Transfer: European Review of Labour and Research

This article develops a research framework for understanding workers and their unions as strategic actors in the climate transition, emphasising the centrality of their agency. While climate change poses profound challenges such as job losses, work reorganisation, and health risks, workers are often described as passive recipients of state or employer-led decisions. We conceptualise union engagement along two dimensions: the strategies they pursue (‘what’) and the factors shaping these strategies (‘why’). Drawing on existing literature and empirical observations, we first identify five generic strategies: abstentionist, unconditionally supportive, conditionally supportive, oppositional, and transformative, mapped along two dimensions: agreement with climate policies and engagement in climate action. Then, we propose a framework integrating internal factors, including worker interests, union power resources, and strategic capabilities, with external influences such as structural power, institutional power, societal discourse, and employer strategies.

This article examines whether a shorter full-time standard working week can promote gender equality in the labour market by reshaping the distribution of paid and care work. Based on an overview of employment rates and working hours in the EU, it shows that, although there are major differences across the EU, women are often employed but disproportionately in part-time positions, resulting in lower earnings and pension entitlements. Using data from the European Working Conditions Survey, it highlights the unequal division of unpaid care and housework between women and men, rooted in persistent traditional gender roles. It also shows that these roles shape working time preferences. Against this background, the article then reviews empirical studies on the impact of shorter full-time standards on the gendered reallocation of care work and paid employment. The findings suggest that while reducing the full-time standard can foster gender equality, its effects depend strongly on institutional frameworks and persistent gender norms.

Climate policy measures and the energy transition present challenges for unions beyond the traditional scope of collective bargaining and social dialogue. Union responses to policies to phase out internal combustion engines must simultaneously address climate, environmental and industrial policy issues, and influence decision-making within multinational corporations and the web of supply chain firms that participate in production. Studies point to the need for capacity building to enable unions to respond to these complex challenges. Nevertheless, the nature of the union ‘capacity’ to be mobilised in climate responses, and how this is developing in diverse institutional contexts, remains unclear. Building on Richard Hyman’s concept of ‘strategic capacity’, the article explores how different dimensions of union capacity are mobilised to respond to challenges posed by internal combustion engine phase-out policies. This article draws on a study that maps trade unions’ responses to such policies in the United Kingdom and two EU countries.

This conceptual article explores the tensions that climate change creates between environmental sustainability, gender equality and economic stability. It argues that these dimensions fundamentally challenge the foundations of traditional industrial relations (IR) and thus trade union strategy. By bringing union studies into dialogue with feminist political economy and eco-feminist perspectives, and drawing on scholarship and current evidence of union initiatives across the Global North and South, it proposes a union–climate–gender normative framework. This framework is structured along three interrelated continua: unions’ i) climate and ii) gender equality ambitions and iii) economic paradigms. We advocate for gender-responsive approaches that reframe productivity by considering the interdependence between paid-productive and social-reproductive labour, and call for unions to treat gender equality not as additional to but as a constitutive principle of just transition strategies.

This is a plea to reconcile, in a gender-conscious manner, commodified labour and care work by providing both men and women ‘time to breathe’ over their life courses. Looming over the future of work are three trends – an ‘overheated’ work culture, a lack of time for personal and social care, and an intolerable gender discrimination stemming from the first two. Under such conditions a time-aware working time policy has to try to improve the temporal conditions of all forms of work over the lifespan, and in a manner that eliminates gender discrimination. There are already laws and collective agreements going in this direction. The ‘time option model’ supplied with temporal drawing rights would mark a radical further step in this direction. The objective of this working time policy would be, rather than just to limit working time, to enhance freedom at work and thus give people more space and time to care for societal needs.

This article explores the impact of reduced working hours on employee health, examining both physical and mental well-being. It highlights evidence that working time reductions can improve sleep quality, reduce stress and decrease sickness absence, particularly in high-stress or physically demanding jobs. Additionally, shorter working hours may contribute to better work-life balance and greater life satisfaction. While some studies suggest that effects may vary depending on gender or job type, overall, findings indicate that working time reduction is a promising strategy for enhancing health outcomes and improving employee well-being. Such benefits may be sustained over time and suggest that reducing working hours should be considered an effective policy for fostering healthier, more balanced work environments.

Deep decarbonisation requires overcoming carbon lock-in and prioritising green ‘phase-in’ over necessary ‘phase-out’ strategies in fossil fuel-intensive energy and industrial sectors. This article analyses a case of localised transformative agency in Civitavecchia (Rome metropolitan area, Italy), a territory dependent on a major coal-fired power plant. Integrating a power resource framework with literature in environmental labour studies, we examine how a heterogeneous inter-union collaboration (CGIL, UIL, USB) achieved wider cooperation and subsequently shifted strategy from defensive opposition to demanding an affirmative just transition combining job creation and clean energy infrastructure. Using extensive qualitative data, we argue that strategic mobilisation of coalitional power is essential for union renewal and for challenging the structural privilege of incumbent fossil fuel capital. Localised democratic experimentation by unions can successfully disrupt national-level political inertia, driving policy implementation for high-road job creation and local environmental sustainability. But upscaling and institutional support for such struggles remain necessary to secure these outcomes.

This article argues that formal reductions in statutory or collectively agreed working hours may be ineffective without corresponding reductions in workload and robust safeguards against work encroaching onto non-working time. Technological developments and the expansion of telework have intensified the risks entailed by permanent availability, as well as increasing work intensity and informal extensions of working time. This article shows how existing working time legislation, particularly the EU Working Time Directive and its interpretation by the Court of Justice of the EU, may be insufficient to address these challenges. It critically examines the limits of current legal frameworks and evaluates the emergence of a right to disconnect at national and European levels, contending that clear definition and effective implementation of such a right are essential to safeguard meaningful working time reduction.

This article contributes to the debate on union efforts to shape decarbonisation of their industries by examining collective bargaining that impacted the transition to electric vehicles (EVs) in the auto industry. We compare the 2023 bargaining round between the United Auto Workers and the Detroit Three car makers in the US with the 2024 negotiations between IG Metall and Volkswagen in Germany. Both unions launched strikes, but while the UAW secured strong gains, IG Metall made major concessions. Applying power resource theory, we examine the two bargaining rounds to find explanations. The greater associational and institutional power of IG Metall conferred no advantage; equally, the UAW’s militant strategy alone does not explain its success. Rather, the outcomes were critically shaped by how the unions’ structural power – their ability to disrupt production and market exchange – was conditioned by two external factors: EV market volatility and high-level political support for the ‘green’ transition.

This article is a contribution to debates on the role of trade unions and industrial relations institutions in boosting popular support for a greener economy. Building on prior work that demonstrates a positive association between collective bargaining coverage and pro-environmental attitudes among workers, the article adds a more robust country-comparative focus. Matching data from the European Social Survey with the new European Participation Index (EPI), it examines whether cross-national variation in the strength of unions and industrial relations institutions is related to country differences in public support for carbon taxation and considers a range of explanatory factors. Results of multi-level regression models support the core argument by revealing a positive association between the EPI and public support for carbon taxation, which is robust to several control variables, including the domestic weight of the fossil fuel industry. The article thus highlights the importance of trade unions and industrial relations institutions in the successful navigation of green transitions.

The issue of fracking highlights the variability of trade union approaches to the environment in the UK energy sector, as reflected in their narratives and strategic organising orientations. Stories alone cannot change the material interests underlying complex societal conflicts, yet transformative policies on the climate crisis cannot emerge without a coherent story about the environmental crises and possible solutions. This article uses unions’ positions on fracking as a proxy for opposing/supporting/hedging against climate action to see how divergent positions amongst the UK’s three biggest unions in the energy sector (UNISON, Unite and GMB) and the TUC are reinforced or challenged by internal union narratives and strategic foci. Drawing on four in-depth expert interviews and 148 union documents, the main union narratives and strategies are analysed and clustered. The article’s key insight is that unions’ specific narratives differ depending on a union’s orientation. Pro-fracking unions address the short-term immediate financial and material concerns of members and hence promote business partnerships, while anti-fracking unions develop broad-based grass-roots alliances to address the climate crisis. The key entry point for transformative coalitions lies in promoting a coherent and positive narrative about transformative change, in line with scientific evidence.