Workers provide the labor that makes climate mitigation and adaptation efforts possible. Generating renewable energy, operating decarbonized transportation systems, retrofitting buildings, managing waste and recycling, providing essential care and services, restoring and preserving ecosystems–none of the critical functions required for a climate-safe economy would be possible without working people, including the nearly 2 billion workers employed in the informal economy. Although their labor is essential to powering the transition, workers and their organizations are too often excluded from key operational and financial decision-making spaces that determine how these transitions will happen and whom they will benefit. Women, migrant workers, and workers across Global South/Global Majority countries are further distanced from meaningful climate governance when transition debates center technocratic interventions or narrow energy targets.

As the people providing the labor, workers have tremendous, untapped expertise in how to deliver a truly durable transition to a resilient and low-carbon economy. This panel explores how meaningful worker participation in whole-of-economy transition planning and governance can simultaneously accelerate climate action and build resilience for impacted communities. Panelists will explore the role of workers’ organizations in industrial and sectoral transformations, examine how gender-inclusive decision-making is central to delivering climate action, and identify opportunities for addressing governance gaps. Speakers will draw examples from ongoing just transition and climate governance advocacy, including in relation to the Belém–Antalya Mechanism (BAM), national and regional transition planning, and workplace or sectoral bargaining.

(The Solidarity Center’s climate and labor work is made possible through diverse funding sources, including philanthropic support from private foundations).