The story of coal in Germany:

Employer associations: Climate change, power and politics

“…This article makes a novel contribution to the nascent field of industrial relations and climate change research by critically reviewing the importance of employer associations in shaping government policies and social attitudes towards climate change. Existing industrial relations practices, such as hours of work (Fitzgerald et al, 2018), social dialogue (Galgóczi, 2020) and the work, including pay and conditions, and skills attached to polluting industries (Reitzenstein et al, 2020) have become central to debates about responding to climate change. Emphasising this point, a recent journal special issue examining industrial relations and climate change stresses that workplaces are key sites of pollution and thus any hope of reaching net zero carbon emissions requires workers, unions, employers and the state to reimagine the regulation of work, work design and the social relations of production (Clarke and Lipsig-Mummé, 2020).…”

“…This article makes a novel contribution to the nascent field of industrial relations and climate change research by critically reviewing the importance of employer associations in shaping government policies and social attitudes towards climate change. Existing industrial relations practices, such as hours of work (Fitzgerald et al, 2018), social dialogue (Galgóczi, 2020) and the work, including pay and conditions, and skills attached to polluting industries (Reitzenstein et al, 2020) have become central to debates about responding to climate change.…”

“…Reflecting this general claim, a handful of studies demonstrate empirically that employer associations have been critical in shaping climate policy at the international level (for example, Moussu, 2020), while, even in the archetypal example of 'successful' climate transition and industrial relations, German employer associations are presented as having held a privileged policy position which has delayed transition (Reitzenstein et al, 2020). We argue, as an increasing number of industrial relations scholars do, as outlined above, that climate change must be understood as an industrial relations matter, and we further show that the role of employer associations in it merits much more examination than it has received so far.…”