Redéfinir le travail : quand la jeunesse place l’environnement au cœur de ses choix professionnels

Melissa Ziani

À partir de données empiriques tirés d’entretiens qualitatifs (n=23) menés auprès de finissant.es en gestion et en ingénierie inscrit.es dans des filières environnementales au Québec, cette communication interrogera la manière dont ces jeunes appréhendent le travail dans un contexte d’urgence climatique.

En juxtaposant la sociologie de la jeunesse aux études sociales sur le travail, nos résultats illustrent comment pour ces jeunes le travail (salarié comme bénévole) s’ancre dans un désir de donner du sens à leurs actions. De surcroit, la sociologie de l’environnement permet d’explorer la manière dont l’intégration de la question écologique dans la vision du travail de ces futur.es professionnel.les redéfinit la notion d’utilité.

Cette communication explorera comment les études sur le travail viennent à se renouveler à la jonction des sociologies de la jeunesse et de l’environnement, abordant comment les exigences écologiques façonnent désormais la perception du travail de ces jeunes diplômé.es, dessinant les contours de l’avenir du travail.

Labour and Environment, Past and Present, Alberta and Ontario

Chad Montrie

This paper will reflect on the importance of labour history for understanding the origins of the environmental movement in Canada as well as the importance of environmental history for engaging with Canada’s history of workers, unions, and working-class politics.  Moreover, it contemplates the ways in which historical investigation along these lines opens up a critical perspective for challenging the common corporate-parroted notion that workers have to choose between “jobs” and “environment.”  To illustrate these observations, the paper will point to two examples, one from Alberta and the other from Ontario.  The Alberta case will feature the role played (perhaps counter-intuitively) by the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers in promoting an environmental consciousness during the 1970s.  The Ontario case will highlight the part the Canadian Labour Congress played in encouraging provincial and local concern with environmental issues across the country as well as developing an early iteration of what became known as “just transition.”

From Socialism to Neoliberalism: Swedish Origins of the Collective Workers’ Funds in Québec

Shannon Ikebe

The FTQ’s creation of the Fonds de solidarité in 1983 marked a shift for Québec labour towards concertation and accommodation with emerging neoliberalism, away from the militant orientations of the 1970s. Faced with a crisis of mass unemployment, the FTQ’s fund would solicit voluntary workers’ investment, investing in Québec firms to promote national economic development and job creation. Although the funds were collectively run by unions, they largely operated under the logic of private capitalist investment, seen as the motor of economic recovery.

The FTQ’s fund was directly influenced by Sweden’s Wage-Earner Funds model, which FTQ leaders studied during their pivotal visit to Sweden in 1979. The Wage-Earner Funds proposal was originally a radically socialist one, proposed by the powerful Social Democratic union LO in 1976, aimed at eventual worker control of the means of production. In Sweden, the Social Democratic Party leadership defeated the radical plan and transformed it into a qualitatively distinct plan, as part of the party’s new neoliberal program in 1981; the plan aimed at increasing investment capital for private firms at the expense of workers’ consumption.

In both cases, the radical potential of collective workers’ funds as a tool for workers’ democracy and economic planning was recuperated, and reinterpreted to align with the capitalist market imperatives. The juxtaposition of the two cases illuminates a process of transnational diffusion of ideas and social democratic accommodation to the neoliberal logic in the name of pragmatism, which was essential to neoliberalism’s global ascendence.