Marking this year’s April 22 Earth Day, the Solidarity Center is launching a new, partner-informed, inclusive strategic plan to support workers and their unions around the world to address impacts and drive solutions for an accelerating climate crisis.
“The Solidarity Center recognizes that workers and their communities—especially in the global south—are disproportionately impacted by the climate crisis. We are committed to directing resources and attention toward people-centered climate policy and legislative advocacy by our partners and allies in their respective countries,” says Shawna-Bader Blau, Solidarity Center executive director.
The Solidarity Center’s strategic plan—centered on ensuring decent work and a strong labor movement in the future—endorses the following program and advocacy approaches:
- Developing worker-driven climate solutions and playing a significant role in their implementation to protect hard-fought gains and advance worker rights in changing industries
- Using collective bargaining to advance cleaner, safer and more sustainable operations across sectors; and ensuring an inclusive process that prioritizes the needs of workers and their communities in transitioning sectors
- Building broader coalitions, securing the mutual commitment of climate, human rights and community organizations in the fight to win decent, unionized green jobs; building healthy, resilient and sustainable communities; and supporting worker rights
- Effectively participating in national, regional and global climate justice negotiationsand holding policymakers and employers accountable for achieving a just transition to a cleaner economy that enables workers to enjoy their fundamental freedoms and rights; and
- Advancing an enabling legal environmentto achieve a just transition, recognizing the critical link between labor rights and environmental justice.
“On Earth Day, the Solidarity Center stands with our partners as they drive the vision for a fair or just transition to a cleaner, more inclusive, and more equitable economy,” says Sonia Mistry, Solidarity Center global lead on climate change and just transition.
Read more here.