Trade Unions as a Force for Stability or a Force for Transformation

This paper engages with the role of trade unions in regime destabilisation. Destabilisation requires supply-side policies that often meet significant resistance. An important reason for this resistance is that phase-out policies may threaten state income and employment. This threat to employment means that trade unions have a big stake in such policies. Trade unions have, however, until recently not received much attention in the literature on sustainability transitions. The literature on trade unions suggests that unions have a particular power that can be both a force for continuity and for change. The question that we explore in this paper is, when do trade unions represent a force for change and when do they represent a force for continuity? We explore this question by assessing how different trade unions engage with the notion of just transitions and transition policies. To explore this question, we study Norwegian trade unions’ engagement with policies affecting the oil and gas industry. The importance of oil and gas for Norwegian state income and employment, high union density, and the model with tripartite cooperation suggests that trade unions in general, and unions representing petroleum-related industries in particular, have significant influence on the potential for introducing supply-side policies. The role of Norwegian trade unions in sustainability transitions thus represent an extreme case that can illustrate the role of trade unions in attempts to limit fossil fuel production. We focus on the six largest unions within the Norwegian Confederation of Trade Unions (LO), which is the largest umbrella organisation for trade unions in Norway. For our data, we collect evidence from public hearings, official statements, media records, and congress summaries. We then map the development of each union’s position towards transition and destabilization. For our analytical framework, we draw upon three related strands of literature. First, to frame our study as part of a broader debate about phase-out of fossil fuel industries, we build on the literature on regime destabilisation. Second, to be able to analyse the extent to which different trade unions represent a force for stability or change, we draw upon literature on policy mixes for sustainability transitions. Finally, we make use of literature that deals particularly with the concept of just transitions. Unsurprisingly, our findings show that the unions representing workers in oil and gas argue for a transition within rather than a transition away from oil and gas. However, we observe movement in some of the other unions, and therefore also a changed agenda in LO centrally. We relate this shift to a more general change in the climate discourse in Norway, and the formation of new alliances where trade unions are increasingly divided in how they view the petroleum industry in a sustainability transition. The fact that the trade unions are organized under the same umbrella in LO means, however, that they have to engage in mutual deliberations and negotiate joint decisions. This has resulted in ‘just transition’ emerging as a discourse most can agree on, but which is still interpreted in different ways.