Metabolic politics: Industrial relations as if nature mattered

Abstract

Work is at the center of the social metabolism with nature. This means that industrial relations (IR) are always also environmental politics. This article reviews core contributions to IR literature, showing that they do not systematically address this role of nature and separate the politics of work from their ecological basis. Against this backdrop, the article develops an interdisciplinary approach, combining IR studies with geographical as well as historical perspectives. Drawing on these fields, it presents the concept of metabolic politics in which nature is an autonomous party of IR. This approach allows analysis to take into account systematically the effects of IR on nonhuman nature as well as nature's own shaping of IR. Such an interdisciplinary approach is necessary to understand the entanglement of IR with climate change and the broader ecological crisis.