Oil and gas workers, said climate activist Mikaela Loach, have a “common foe” and should unite.
The author and Edinburgh University medical graduate, who is best known for having taken on the government in a court action over its oil and gas strategy, put her support behind workers in the fossil fuel industry as she launched her book, It's Not That Radical.
In the past week 1300 oil and gas workers went on a two-day strike, and the protest group, This is Rigged, staged protests in the Scottish Parliament, throwing red paint over the building and threatening to "shut down Scotland's oil industry".
Asked, in an interview in this Saturday’s Herald Magazine, what she would say to an oil and gas worker in danger of losing his or her livelihood, Ms. Loach said: “Us climate campaigners and oil and gas workers have a common foe, which is the bosses and their higher-ups in the industry who don’t care about the planet or the workers. The bosses are screwing over both of us.”
Ms Loach, who is a rising star in the climate movement, whilst herself middle-class, is keen to dispel the image that climate action is only for white, privileged people.
READ MORE: David vs Goliath court case could reshape the oil industry
READ MORE: This Is Rigged: Why we plan to shut-down oil infrastructure
READ MORE: Industrial action Scotland: 1,350 oil and gas workers strike
She also acknowledged that a great deal of blame and guilt now surrounds the oil and gas industry and was keen that the workers did not shoulder it. “A friend has been doing her dissertation on oil and gas workers and how they feel about the industry and she was saying that a lot of people have shame around telling people what their job is because they’ve been made to feel it’s their fault that all of this is happening.”
She promised: “As a climate movement we will be and should advocating for your rights as a worker as well as the rights of the planet and the rights of people because those are so interconnected. We want to advocate for a real just transition which means funding that kind of training and skilling up into renewable industries and not abandoning entire communities. It means creating more and safer jobs for people who are currently in insecure jobs and worried about their future."
The workers, she reiterated, were not the enemy of the climate movement - quite the reverse.
"It’s in the best interests," she said, "of the fossil fuel bosses and the industry at large to make workers believe the climate movement is against them rather than for them. Because if the workers in the oil and gas industry and the climate activist movement come together and work together to advocate or a true just transition, there’s so much collective power."
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