The Role of Trade Unions in Social-Ecological Transformation: Overcoming the Impasse of the Current Growth Model and the Imperial Mode of Living

In scholarly and political debates on transformation towards sustainability or along social-ecological lines, employees and trade unions are hardly ever mentioned. The latter still largely represent a perspective that could be summarized as “jobs versus environment” and formulate their environmental strategies within the confines of ecological modernization, if indeed at all – i.e. they do not question the orientation towards growth, capitalist power and production relations or a destructive societal nature relations. It was strong trade unions who won historical achievements for large parts of the population, but these achievements simultaneously deepened the problematic aspects of a mode of production and living which we call the “imperial mode of living”. This antinomy needs to be considered and dealt with politically. This paper examines the results of a multi-year empirical project on the views of Austrian trade unions on social-ecological transformation. It shows that, while there are already some important initiatives, these do not address the main challenge, i.e. the imperial mode of living. However, some entry points for a possible politicization of unsustainable production and consumption emerge from our research, along with a view of the role of trade unions in this politicization. One approach is to overcome the narrow equation of well-being with capitalist economic growth and to replace it with a more comprehensive understanding of well-being and quality of life.