Such strategic thinking is essential as environmental movements prioritise their efforts. But these efforts, even when they don’t prioritise addressing batshit workers, have repercussions among them. Especially among younger workers, the growing awareness that batshit work is unsustainable and harmful will have effects. The “proud coal miner” trope has come to represent all workers in environmentally destructive sectors, but within the heterogeneous world of batshit work, doubt and ambivalence will spread in an uneven way. All workers are all more than workers, and their interests and subjectivities irreducible to their role as workers. This raises the question of the internal divisions of batshit workers and shifts our attention from any abstract notion of “the working class”, towards a reflection on how they are affected by batshit work and its gradual social delegitimation, and how best to relate to that strategically.

Generation-fuck-my-job?

Understanding the specific physical and mental, social and ecological harm caused by different forms of work is not just up to public health specialists, social workers and scientists estimating the climate impact of whole industries. It’s also a question that they themselves and the affected communities of which workers are often a part are asking themselves, and which we must ask ourselves. In short, we will need workers’ inquiries and co-research to understand batshit work better. The advantage of starting from workers’ own experience is that it helps us understand what their attachment to their work consists in, how it might be undone, and the work of inquiry itself might provoke discussions among workers, or changes of mind. More broadly, it will help us better understand and find allies within the generational and gendered dynamics at play, between, for instance, the workers invested in traditional worker's masculinity, the women supporting unemployed miners on their teacher or care-worker wages, and the young people looking for alternatives to black lung and planetary disaster. Importantly, more and more batshit work is carried out under precarious conditions and within unstable communities, rather than within historic and tight-knit union-job mining towns.

In 1960s Italy, a generational gap opened up between older factory workers and a new generation of workers. While the older generation took pride in providing for their family and developing the booming Italian economy, the younger generation rejected boring repetitive work, and the authority of foremen and bosses. Unlike the parents’ generation which had been brought up on discipline of fascism and the deprivations of war, the experience of factory work was profoundly dissonant with the cultural experience of the 1960s, and so young people began to refuse work en masse, starting with absenteeism and sabotage, and ending with many opting for a life of rich sociality and intermittent work over secure employment and nuclear family life (For a fictionalised reportage from this generation, see Nanni Balestrini’s We Want Everything, Verso). Today, a generational dissonance is on sharp rise in many countries (Keir Milburn, Generation Left, Polity 2019). As the climate emergency and ecological collapse intensifies, we are likely to see a similar dynamic among young workers in batshit industries, but also between older colleagues of the same age, like the bird watching enthusiast and the car lover, and within workers themselves (In the Italian case, an interesting portrayal of such a contradiction can be found in Elio Petri’s film The Working Class Goes to Heaven). In short, the question is not whether the balance between economic and ecological interests will shift, but how, what can be done to accelerate this process, and what struggles might come out of it.

The rest of this article will deal with various possible responses to these questions, from union and political demands for Just Transition or a Green New Deal, to campaigns that ecological awareness and interests starting from a conception of workers as more than workers. What is at stake is not just bringing as many workers as possible on board with a just transition, but also finding ways in which they might come to use their structural power to fight actively for such a transition, rather than against it. Collectively, workers know every nook and cranny of batshit industries, they know the points of leverage where an industrial process is most vulnerable to the disruption of strikes, blockades and sabotage. Individual workers can throw spanners in the wheels, lessen their efforts, call in sick. Collectively workers can fight to increase wages and lower profits, and grind whole industries or logistics chains to a halt. But as long as workers’ interests remain aligned with capitalist profitability at any cost and so with extractive and polluting industries, they are likely to use their power to demand a greater share of the spoils, and so an expansion of the economy of spoilage.

The paradoxes of a Just Transition away from batshit jobs

Workers in heavily polluting industry are typically portrayed as backward-looking and resistant. To many, they epitomize the contradiction between labour issues and the environment. And true to this diagnosis, some unions have fought closures of batshit jobs tooth and nail, and lobbied politicians to expand their industries. But most unions realize that moves towards a carbon-neutral economy will have to happen whether workers like it or not. Thus, during recent decades, the idea of a ”Just Transition” has emerged as the key to resolving this issue in practical and ideological terms.

The idea of just transition goes back a long way. In the mid 1970s, Lucas Aerospace workers facing peace-dividend-driven redundancies collaborated with radical researchers to develop the so-called Lucas Plan to use their skills and company for socially and environmentally useful purposes and (as Boggs set out) similar attempts were made by US and German Green and peace activists in the 80s, drawing on the inspiration of the GI Bill which helped demobbed soldiers to access welfare, education and subsidised housing to readjust to civilian life after WW2. In the early 1990s, Tony Mazzocchi of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers International Union (US) took this idea to environmental labour politics with his proposal for a “Superfund for workers”, which would found the retraining and reskilling of workers displaced by environmental protection policies. Soon, the terminology shifted to “just transition”, which was adopted as a union demand in the first unions by the late 1990s, and by international trade union confederations in the 2000s, most visibly in their negotiating papers for international climate conferences.

Apart from reskilling and temporary unemployment support, just transition proposals typically entail demands to secure alternative jobs for workers, to protect their social rights (especially health and pensions), and policies to boost overall employment opportunities, in the overall economy or in the specific communities facing closures of polluting industries. Just Transition proposals are designed as tools in defensive fights against the negative consequences of ”free market transition”. Sometimes a negotiated solution is sought with governments or employers, while in other cases, although more often related to financial failure than to environmental regulation, workers take over companies and transform production. Some recent examples are the New Era Windows in Chicago, the tile factory FaSinPat in Neuquén, Argentina, and the soap factory Viome in Thessaloniki, Greece.

The discussion of Just Transition focuses on two questions: how to avoid the negative consequences of “free market adaptation” or how to convince reactive workers to accept transitionary measures? In other words, Just Transition proposals are almost always responses to situations where “unjust” transition is already happening, regardless of workers. While such proposals typically involve a vision of a better and more sustainable world, demands for Just Transition are – at least from what my research shows – rarely if ever leveraged within workplaces that are not already scheduled for closure or regulated out of existence. Meanwhile, governments and employers have been exceedingly reluctant to close profitable industries regardless of their massively destructive effects. When they do push ahead with closures of mines and coal plants, environmental reasons are often an afterthought. When the Thatcher government closed down the pits through a violent war against mining communities in the 1980s, the key aim was to break their political power, which had long kept Tory governments in check. In recent decades, the decline of coal mining in the United States has had more to do with the rise of natural gas from fracking, cheapening of imported coal and renewables than with any government “war on coal”. In such cases, mines have become so economically unviable that worker’s demands for compensation have had little leverage. In a recent report from the Labour Network for Sustainability, American trade unionists report that many workers respond to Just Transition with a weariness similar to that of British miners on the subject the "regeneration" of former mining areas: as a euphemism for job-losses and community decline. Without denying the importance of single-company transitions, Tadzio Mueller points out that “there are no examples of rapid, sector-level Just Transitions that are actually considered just by those who are dependent on these extractive industries.” After nearly thirty years of existence, and twenty years of increasing prominence, this is not a great track record. Mueller draws the controversial, but incontrovertible conclusion: