In light of growing concerns around the climate crisis evidenced in the latest IPCC report, it is crucial that labour lawyers develop a climate-competent practice. Climate change will have an impact on workplace health and safety, job security, and pensions, among other things. Labour lawyers can play an important role in advising and supporting their clients on climate-related changes to their members’ workplaces.
What are the impacts of climate change on workers and the future of work?
Climate change presents a threat to the enjoyment of basic human rights for everyone, and it affects already vulnerable people “first and worst.” The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights has observed that “the climate crisis is a human rights crisis.”
Climate change will continue to have a disproportionate impact on racialized and Indigenous communities. Dr. Ingrid Waldron has noted that in Canada, “Indigenous and African Nova Scotian communities have been the most impacted by environmental racism.” Environmental racism impacts workers: the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists and the Adapting Canadian Work and Workplaces to Respond to Climate Change (ACW) project have been leading the “Green Is Not White” research initiative which calls for non-toxic workplaces and “green collar jobs” for immigrant workers.
Climate change has occupational health & safety consequences. Rapidly rising temperatures increase the risk of heat stroke, severe dehydration, exhaustion, and can even be life-threatening, which has a disproportionate impact on those who work outdoors. Chemicals evaporate faster at high temperatures, increasing the risk of poisoning due to inhalation of chemicals in the workplace. High temperatures can also worsen air quality which exacerbates respiratory illness and cardiovascular diseases. These risks may be compounded for migrant farm workers. Climate change causes more extreme weather events including violent storms, floods, and landslides, as well as forest fires due to drought. These events have a significant impact on the occupational health and safety of first responders such as firefighters responding to increasing occurrences of wildfires and nurses and paramedics responding to the victims of extreme weather events amidst potential infrastructure failures.
Many industries are facing increased instability and impacts on job security as a result of climate change and the transition away from fossil fuels, including the mining, oil and gas, automobile, and manufacturing industries. “Climate change bankruptcy”, bankruptcy caused, in part, by climate-related incidents, may be a new reality that employers will need to mitigate. For example, PG&E was facing $30 billion in potential liabilities in 2019 following a series of wildfires, made more likely by climate change, connected to its equipment. Climate-related dangers, such as wildfires, extreme heat, flooding, drought, and storms, will continue to have an impact on business operations and liabilities. Oil-reliant industries, and those known for their “booms and busts,” may become increasingly unstable.
What can labour lawyers do about it?
Address the impacts of climate change in the workplace through green collective bargaining. “Greening” clauses can address commuting, extreme weather, green procurement, training, & workplace committees. The ACW has compiled a collection of such clauses from Canadian collective agreements in a database to support unions who want to fight climate change by bringing environmental issues into their collective bargaining priorities. Labour lawyers can advise their clients about these opportunities to address the climate crisis through their contracts.
Support unions in educating their members and trustee representatives on how their pension fund “invests their retirement capital” and demand more transparent climate-related disclosures. In its legal backgrounder on duties to manage climate change, Ecojustice highlights that while “most large public sector pension administrators and investment managers have acknowledged and started to assess climate-related risks, few have set targets or established credible plans to align with the emissions reductions needed to prevent catastrophic climate change.”
Support and contribute to union research on the impact of climate change on work & how their members’ work itself can contribute to fighting climate change. Several unions have released research on the impact of climate change on work, for example, the “Climate Change and Just Transition” report published by the ACW and the United Steelworkers in 2018. Others provided submissions for the 2021 Federal Just Transition Consultations, including Unifor who recommended the federal government generate decent unionized jobs in the green economy. The Hospital Employees’ Union has advocated for climate action at the provincial level.
Join groups like Lawyers for Climate Justice that have called on bar associations to adopt a definition of climate justice and urge lawyers to take an active role in addressing climate change. Lawyers can also support student and worker-led initiatives, such as Law Students for Climate Accountability, that have published reports and called on law firms to recognize their role in exacerbating climate change.
Consider the impacts of climate change on all areas of your practice and seek out continuing professional education opportunities. The Honourable Justice Brian J Preston SC in New South Wales, Australia published an article on Climate Conscious Lawyering where he discusses the ethical dimensions of legal practice: “ethical thinking about climate change and its consequences should pervade all aspects of legal practice.” Labour lawyers can develop policies that minimize the climate impacts of their practice and support their clients in identifying and responding to climate related risks.
As the economy transitions, jobs in the more heavily-unionized fossil fuels sector may transition into non-unionized jobs in emerging industries, such as wind and solar, or to other lower-carbon sectors. Labour advocates have pointed out that “green jobs” must also be unionized jobs to ensure that workers have fair and safe working conditions. This will require a large effort by the labour movement and organizers, and support from labour lawyers, to ensure that workplaces in emerging sectors are unionized.
Labour lawyers, unions and their members have an important role to play in speaking out about the impact of climate change on workers and advocating for community and political action to both mitigate these risks and prevent further warming.
Sydney Lang is a union-side labour lawyer at Cavalluzzo LLP and a climate and mining justice organizer in Toronto. She has worked on campaigns and research projects related to fossil fuel divestment, corporate accountability in the Canadian mining industry, and a just transition.
We are looking to establish a network of labour lawyers interesting in advocating and sharing resources around climate change. If you are interested in getting involved, please contact Sydney Lang (slang@cavalluzzo.com), Jodie Gauthier (jgauthier@blackgropper.com), or Michael Thorburn (mhft@stanford.edu).