Trade unionists and climate campaigners gathered outside Highbury and Islington station to kick off a ‘Year of Trade Union Climate Action’

TRADE unionists and climate campaigners gathered outside Highbury and Islington station in solidarity with workers impacted by climate change worldwide.

Coinciding with COP30, the United Nations climate negotiations in Brazil, the demonstration kicked off a “Year of Trade Union Climate Action” around the country, a campaign that hinges on one message: climate action is union action.

Pippa Dowswell, Islington’s National Education Union co-secretary, explained the connection.

“Trade unions should be involved in climate action because the effects of climate change in this capitalist society we live in are bound to impact working people more than they impact anybody else,” she said.

Union involvement is particularly important when it comes to the “just transition”, she added, that is, making sure the shift to a green society is fair.

“We need to make sure that people who lose jobs in the transition are offered jobs the new green economy. So if you’re currently working on an oil rig, you could be retrained to build wind farms, for example. The fossil fuel economy is going to have to go and we don’t want a situation like with the coal industry in the 1980s, where coal villages are still suffering from what happened.”

Ms Dowswell also highlighted unions’ responsibility to advocate for a just transition internationally, as well as support refugees fleeing crises, many of which are influenced by climate change.

Islington Homes for All campaigner Morag Gillie told the Tribune that climate action is an opportunity for new green jobs, including apprenticeships focused on “retrofitting” homes – making them more energy efficient and better suited for extreme temperatures.

She said: “The government and other interested groups try and frame climate action as being unaffordable and being imposed on ordinary people, and I think that’s furthest from the truth.

“Ordinary people are bombarded with the interests of big business, so it’s really important that we’re out on the streets putting out the fact that working class people won’t benefit from the continuation of fossil fuels and killing our planet.”

Islington Climate Centre’s Anna Hyde was also at the demonstration.

She said: “All these problems, whether it’s climate or housing, are symptoms of the same problem, and that is the cost of billionaires crisis.

“Money is being centralised into fewer and fewer hands and that is causing growing inequality, which is disastrous for our society.”