Market-driven green economies are premised upon the exploitation and ongoing commodification of both labour and nature. Yet their concrete incarnations experiment with new strategies to "secure and obscure" such processes. These strategies include the formulation and dissemination of an ideological representation of green labour in which environmentalism is "put to work." In this paper I focus on worker recruitment in Toronto and analyze its role in constructing green jobs as a venue for environmentalist politics, and therefore as "good" and "meaningful" work. My empirical material consists of green job announcements posted on GoodWork.ca, the main platform for green worker recruitment in Canada. Building on a Gramscian understanding of ideology, I query the concrete and symbolic functions performed by job ads and discuss them in relation to the structural processes that characterize Toronto's contemporary labour market. I suggest that an ideological representation of green work is used to select motivated and productive workers, justify the offer of non-specialized, precarious, or unpaid positions, and ultimately extend the reach of labour subsumption into spheres traditionally considered outside the employment relation, such as environmentalist activism. In turn, such a representation conceals the extent to which green economies rely on the exploitation of labour while it circumscribes environmentalist critiques within economic growth-centered initiatives.

Workers' experiences in Italian social cooperatives expose the tension between the goal of desirable change that these social economy organisations pursue and the demanding working conditions shouldered by staff. Born from the radical movements of the 1970s, social cooperatives deliver care and community services that seek to counter inequalities and marginalisation. This important work fuses employment with activism. Yet, cooperatives often rely on casualised labour practices that normalise overwork. A noble mission does not guarantee cooperatives will also be sustainable work environments. Based on extensive qualitative research conducted in Milan, this paper explores how, since 2013, a collective of social economy workers has been mobilising to challenge poor working conditions, query the ways workers participate in them, and connect labour demands with broader struggles against austerity and impoverishment. These organising efforts pursue social recomposition: a form of labour struggle that exceeds the workplace and embraces the sphere of social reproduction. Combining a workerist framework of class composition with feminist insights, this paper invites attention to the ways workers inhabit and struggle within, against and beyond their work.