worker cooperatives, sectoral planning, industrial policy, community-labour coalitions, migrant worker organizations, reforms to the working day, and other eco-social political economic arrangements for alternative forms of living also feature. All the while, each political potential must grapple with the tension of who is or is not recognized as a “worker” in the pursuit of these policies (Barca 2024; Akbulut, 2024). And, relatedly, how can solidarities and resonances between workers be appreciated with both breadth and depth? Finally, do these alternatives help build power to make change possible?
This also requires critical attention to who constitutes the worker within broader socio-ecological transition politics. Labor movements themselves are internally differentiated by migration status, race, gender, citizenship, occupation, geography, and uneven access to collective representation. Michael Denning’s concept of “wageless life” offers a productive intervention to re-imagining labor struggles within socio-ecological transitions. Denning argues that analyses of capitalism should not begin with the employment contract, but with the dispossession that produces the imperative to earn a living in the first place. The proletarian, in this account, is not just the wage laborer but the person made radically dependent upon the market for subsistence. Employment is therefore not universal, nor secure. Workers continually confront the possibility that capital will have no use for their labor. This perspective complicates familiar narratives of Just Transition. If ecological reconstruction is imagined primarily through the creation of “green jobs,” what happens to those whose labor is informal, unwaged, reproductive, intermittently employed, or rendered surplus through economic and technological restructuring?
For SASE 2027, we encourage submissions that engage labor environmentalism and the question of: how can workers rebuild the foundations of socio-economic systems so that the majority of people’s’ ability to live is decoupled from capital’s mute compulsion (see Mau 2023)? Organized by the Trade Unions and Labour Environmentalism (TULE), a cross-national and interdisciplinary network foregrounding the role and function of labour in socio-ecological transitions. We invite prospective papers that engage with the below themes and/or questions with emphasis on direct engagement with the workplace (broadly construed), communities, and/or sectoral case studies:
- Is employment creation an adequate horizon for Just Transition, and what would ecological reconstruction beyond the wage look like?
- How does the enclosure, dispossession and wagelessness underlying capitalist labour markets shape workers’ capacity to contest environmentally destructive industries?
- How might Just Transition and/or other frameworks commit to socio-ecological transitions account for the unemployed, informal, migrant, seasonal, precarious, and reproductive and subsistence workers? And what forms of solidarity can connect them to organized labour?
- What labour-led alternatives and experiments can advance social and ecological well-being? (e.g., bargaining for the common good, community-labour coalitions etc.,)
- What are the implications of ecological restructuring for transnational and emerging “green sector” labour forces, and what does worker power look like when stable employment is no longer its presumed foundation?
- What does a labour led eco-social politics look like and how might it be scaled?
- Reflections on “doing” labour environmentalism including participatory, worker-led comparative, historical, and other methodological approaches.
These questions speak directly to SASE 2027’s call to examine efforts to “rebuild key institutional and political formations” amid disruption and to learn from experiments capable of promoting shared prosperity and democracy. They also build upon TULE’s ongoing commitment to foregrounding trade unions and organized labour within environmental labour studies while remaining critically attentive to the contradictions and limitations of organized labour itself, including its own historically uneven engagement with gender and social reproduction. By bringing together research across sectors, countries, and disciplinary transitions, this mini conference asks what labour environmentalism can contribute not merely towards managing ecological transition, but to reconstructing economies around different relations between work, nature, democracy, and collective life. At a moment when existing institutions are being dismantled and ecological crises deepen; the challenge is not to defend what remains but to build in its place.