Author Description

Employment and the environment are both in an increasingly precarious state at the turn of the millennium; unemployment and environmental degradation have risen markedly in the past decades. The paper uses five case studies to illustrate the relationships between jobs and enviromental protection. There are those who still continue to argue that jobs and environmental protection are in basic conflict. But, the paper argues, it is not environmentalists that threaten employment, but those who downsize their workforces and destroy the environment in the interests of short term profitability. Thus working-people's interests and environmental imperatives are not in real or long-term conflict. The paper considers recent initiatives in creating green employment in Australia and overseas. Developments to green the labour market are very welcome. They help to foster new sustainable enterprises, encourage new employment and to build much-needed links between trade unionists and environmentalists. Such developments do not, however, confront the power of those who gain from environmental damage. Increasingly employers are recognising that environmentally sound practices can be good for business. Many, however, persist with environmentally harmful activities in the interests of short term profitability. Therefore greening the labour movement not just the labour marke remains a vitally important strategy to protect the environment from ecocidal enterprises, because workers have considerable power to confront such enterprises on behalf of the environment, as many recent examples of actions in defence of the environment demonstrate. The paper uses the example of Earthworker to illustrate how unions and their members can work with environmentalists to achieve both these aims. Earthworker draws its activists and supporters from a wide variety of union, green and community organizations. It acts as a conduit between unionists and environmentalists to work on common projects. The paper