The strike as an instrument for environment protection

Abstract

Environmental defence organizations surprised us in 2019, by uniting their traditional demands and instruments of struggle with a call for a global day of striking for the climate. More recently, the Rebelión Científica (Scientific Rebellion) collective has called for a strike by university professors to highlight the precipice that humanity finds itself standing before. This is a matter of making visible the irreversible nature of climate change, using an instrument that was not originally designed for this type of objective. The right to strike has its roots in the industrial revolution, and has found its natural area of action in achieving improved working conditions for the working classes. After a long historical period of repression or simple anomie, this was recognized as a right, and in Spain as a fundamental right. All this time, the right to strike, at least in its technical conception, has been linked to the world of work and its traditional aspirations.

Thus, we must ask ourselves, from the perspective of our discipline, whether this instrument is malleable enough to adapt to the new social realities and their demands. Obviously, the first obstacle posed by such an extension would concern the restrictive character of the holders of this right, at least in the Spanish legal system. This is a workers’ right. Accordingly, so-called strikes called and supported by other types of social actors would lack such consideration and protection (Sentencia del Tribunal Constitucional 11/81, of 8 April, Fundamento Jurídico 12). Thus, in this study, we must limit ourselves to the analysis of strikes with such an objective, yet linked by their organizers to work.

Moreover, the study of the relationship between strikes and the defence of the environment must previously differentiate the possibilities of this instrument with respect to the addressees of such measures. Thus, in the first place, we must contemplate the possibility that workers, through their trade union organizations, bring production to a halt as a means of protesting against certain policies of the public administrations that, in their opinion, are harmful to the natural environment. In this case, the potential of environmental strikes would be related to political strikes and their legal recognition.

Besides this, we might also discern the possibility that workers, as a means of applying pressure against business policies that, in their opinion, are not respectful of the environment, could engage in measures of collective action. In this regard, as we will see later, a distinction has traditionally been drawn between those business measures that, besides affecting the environment, potentially damage workers’ safety and health, and those others that pursue improvements in the so-called external environment, and which are not immediately connected with workers’ health, beyond what affects them as inhabitants of the company environment (Vanuls, 2015, p. 18).

Regarding this second case, the broad recognition of free enterprise limits this type of strike twice over. First, it limits interference with the entrepreneurial right to manage one’s company, while respecting the rules, according to one’s criteria. Secondly, this business freedom also entails conferring police power to the employer, which licences her to introduce safety measures that, ultimately, may also affect the normal development of the measures of collective action analysed here.

This chapter will analyse the potential of strikes in the struggle for a healthy environment. In recent times, environmental defence organizations have called on citizens to express their unease about the environmental future through global strikes. Thus, I ask, in the first place, whether these are genuine strikes. Next, following my conviction that defending the environment is also a class interest, the viability of environmental strikes is admitted. Finally, some issues are addressed regarding the possibility of political-environmental strikes and the relation between this type of strike and the growing protection of the right to free enterprise.