Carbon captured? Trade union politics and oil and gas phaseout policy in the UK North Sea transition | Ben Crawford

Ben Crawford will present the paper ‘Carbon captured? Trade union politics and oil and gas phaseout policy in the UK North Sea transition.’ which he co-authored with Marion Dumas and Fergus Green.

Abstract

Scholarship in climate politics suggests that labour and business actors in carbon-dependent industries tend to align in opposition to policies that threaten the viability of those industries. More recent work has qualified this claim, arguing that unions may accept industry phaseout policies where governments offer compensatory benefits to workers and regions, potentially as part of a “just transition” bargain. However, these accounts adopt a rationalist perspective, which assumes that labour organizations within the same sector will respond in broadly similar ways to such policies.  We test these expectations through an analysis of trade union responses to decarbonization policy proposals affecting the UK North Sea oil and gas sector. We examine the positions adopted by major UK energy unions in response to UK Labour party proposals to prohibit new exploration licences and halt consents for new oil and gas fields. The North Sea provides a critical case for analysing just transition politics given the potential for employment transfers from oil and gas to offshore renewables and the emergence of just transition policy frameworks in the UK.’

‘Our findings challenge expectations of uniform labour responses. Despite representing workers in the same industry, unions adopt divergent policy positions: GMB take a consistently oppositional stance, whilst Unite the union and RMT articulate conditional support for a negotiated phaseout accompanied by policies enabling a “from–to” transition for oil and gas workers into renewable energy employment. Union strategies also vary, ranging from coordinated lobbying alongside oil and gas operators to coalition-building with NGOs and political and industrial mobilization aimed at shaping outside employment options within just transition debates. We argue that this variation reflects differences in union politics—organizational identities, internal structures, and strategic repertoires—which shape how unions interpret transition politics and represent member interests.  The paper advances theorisation of union responses to climate policy by integrating class-based perspectives and organizational theories from the sociology of industrial relations into political science analysis, offering a clearer account of unions as political actors and their role in shaping just transition policy processes.

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