YESTERDAY’S VALUES IN TOMORROW’S INDUSTRY: THE FUTURE OF WORK IN GLOBAL PRODUCTION NETWORKS OF RENEWABLE ENERGY

Abstract

This dissertation examines “green” and “climate” jobs in a period of so-called “energy transition”. Renewables play a crucial role in making the switch from fossil fuels to other forms of energy and associated forms of work, green and climate jobs, play a prominent in legitimizing the transition. Despite their promise, we know comparatively less than we should about these growing sectors and associated social relations at work. In this, my dissertation develops a systematic critique of existing social relations of “green” work under capitalistic social relations. I do so to show that many jobs with these labels are not as desirable, both ecologically and socially, as they could otherwise be. I map, both theoretically and empirically, what green jobs and climate jobs look like in the renewable energy sector. I do so principally from the US, but move across global, national, and local scales to make my argument. I focus on wind energy and Vestas’ global production network, in particular. I also develop an eco-social typology to help me examine different “green” and “climate” jobs according to their associated processes, outputs, and uses, with additional consideration to spatial and temporal dimensions. I then fuse that typology with an interpretive framework called labor regime analysis, an instrument that derives from scholarship associated with labor process theory, which helps me to explain how political structures, institutions, and actors coalesce into particular labor regimes that condition the jobs we see. Using these tools, I show that many of the jobs we see are marked by social processes that are harmful and precarious. Using labor regime analysis and the eco-social typology, I show how jobs affiliated with renewable energy production networks, including those associated with wind energy and Danish company like Vestas, are not necessarily desirable socially. More specifically, I use labor regime analysis to show how many of the same political economic social relations have rooted themselves in the renewable energy sector—social relations of spatial competition, provincialism, and pursuit of surplus value over human needs. In line with what we have seen historically, green capitals continue to leverage structural power and difference across race and class in pursuit of their further valorization. Among other things, these practices are driven by conditions of competition in the energy sector. After developing this critique, I conclude with some reflections on necessity and realization of “eco-social” jobs anchored in politics of renewal, regeneration, and connection. Ultimately, however, I conclude that we cannot realize more ecologically and socially sensitive futures for workers or the planet without reckoning with the aforementioned relations of competition and interests that simply seek to “green” capitalism. I contribute to literatures that intersect with the political ecology of labor, labor process theory, and global and comparative political economy that exist across disciplines. These include methodological advancements that pair scholarship in global production networks and labor regime analysis through a comparative logic of “siting” (see Riofrancos 2021). It also emphasizes the manner in which ideas, mutually constituted among actors, material relations, and associated structures, act in a contradictory manner to maintain the labor process. However, ideas about work, including “green”, point the way to avenues of contestation.