Dear Climate Workers friends,

It’s been awhile since you’ve heard from us. I’m writing with some news.

In 2018, Movement Generation Justice & Ecology Project (MG) – of which Climate Workers is a program and of which I am staff – pivoted to focus more deeply on deepening its understanding of ecology and just transition strategy, and revising and upgrading our curricula. As a result, we put programs like Climate Workers and Earth Skills on hiatus.

As MG continues that work to deepen its capacity to train on and carry out just transition strategy, I write with two pieces of news related to Climate Workers:

1. We’ve made a decision to officially bring Climate Workers to a close. In short, as MG evolves and consolidates as a staff collective around its core work of developing and disseminating the Just Transition framework, it became increasingly difficult to dedicate the kind of full-time organizing that Climate Workers would have needed to move forward with the boldness required of us.
2. As of August, I will be leaving the Movement Generation staff. While the decision to close out Climate Workers definitely factored into my decision to leave the collective, the truth is I absolutely adore MG, I believe in the entirety of the work we’re doing, and MG will always be my political home. However, I’m also strongly feeling the pull of one of the other loves in my life – photography – and am eager to dedicate full-time attention to sharpening my craft, and this felt like this was the right moment to make that leap.

As we close out the program, we are so proud of all we’ve accomplished over the last five years. On behalf of everyone at Climate Workers and MG, I wanted to say a huge THANK YOU to the rank-and-file workers, union organizers, and climate justice leaders who helped us advance a powerful politic of just transition within the labor movement. In particular:

Thank you to the hundreds of rank-and-file union members who marched with us against the Keystone XL pipeline and the expansion of the Chevron refinery in Richmond in 2014, our first action.

Thank you to the farmworkers, day laborers, landscapers, domestic workers, fast food workers, city workers, librarians, wastewater treatment plant workers, and others who lent their voices and stories to our “Worker Wisdom in a Changing Climate” series.

Thank you to the union workers at Casino San Pablo with whom we took over an abandoned lot in Richmond, planted fruit trees and herb spirals, and created a “strike garden.”

Thank you to the fast food workers and urban farmers who together shut down a McDonalds drive thru, handing out hundreds of free, locally-grown, organic, burritos to the people.

Thank you to the labor leaders who caravanned down to the fracking fields of the Central Valley with us, and who later marched 10,000 strong in the streets of Oakland and blockaded the doors of the state building with us, calling for an end to fracking.

Thank you to Walmart Workers who went on strike on Black Friday and to hundreds of environmental justice allies in Richmond who joined them, calling out Walmart as the world’s largest climate criminal.

Thank you to the recycling workers in Oakland who won an expansion in the municipal compost program, raised workers wages across the county, and organized their coworkers into the union.

Thank you to refinery workers who struck the Tesoro Refinery in Martinez and the hundreds of environmental justice leaders who joined them, backing their demands around safety and public health.

Thank you to hundreds of workers for shutting down Wells Fargo and City Bank in downtown Oakland with us in solidarity with Water Protectors fighting the Dakota Access pipeline.

Thank you to all the workers, residents, and youth who helped stop Phil Tagami’s plan to bring dirty coal through Oakland’s working class black and brown neighborhoods.

Thank you to the workers who struck on May Day and the nearly 100 environmental and climate justice organizations who held a press conference calling on corporations not to retaliate against striking workers.

Thank you to dozens of unions that let us in to train your members on climate justice and the dozens of worker leaders and union organizers who went through our intensive 5-day Just Transition retreats.

Thank you to all the workers we’ve never even met who know more about what it means to live in right relationship to land, water, air, and each other than any boss ever will. To the workers who are reclaiming their labor in service of their communities. To the workers who are reviving ancestral and traditional ecological knowledge. To the workers who every day get up, organize their coworkers, and demand dignity. We see you. We thank you. We honor you.

We are proud of the work our members did locally that led to a renewed, more militant push within labor at the national level to lead with a vision of Just Transition. We are in the process of writing up our many lessons learned from this organizing model and would be happy to share that upon request when it is finished.

While this chapter of Climate Workers is over, we’re hopeful about what is ahead. Everywhere people are fighting the bad, building the new, changing the rules, and re-writing the narratives. We know our labor is what we have to bring to this project and therefore, workers must continue to be on the forefront of solutions. We know this work will continue without Climate Workers. We’re just grateful to have been able to make our humble contribution to it over the last five years.

Solidarity,

Brooke Anderson

for Climate Workers & Movement Generation

 

P.S. if you were making a monthly contributions to Climate Workers, thank you and that contribution has been stopped. If you wish to make a similar donation to Movement Generation, you can do so here.

 

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