Report February First Competences, employment and industrial relations for a green and just transition

Introduction

Two main issues are at stake about the relation between competences and ecological transition: education and labor market policies, considered both as post-education life-long formation and as services for re/up-skilling of unemployed people.

The ecological transition, to which should follow the decarbonization, is a process that is expected to impact the core sectors of industrial economies, such the energy-intensive or hard-to-abate sectors (steel, cement, petrochemical, energy production, mobility).

Accordingly, given the objective to reduce CO2 emissions and to eliminate fossil fuels as raw materials in industrial and energetic sectors, redundancies are expected to occur in those sectors which rely most on such material. Industrial relations will have a key role in addressing those issues: in particular trade unions are facing an epochal challenge, due to the emerging necessity to keep together in their analyses and actions both the social and the environmental objectives.

Against this background, competences and formation are fundamental in defining the priority of the political agenda: it is necessary that the workers employed in those sectors could adapt to the new technological-productive scenario, to avoid social exclusion and marginalization.

Then, considering the asymmetries of the twin transitions, which are expected to bring important advantages in the center, while its costs will be concentrated in the peripheries, in those territories economically dependent on primary industry. Moreover, other divides interact with the effect of the green transition, such as, primarily, the global north/global south one. In fact, those global south countries who had contributed less to the climate crisis are on the one hand those who pay more its costs (environmental, social, economic) while, on the other hand, are typically the territories in which are extracted the materials at the core of the green technologies, producing further environmental damages.

Given this scenario, will be necessary, beside formation and activation policies, the design of encompassing instruments of labor market policies: the green transition will probably create relevant job losses. Against that, re/up-skilling path will be necessary, as well as encompassing passive means, such as unemployment benefit dedicated to the so-called brown sectors, and early retirement paths.

Returning to the European societies, they are highly heterogenous: from the capitals and the metropolises – the center, as said before – the passage to vast underdeveloped areas, both economically and culturally, is often, even geographically, very rapid; and those peripheries must be the target of the just transition, so that it will really configures as an opportunity, in zone typically sacrificed to health and environmental degrading productions.

Some financial instruments have been already adopted (the Just Transition Fund is an example) but they should be integrated with a wider range of policies, to guarantee that the transitions will be just and fair. Two priorities should be education and formation policies, as well as active labor market policies (ALMPs).

Questions

• Which are the key competences for the ecological transition?
• How to structure those new competences?
• What role can trade unions and companies play in fostering a socially just transition?
• How should industrial relations and corporatisms be thought over in the context of a green transition?
• Which could be the perspective for the educative system?
• Through which ALMPs do the development, the activation and the updating of the competences will be more effective?
• How does public administration should adapt to the new context?
• Under which conditions do competences and knowledge should represent inclusion instruments?
• Which are the relevant actors? Which are their responsibilities?

Participants

• Bela Galgoczi, European Trade Union Institute
• Massimiliano Lepratti, Està
• Lidia Greco, Università degli studi di Bari
• Paolo Tomassetti, Università degli studi di Milano
• Francesco Bagnardi, Università degli studi di Milano
• Maristella Cacciapaglia, Università degli studi di Bari
• Dario Guarascio, Università Sapienza di Roma
• Elena Jachia, Fondazione Cariplo
• Marina Da Forno, ANPAL Servizi
• Giovanni Verla FIOM
• Simona Fabiani, CGIL
• Andrea Casamenti, SOLIDAR
• Renata Semenza, Università degli Studi di Milano

Discussion

Opening intervention

The keynote speech was by Bela Galgoczi, senior researcher at the European Trade Union Institute, which mainly dealt with the different dimensions of the labour impact of the green transition.

First, an overview of the inequalities was provided. In order to prevent the ultimate inequality, i.e., the scenario of the Noah’s Ark in a climate catastrophe, policies are needed to tackle the social and economic issues that would emerge due to green transition. In line with this, the risk is that climate policies, i.e., those policies aimed at reducing the anthropic impact on the biosphere, are perceived as more hurting than the climate change itself. Against that, it emerges how Just Transition approaches are the way, possibly the only, to promote a paradigm change in both consumption and production models.

These general considerations concretize differently in the labor markets. The first issue is related to employment and skills. The green transition is, in fact, likely to produce massive job losses in those brown sectors rooted carbon-based activities, while, instead, it is likely to boost the employment in green sectors, i.e., those economic activities mostly involved in the transition to a net-zero carbon society. Two typical examples are the energy and automotive sectors, which are expected to be the most affected ones by decarbonization. In particular, the latter sector, which employed more than 5 percent of the total European workforce, will experience an epochal technological shift, due to the electrification of the powertrains. The effect of this transition would not be seen at the aggregate level, while instead will impact on the quality of the job, as, according to the keynote presentation “none of the 14 million jobs [of the automotive sector, nda] will remain unaffected”.

Approaching instead the Just Transition (JT) concept, the idea is that the transition to a net-zero carbon economy should fit within the planetary boundaries, in a way in which burden sharing is fair. So, in a normative manner, decarbonization is strictly related to global climate justice, accounting therefore for the existing inequalities and phases of development. Thus, JT should be intended as a just burden sharing on the way to net zero. The EU level interprets JT in relation to: i) distributional effect of climate policies; ii) labor market transition; iii) regional restructuring. However, a broader understanding of the climate policies falls out of the scope of the EU action, as only those transition-related risks that interest rich countries are considered.

Lastly, the topic of the welfare state was raised. The desirability of an eco-social transformation of the welfare state is then advanced, even though feasibility concerns are acknowledged, due to socio-economic and institutional constraints. In fact, to make effective the JT, the process should necessarily be embedded in a broader rearrangement of production and redistribution. In doing so, it will be necessary for welfare, as well as social and economic objectives, to include the ecological goals.

Discussion

Renata Semenza, associate professor at the University of the Study of Milano, emphasized the discrepancy between the abstraction of the ecological transition and the concreteness of work. In doing so, she pointed out the necessity to clarify conceptually the issue of “green jobs”, trying therefore to answer the interrogative: “what exactly is a green job?”; if, in fact, the work associates to the transition is generically defined as “good occupation”, it is not clear how such a statement relates to the training systems and the sectoral demand for work by companies. The main issue is the fact that the definition of “green jobs” is normative and works as a sort of equivalent of the “Just Transition”. The “rhetoric of the green jobs” (https://air.unimi.it/handle/2434/954909) in fact is assessed to be at risk of overshadowing the actual effects of the green transition in energetic and industrial sectors, that is likely to materialize in a number of job displacements, targeting in particular the lower-income social groups.

Elena Jachia, director of the environmental sector of Fondazione Cariplo, put forward some considerations on the theme of green jobs and green competences. In particular, the focus was on education and the role of schools in promoting and anticipating the formation of those skills, to enable better performance in the labor markets. A case was presented, related to a project carried out in Lombardy. Two main paths were at stake: green entrepreneurship and orientation toward green professions. In this context, the objectives are, on the one hand, the promotion of the entrepreneurial mentality at a school-level, while on the other hand, the spreading of information and tips related to the professions that are likely to be highly required in the labor market of the future, in which green and digital jobs would gain more and more relevance.

Maristella Cacciapaglia, researcher at the University of Milan, stressed instead the possible criticisms related to economic and job conversion. As she reported: “it is not easy to convert a steel worker to a nurse”. Following this line, a hypothetical green transition should be therefore aware of the aspirations, ideas, and perspectives of those who will suffer from job disposals. From a participation and a social justice point of view, reskilling and upskilling should not be the only strategy adopted. In line with this, also the contextual analysis of the labor market situation should be considered, as Active Labor Market Policies have key functional limits: in those marginal areas defined by a hostile labor market, in which the opportunities for high-skilled workers are few, the opportunities for low-skilled workers are substantially null.

Marina Da Forno, Head of Partnerships and International Relations in ANPAL, brought the point of view of the most important public institution in the field of ALMPs. She defined the main challenge that institutions such as ANPAL face daily: to reduce the risk of labor market exclusion for the more vulnerable citizens. The focus, thus, is both on training and on the job-matching activities promoted by ANPAL, such as up/re-skilling paths and the creation of work-related taxonomies. The case of Emilia Romagna was brought to attention. Here, an interesting pilot is underway, aimed at the realization of a “green taxonomy” in three sectors: green tech and energy sector, the agri-food sector, and building and construction. However, this attempt, although really important due to its innovative nature, is limited in its scope. The taxonomy is, in fact, mostly data-driven and does not take into account the theoretical and analytical issues related to the lack of a common definition of green jobs and green occupations.

Andrea Casamenti spoke on behalf of SOLIDAR, of which he is the Just Transition Policy Officer. SOLIDAR is a network of civil society organizations such as trade unions, citizen associations, and political activists which increasingly works on the social dimension of the ecological transition. According to the scope of the organization, the perspective adopted is the one of education. In a recently published report, the organization seeks to understand the link between green competences and education, both as formal and non-formal. The objective here is to not only look at the skills and training issues but instead to focus on citizen education and therefore push for the adoption of more sustainable lifestyles.

Giovanni Verla, provincial secretary of the FIOM in Ferrara, spoke instead about the concrete initiatives taking place in its territory of reference about the green transition. He dealt mainly with two themes: the labor and climate pact in Emilia-Romagna Region and the impacts of the green transition in two key sectors like the chemical and the automotive. About the former, in the context of such a pact, several proposals were advanced by the FIOM to address the industrial crisis of the chemical plant of Ferrara, including, in a circular economy perspective, the implementation of a Bio-refinery that would exploit the agricultural waste to produce biofuels. However, such proposals were not addressed by politics nor by companies. About the latter, instead, the social impacts of the green transition, as already said by Maristella Cacciapaglia in quoting her professor at Pittsburgh on the difficulties to “convert” a steel worker into a nurse, were expected to be highly costly, and in particular in the hard-to-abate sectors or brown sectors. Against this preliminary consideration, however, the FIOM representative emphasized the lack of encompassing industrial and energetic plans that would guarantee the possibility of having several policy instruments to face the complex challenges of the transition.

On the same line is the intervention of Dario Guarascio, assistant professor of economics at the University of Rome. He addressed a somehow neglected issue, i.e., the increasing impoverishment of the Italian productive sector, which among its causes had the lack of industrial policies. This lack had also led the Italian economy to be a laggard with respect to several technological domains, and this, in particular, is expected to expose the whole productive sector to the asymmetrical effects of the transition. In fact, as the green (and digital) transition is a technology-driven one, those countries and economies that are at the edge of technological development are likely to benefit the most, while instead, countries like Italy, which are in a condition of economic stagnation since the 90’s, are expected to be more exposed to its negative externalities, such as market erosion and, conversely, job losses. In this regard, among other factors, a key role has been played by labor market precarization, as it has become difficult to attract high-level competences – needed for the ecological and digital transition – against low salary and working conditions.

The intervention of Paolo Tomassetti, researcher at the University of Milan, aimed instead at looking at the big picture. He brought, in fact, a reflection on the need to “decolonize” the transition, and in particular, with reference to the relation between “green jobs” in the global North and resources exploitation in the global South. He pointed out the example of the car and nuclear industry, which are assessed to be two key sectors of the green transition, aiming to analyze their global value chains. About the former, if the electric cars would probably constitute an important “piece” of the green transition, their value chain is far from being green, as lithium extraction, for example, typically involves ecological and community destruction. The same accounts for the nuclear industry: apparently, it is CO2 neutral, but if we look at the upstream supply chain, relevant socio-environmental problems arise in the places where uranium is extracted. Also, it is relevant to deconstruct the dichotomy between renewable and fossil fuels, as many renewables are based on fossils. Accordingly, the most accurate distinction is not between renewables and fossils but instead between community-based models and extractive ones. Lastly, a claim was made about the fact that the core of the transition would be the shift from extractive to community models, which are not designed for profit and therefore truly contribute to people’s well-being and are environmentally and climatically sustainable.

Conclusions

Several points emerged from the discussion. First, what is needed for a Just Transition is clearly not a technocratic management of an economic transition within capital accumulation systems. Instead, due to the unseen gravity of the socio-ecological crisis, the scope of the transition should be enlarged and made broader. Accordingly, the necessity is to steer and push for behavioral change, particularly in affluent Western societies, which are, and historically have been, the major contributors to environmental damages, climate change, and, ultimately, biosphere alteration.

Starting from this encompassing point of view, it is key to consider the North/South divide to address the decarbonization of the whole global value chain and to make it just. It does not sound fine to have low-emitting electric cars that circulate in European Capital Cities against the destruction of territories in which lithium mines are concentrated.

The third point, which will also be addressed in the third workshop on eco-social welfare state, regards the definition of the risks that climate change and climate policies would generate, and that are likely to affect everybody, in every part of the world. With reference to green jobs, also, the reflection goes toward the acknowledgment that those kinds of jobs should not be considered as dichotomous in relation to brown ones, but instead, the political intent should be to foster the synergy between those economic activities that pollute the most and their green equivalents. The key issue will be, therefore, the recognition and activation of the skills that are mostly needed in the transition process, considering them as cross-sectoral.

Lastly, a point emerged about actors’ roles in the transition. With reference, in particular, to trade unions, due to their capacity to mobilize and set the agenda, they should be at the forefront in steering the transition, going beyond their structural – and corporatist – interests and considering instead society in its broad sense, seeking to establish intergenerational and climate justice, fostering personal behavioral change, and reconsidering the relationship between humans and non-humans.