The green transition will reorganise production, investment and employment. Inevitably, some sectors will expand, and others will contract or even disappear. Workers may face job losses, lower earnings, relocation or a demand to acquire new skills. While these costs are widely discussed, much less attention is paid to an earlier stage of the process: who influences the policies that decide where those costs fall in the first place?
Our recent work on Italy makes this question difficult to ignore. In this first systematic firm-level study of climate lobbying in the country, we combined data from LobbyFacts and ORBIS to examine Italian firms’ lobbying expenditure and participation in European climate-policy discussions between 2011 and 2023. The clearest result is that revenue matters: firms with higher revenues can spend more on lobbying and thus participate more actively in climate-related meetings and engage more intensively with the policy process. Given that, large firms dominate the lobbying arena, but participation also varies markedly across regions.
Italy is an especially revealing case since it combines a large manufacturing base, strong regional inequalities and extensive networks of small- and medium-sized enterprises with a fragmented framework for regulating lobbying. Much of the industrial adjustment occurs through supply chains rather than through a few visible corporate closures. When political access is concentrated among firms with the resources to maintain a presence in Brussels, policy makers may hear a detailed account of the costs faced by major incumbents, while suppliers, precarious workers and their unions, as well as territories with fewer institutional resources, remain underrepresented.
This fact is, of course, directly relevant to the future of work and workers. The companies included in our sample employ, on average, more than 10,000 people, with the largest one employing up to 167,000. Accordingly, industry-level decisions about carbon pricing, industrial decarbonisation, transport, energy and technological change can be detrimental for a very large share of the workforce. Yet, the number of workers attached to a company does not automatically translate into an equivalent political voice for them.
A company may employ thousands of workers, but more often than not it will intervene in climate-policy debates primarily to defend its market position, manage compliance costs or delay an expensive adjustment. Its interests can occasionally overlap with those of its employees, but the two should not be treated as identical.
In Italy, labour unions provide an important counterweight within this political arena. The main confederations, CGIL, CISL and UIL, have broadly supported decarbonisation, but insist that its pace and design must protect employment, wages and working conditions. Their common position is that workers, their families and affected communities should not bear the costs of the transition. They therefore call for workers’ participation in decision making, collective bargaining, investment in retraining, social protection and an industrial policy capable of creating secure, good-quality employment.
Yet union influence is neither uniform nor a given. Sectoral organisations confront different risks in energy, steel, automotive production and other carbon-intensive activities, while workers in precarious employment, small firms and weakly organised workplaces may have much more limited access to collective representation. Labour unions, therefore, should be understood as political actors within climate governance: they aggregate workers’ interests and challenge corporate claims to speak on employees’ behalf, but they operate within the same fragmented and unequal system of policy access.
Our work on defining a just transition offers a useful way to understand the problem. Policies reaching the same environmental objective should be compared according to the relative net costs they impose on different groups, particularly those with the least bargaining power. The just choice is the one that minimises the heaviest burden on the most exposed group, while also considering responsibility for environmental damages that affect the whole of society. Workers who lose their jobs because a carbon-intensive plant closes may bear an exceptionally high cost despite having little responsibility for the investment decisions that created the plant’s emissions. Retraining or temporary income support may help, but justice also requires them to influence the choice and design of transition policies in the first place.
This brings lobbying into the centre of the just transition debate: if well-resourced firms and industry associations enjoy better access to policy makers, the feasible policies placed on the table may already reflect an unequal distribution of political capacity. A policy can appear balanced only because some alternatives, and some of the main affected groups, were never heard. Distributional justice after a decision cannot fully repair exclusion from the process that produced it.
Lobbying itself is not inherently illegitimate. Firms possess technical knowledge about production, technologies, supply chains and investment constraints and how these need to be adjusted and changed in the context of a green transition, and policy makers need that information to design public policies. The problem arises when access is determined mainly by revenue and organisational resources, while workers, small firms, less industrialised regions and communities dependent on carbon-intensive activity struggle to participate on comparable terms.
Recent developments related to climate lobbying across the European Union add a further warning. Organisations do not simply state whether they support climate policy, but they also justify their positions through claims about competitiveness, fairness, responsibility and the public interest. Proposed policies framed as protecting jobs or ensuring a fair transition may express genuine concerns, but they can also lend moral authority to positions that primarily protect established interests. The relevant question is therefore not only what is said in the name of workers, but whether workers themselves were able to define the interests attributed to them.
Italy and other industrial-based countries must respond by treating workers’ political access as part of transition policy. A mandatory and accessible national lobbying register should disclose expenditure, policy targets and meetings at national and regional levels. Climate consultations should include transparent balance requirements across large firms, small- and medium-sized enterprises, as well as the relevant trade unions and work councils, affected territories and civil society organisations. Publicly supported advocacy hubs could help smaller firms and regional actors engage with complex EU initiatives, while major climate measures should also include worker-impact assessments and evidence of meaningful consultation before decisions are finalised.
A just transition cannot be judged only by the compensation offered after a factory closes or a job disappears. It must also be judged by who shaped the route to decarbonisation. Workers should not ‘enter’ the climate policy debate only as a cost to be managed or a constituency invoked by others. They need an independent voice in deciding which risks are acceptable, which protections are credible and which alternatives deserve public support. Without fair political access, the green transition may reach its emissions targets while reproducing or even deepening the class-based inequalities that justice was meant to correct.
Lilit Popoyan is an Associate Professor in Business Analytics & Innovation with a strong emphasis on policy-relevant quantitative research analysing a nexus between macroeconomic policy, financial regulations, financial stability, sustainable finance and climate change, production networks, and macroeconomic dynamics.
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