Lack of Rain in the Rainforest

Nora Räthzel

From work or nature to work and nature: another kind of unionism

On a one-week tour organised by João Paulo Cândia Veiga from the University of São Paulo and Manoel Edivaldo Santos Matos from the Union of Rural workers (Sindicato dos Trabalhadores y Trabalhadoras Rurais de Santarém, STTR) in Pará, a region of the Brazilian Amazonas, we visited eight communities along the Rivers Arapiuns, Maró and Amazonas. These are small communities of between 90 and 300 people. They are of mixed indigenous and Portuguese origin, some groups defining themselves as indigenous. Traditionally, they lived from fishing, hunting, gathering fruit and planting manioc. But with the arrival of timber companies their lives have become unstable. In the eighties, but on a much larger scale in the nineties, timber companies entered more remote areas of the rainforests. Game, fruits and fibres on which people had lived began to decrease radically. In the middle of the nineties, supported and organised by the STTR, the communities living in the areas began a struggle for the ownership of the land they worked and lived on. They won this struggle but their battles have not ended. The timber companies remain, employing carrot and stick strategies to get at the wood: threatening activists on the one hand and promising to provide electricity and jobs on the other. The companies do not keep their promises, jobs are heavy and wages are low. But when survival is difficult, some people see no other choice than to work for them. Others are too concerned with the future of the forests to accept such an option, which creates tensions within communities.

Talking about an Energy and Jobs Revolution

Kumi Naidoo
© Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert / Greenpeace

Creating decent new jobs, fighting poverty and curbing catastrophic climate change have historically been seen as three distinctive challenges, pursued by a trio of different movements: trade unions, development organizations and environmentalists. This should no longer be the case. In the past few years, as climate change has become ever more of a pressing issue and the international financial institutions have once again proved incapable of creating employment or fighting poverty, people and organizations have realized that it is in our collective interest as citizens of the world to pursue a green industrial policy. This should start with a re-evaluation of the way we produce and distribute energy.

Greenpeace's Energy [R]evolution, developed in conjunction with over 30 scientists and engineers worldwide, proposes a radical shift in the way the world produces, distributes, and ultimately consumes energy. It is a roadmap for moving energy production closer to the point of use. Under the current system, we produce large amounts of energy at a few centralised locations and send that energy over very long distances to where it is consumed. This system is inflexible, often wasteful, and leaves large swathes of the world’s population unserved and without access to any energy.

On the urgency of stopping global warming

Willi Semmler

Christian Schoder

Parts of the labour movement still have strong reservations towards measures aimed at reducing the carbon intensity of production in order to mitigate global warming. The public debate is dominated by fears that environmental policies harm the working population in the North as well as in the South by increasing unemployment. In line with this public opinion, governments are reluctant to implement mitigation policies on the national or international level. They impose market-based abatement regimes which are in line with orthodox economic theory but ineffective in practice. In this article, we want to rebut these concerns by pointing out that global warming may follow a self-enforcing pattern which is increasingly costly to reverse, thus harming the world's population more and more. Moreover, we argue that mitigation policies may have a positive impact on employment if done properly. After discussing different mitigation policies, we conclude with the policy recommendation of immediate and ambitious action.