Working Through Planetary Breakdown: Labour, Skill and the Changing Climate

This book offers a genuinely interdisciplinary engagement with the future of paid and unpaid work in the context of the twin challenges of decarbonisation and the growing impacts of an unstable climate.

It is innovative in its grounding of such discussions in the everyday realities of workers’ experiences with an empirical focus on skill, occupational shifts and technological change at the workplace level. Part I: Skills and Training delves into how workers gain crucial skills across their lifetimes. From survivalist “preppers” to local microgrid operators, the chapters reveal practical and often unrecognised but essential expertise. Case studies include air-conditioning technical educators and construction trades leveraging tacit knowledge of sustainable practices. Part II: Industrial Transformation draws on empirical studies from coal mining, manufacturing, defence and construction to highlight workers’ experiences of climate shifts, heat and industrial transition. Theoretical contributions explore novel legal strategies such as fossil fuel “cessation” and examine the role of health and safety frameworks in addressing worker democracy and climate-change mitigation.

This collection will resonate with scholars, students, policymakers and trade unionists interested in environmental labour studies, just transitions and the future of work. It offers vital lessons for navigating complex industrial transformations.

Key features:

• Detailed case studies in critical sectors such as energy, construction, defence and manufacturing;
• A dynamic interdisciplinary fusion of human geography, political economy, sociology, industrial relations and law;
• Emphasis on worker agency, practical skill and grassroots adaptability amid intensifying climate impacts.

Introduction, Chapter 5 and Chapter 7 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license.

Chantel Carr is an Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow in Geography and Sustainability at the University of Wollongong, Australia. Chantel is a human geographer working on the social and labour dimensions of energy transitions and decarbonisation.

Jesse Adams Stein is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Design at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS), Australia. Jesse is an interdisciplinary design researcher whose work focuses on labour, technology and industries in transition.