Labour and Circular Economy
A transition to the circular economy implies changes in the number of jobs in certain sectors, in the type of skills required and mobilised by workers, and in working conditions. Yet few studies consider labour in the transition to a circular economy, beyond quantitative consideration of the number of jobs across sectors. It is important to think about labour qualitatively, both in terms of what constitutes decent work, and how environmental considerations are balanced to ensure a just transition.
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Definitions and explanations about key terms relevant to labour.
How does labour relate to the transition to a circular economy?
Explore relevant examples.
Where to learn more.
Key concepts
Just Transition
Since the early 1990s, labour organisations and trade unions have forged the concept of a Just Transition to emphasise that the transition to a sustainable future will not happen without the involvement of workers. In its current official definition, formulated by the International Labour Organisation, the just transition must guarantee decent working conditions for all, quality green jobs, including for workers in sectors that must be abandoned (such as fossil fuels).
The concept seeks to overcome a perceived contradiction between work and the environment, a fear that addressing the monumental climate challenge will inevitably require a choice between protecting the planet or protecting workers and the economies that sustain people. Thus, it aims to define a political agenda that overcomes this false dichotomy. This was summed up by the International Trade Union Confederation in 2010 under the phrase “No Jobs on a Dead Planet’’.
Labour
Labour is the set of social activities coordinated to produce what is useful to satisfy human needs.
More precisely, by labour, we mean the ensemble of waged and unwaged workers who re/produce all that is necessary to the development of life on earth: people, food, commodities, infrastructures, services, knowledge, art, and the biophysical environment itself. Adopting such a broad understanding of labour is key to making sure that all forms of work performed in society are included in our vision of a just transition to CE.
Decent Work
Decent work has been defined by the ILO and endorsed by the international community as:
“productive work for women and men in conditions of freedom, equity, security and human dignity” (UNEP 2008).
Decent work involves opportunities for work that is productive and delivers a fair income; provides security in the workplace and social protection for workers and their families; offers better prospects for personal development and encourages social integration; gives people the freedom to express their concerns, to organize and to participate in decisions that affect their lives; and guarantees equal opportunities and equal treatment for all (ILO 2008).
Worker Agency
The meaning one gives to one’s labour and the ways in which one performs it are essential components of decent work. A just transition requires centring worker’s agency and power to make decisions.
The question of the design of products and systems can be central to workers’ proposals for social and environmental measures. This can find expression through social dialogue facilitated by trade unions. Worker design involves forms of democratic and environmental governance at work. Environmental democracy at work can be achieved through social dialogue via trade unions, cooperative enterprises or direct and participatory democracy with board of management with greater employee representation.
The ILO recommends occupational health and safety committees, where they exist, can be used too as a route to initiate measures to transform labour processes in a more sustainable direction.
Eco-design for & by workers
Eco-design for workers must take into account in advance the type of labour process
involved in the reuse, re-employment or recycling of objects designed for ‘sustainability’. This approach should also take into account the relationship to the environment and nature within the sites of labour.
Eco-design by workers is an approach which argues that design cannot be limited to professional design teams, but must include all actors who are involved at some point in determining the function of an object or a technical system. In this respect, domestic workers or workers involved in reuse or recycling have an important role. Informal waste pickers, for example, often know the possible use of an object or the different transformations it can undergo.
Gendered approach to labour
Feminist political economy has long shown that paid labour is based on a body of unpaid labour, mostly done by women and/or racialized people. This includes care work for people or the natural environment, domestic labour for the maintenance of the household, or reproductive work in general to ensure the subsistence conditions of the community. Much work that typically goes unpaid, is an important part of social and environmental reproduction.
Questioning the sexual division of labour allows us to critique gender inequalities in income; in the division of labour; in hygiene, health and safety at work (e.g. wage gaps, feminization of poverty and low-income jobs, double burden, caregivers’ depletion), but it also allows us to propose ways to rethink a low-carbon economy that aims at the wellbeing of human and non-human communities.
Postcolonial approach to labour
The categories forged in Europe to think about the history of the white male wage-earner obscure the history of a whole section of workers who do not have a voice in dominant narratives.
A postcolonial approach requires giving a voice to those who do not have one in the dominant literature on labour. It also requires taking into account the type of work that is often overlooked in this way, and typically left out of modernist theories of labour, such as the peasantry.
The typical model for thinking about labour relates to craft or manufacture, the activities of producing a commodity from a raw material. This definition of labour leaves aside all care and reproduction activities, agricultural eco-regulation work, or parts of the service sector.
Post-colonial theories of labour first sought to think about the place of workers in non-manufacturing activities outside the metropolitan centres of the countries of the North (Indian peasants for example).