From the viewpoint of autumn 2026, any real or imagined adaptations to the climate crisis are not bearing fruit. As we all sweated it out through the UK’s never-ending heatwave, the issue of what to do with all the carbon that’s been loitering in the atmosphere for centuries became more poignant than ever. The impulsive, almost tokenistic, purchases of electric fans for our workspaces didn’t quite cut it either, bringing into sharp relief the need for a more radical restructuring not only at the societal level but also of how work is organised and experienced.
However, a transition to a more environmentally friendly, or sustainable, future will need to involve significant structural change in the economy. This idea is captured in debates around what a just transition might look like, as a process of ensuring equity and justice for individuals affected by adaptations to climate change. Just transition is also distinctly motivated by easing the shift towards a ‘greener’ economy for workers and communities, particularly those in energy-intensive, ‘hard-to-abate’ sectors.
Furthermore, for the shift to be fair, it must represent and include the voices of the most affected though forms of dialogue and collaboration between relevant actors, such as trade unions, civil society organisations and community groups. A specific focus on the effects on labour would define just transition as a joint decision-making process that develops interconnected social interventions designed to protect job security and employment rights for affected workers. For example, the provision of state or employer-led retraining coupled with the creation of new ‘green’ jobs could support workers during the transition.
There is also political capital at stake, with the UK government offering warm words around a ‘fair’ and ‘managed’ transition on the international stage and at the level of domestic policy: Burnham’s decision on Rosebank and Jackdaw in the North Sea will be the first big test of his government’s climate agenda.
The controversy around the North Sea oil and gas fields also illustrates some of the tensions surrounding climate policy and just transition. That is, the apparent trade-off between protecting jobs and saving the environment. This trade-off is often characterised as a distributive, zero-sum game, where the prioritisation of one is seen to negatively impact the other. Given that the notion of a just transition has its origins in the international trade union movement, the essential union imperative to protect jobs reveals a potential chink in their armour when it comes to their own climate commitments.
In this sense, for unions and workers, just transition can resemble a more typical employment-restructuring process with the same associated threats to jobs and livelihoods at stake. This issue thus raises the question of whether the social and environmental imperatives that underpin a just transition cause a qualitatively different approach to managing the eventual restructuring process. For many, a just transition might seem a bit like old wine in new bottles.
Recent developments in the UK steel industry offer a case in point. The steel industry has been under the spotlight when it comes to reducing emissions because it is one of the world’s worst polluters of greenhouse gases. To reduce emissions, the industry needs to decarbonise: in particular, the blast furnace operation that uses carbon to convert iron ore into steel is the main culprit when it comes to emissions.
In the UK, the blast furnaces at the Port Talbot and Scunthorpe were responsible for 96 per cent of all UK steel emissions. Against this backdrop, Tata Steel UK’s announcement in 2023 to close the blast furnace operation at Port Talbot and replace it with a ‘greener’, less labour-intensive electric arc furnace (EAF) came with the loss of 2,500 jobs. The EAF also signalled a commitment to a wider sustainability and decarbonisation agenda, both in terms of the electrification of process and the strategic shift to recycling ‘scrap’ steel. For Wales, it represented an emotional end to a significant national history of steel production. What’s more, in the longer context of deindustrialisation and episodic industrial restructuring, it felt as though this time the writing really was on the wall for the UK steel industry.
On the face of it, the situation in Port Talbot looked primed for a just transition to take place. While Tata and the unions (Community, Unite, GMB) entered longlasting industrial relations processes of negotiations over the job losses, the machinery of the state was also whirring in the background through the establishment of a traditional multi-actor ‘task force’-style Tata Steel/Port Talbot Transition Board. The Transition Board had a remit to ease the immediate impact of restructuring on affected workers, but with a vaguer, longer-term view of the regeneration of the Port Talbot economy.
While a deal between Tata and the unions was stalling, the new Labour government in 2024 claimed to have directly intervened and ‘saved the day’ by shoring up a package for workers through enhanced severance packages, provision of retraining/reskilling and other employability-enhancing measures. Crucially, Tata received £500m from the government to support the £1.25bn EAF project overall. Funding for measures for workers was also in the mix with £122m ultimately on the table, to be decided upon by the Transition Board: £20m of it from Tata Steel, the rest from the UK government.
It is hard to say whether a just transition occurred at Port Talbot. One metric celebrated by the UK government is that the region has not experienced a spike in unemployment, nor in benefits claimants. Similarly, the involvement of trade unions and the establishment of the Transition Board indicate some attempt to do right by workers and the community.
However, these did not represent anything novel compared to what had come before, and reflected well-established processes of managing restructuring. But, importantly, rather than driven by an environmentally friendly decarbonisation agenda, from the perspective of Tata the shift to EAF simply made good business sense. For Tata, UK steel has been an industry in decline in a country they’d been trying to exit for decades (see Redcar and Scunthorpe), only for the government to hand over a £500m lifeline that also allowed them to halve their workforce at the same time.
The story isn’t over at Port Talbot. Perhaps a lesson to be learned is that any prospect of a just transition seems dependent on the business case: just as it ever was. But for a just transition to live up its own ideals, the progressive case needs to be made on its own terms and through deliberation with the business case. Just transition cannot become just another transition.
Chris McLachlan is a Senior Lecturer in Human Resource Management at the Queen Mary Business School. Chris’ research explores the consequences of deindustrialization and organisational restructuring for affected workers and communities, along with the associated industrial relations processes. His research has focused on responsible approaches to restructuring in the UK steel industry, examining the different forms of institutional support aimed at ameliorating the negative effects for workers.
Image credit: Ant Rozetsky via Unsplash