Working-Class Ecology and Union Politics: A Conceptual Topology

This article argues that Environmental Labour Studies (ELS) may largely benefit from incorporating the perspective of Environmental Justice (EJ). It will do so by offering a theorization of working-class ecology as the place where working-class communities live and work, and that are typically affected by environmental injustice, and of working-class environmentalism as those forms of mobilization that link labour and environmental struggles around the primacy of reproduction. This theorization will thus be connected to a social ethnography of working-class environmentalism in the case of Taranto, a monoindustrial town in southern Italy, which is suffering from a combination of environmental and public health crisis. After characterizing the historical process by which Taranto’s working-class ecology has been produced, we show how EJ mobilizations since the early 2000s have allowed the re-framing of union politics along new ways of politicizing the economy. We conclude by offering a conceptual topology of working-class ecology, which situates different labour organizations (confederal, social/community, and rank-and-file unions) according to their positioning in respect to EJ.