Unions for climate action! | Payton M. Wilkins (re-release)

Payton M. Wilkins opens by agreeing that fossil fuels must go: they are dirty, loosely regulated businesses that damage the planet and make it increasingly less habitable. Climate advocates often respond to the loss of fossil-fuel jobs by pointing to projections showing that investment in a green economy will eventually create more, healthier, and higher-paying jobs. Wilkins says that argument misses the immediate reality. “People eat bread, not data.” When a corporation closes a coal mine, workers can lose paychecks, pensions, and jobs they expected to pass on as part of their families’ futures. The effects spread beyond individual employees: schools close, small businesses shut down, homes are lost, and poverty takes hold. Wilkins argues that no green jobs are automatically waiting for those workers, so shutting down a mine or refinery can devastate an entire community even if it improves air quality in the long term. He rejects the supposed choice between employment and environmental protection. Calling himself “not so much a tree hugger as a people hugger,” Wilkins says both goals are possible, but only if climate advocates stop arriving with predetermined answers and instead listen to the workers whose livelihoods are at stake. That, he argues, is where unions become central.

Wilkins explains that his mother, Donnell Wilkins, founded Detroit’s first environmental justice organization, so he grew up hearing about justice. Even with that background, he says he did not fully understand the conflict between the labor and environmental movements until he organized a climate panel for the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists’ annual convention. The panel included Cecil Corbin Mark of WE ACT, Jackie Patterson of the Shirley Chisholm Legacy Project, and his mother, the CEO of Green Door Initiative, alongside a high-ranking United Mine Workers of America leader. Wilkins expected agreement that climate change threatened human health, families, and homes. Instead, the mineworkers’ representative and the climate experts had a heated confrontation. Wilkins recalls becoming flushed and sweaty and wondering whether he would lose his job. His boss’s look told him to get onstage, and afterward instructed him to “fix this.” Wilkins arranged a private meeting where both sides listened to the miners describe their fears, desires, sense of dignity, and concern for their legacy. The discussion also clarified that coal’s decline was driven substantially by economics rather than only by activists or policy: coal was becoming more expensive, renewable energy was getting cheaper, and investors were divesting from coal because of climate impacts and financial risk. Wilkins says everyone felt heard, allowing the miners to distinguish the people involved from the larger problem. In the following months and years, miners who had opposed common climate policies became more open to considering taxes and emissions standards, although Wilkins says they still had further to go.

Wilkins presents unions as institutions with a long record of protecting workers’ rights while pursuing justice. He points to the 1968 Memphis sanitation workers’ strike, which followed the deaths of two African American workers crushed in a malfunctioning garbage truck. The strike ended after the city agreed to recognize the union and meet the workers’ demands. He also cites South Africa, where the Congress of South African Trade Unionists became a powerful force against apartheid through protests, boycotts, and strikes. That pressure contributed to negotiations in 1990 and apartheid’s end in 1994. For a direct climate example, he describes Denmark’s move from fossil fuels toward wind energy. There, the Union 3F negotiated with the government and wind companies for jobs, retraining programs, and fair wages, helping workers enter the expanding wind-energy sector. These examples support Wilkins’s broader claim that unions are unusually well positioned for climate action. He calls the union movement the only multi-generational, multi-ethnic, multi-racial, multi-gender movement in the world, with tens of millions of people organized around shared ideas. Because unions already represent workers during major economic changes, he says they should be at the center of a “just transition,” rather than treated as an obstacle to decarbonization.

Wilkins says climate advocates and workers must begin with “deep listening conversations.” Each side needs to hear the other’s fears, desires, and ideas for the future. He also calls for education in both directions: climate advocates should learn how workers make a living and what their communities depend on, while workers should learn more about the climate crisis and its effects on health and the environment. After the convention confrontation, Wilkins began inviting coal miners to meetings and conferences focused on a just transition. His goal is for miners to help articulate a path toward green jobs before declining profitability or government policy determines their fate for them. He wants unions to secure federal money for the transition and retrain their members, so workers do not have to choose between earning a living and living in a safe, healthy environment. Wilkins imagines communities powered by renewable energy, where residents do not have to wonder what is in their water or air and where people are valued over pollution. He insists this is not a distant utopia but something that could be achieved within a few years. His argument is partly political: if the U.S. government could bail out banks and the auto industry during the 2008 financial crisis, he says it should also be able to “bail out the American worker.” He doubts that will happen without sustained pressure from unions.

The final argument is that the energy transition will require difficult changes, but those changes do not have to impose all their costs on workers and communities. Wilkins repeats that people deserve both economic security and a clean, healthy environment. The transition should therefore be designed around jobs, retraining, fair wages, and community investment rather than simply announcing that fossil-fuel facilities must close. His optimism is grounded in collective action. The labor movement already has the membership, history, and organizing capacity to press governments and companies for a worker-centered transition. Climate organizations, for their part, can make progress by treating miners and other fossil-fuel workers as participants whose knowledge and interests matter, not as enemies standing in the way of environmental goals. Wilkins ends by calling himself a “serial optimist” and saying that the planet can be protected “without too much pain.” The TED episode identifies the talk as delivered at the 2023 TED Countdown Summit in Detroit, Michigan, and originally published in October of that year; the accompanying episode description presents it as a re-release.