"The just energy transition ignores labour outside the formal economy. So is it just?", 11 November 2024

The just transition debate centres on how to move away from fossil fuels towards renewable energy systems while safeguarding working conditions, livelihoods, and economic and social rights of workers in industrial sectors.

This debate has mainly focused on paid labour and job security in carbon-intensive sectors. But it overlooks hundreds of millions of people involved in unrecognised work that subsidises these transitions. This “unseen” labour is called “reproductive labour”. It’s work that happens outside the market or formal industrial system but sustains the living conditions of workers in formal labour.

Reproductive labour is primarily associated with the maintenance of the living conditions of the workforce in a capitalistic society. This includes care work, cleaning, food production and healthcare provision. Unpaid work in the household is also integral for understanding reproductive labour...

Based on my academic research on the nexus between the energy transition and the extraction of raw materials needed for clean energy technology, I argue that social reproduction has not been seriously incorporated in the just transition debate. Thus, it’s imperative to apply feminist lenses to it. Doing so would put an eye on the often unrecognised, unpaid and rendered invisible labour that is powering the energy transition.

A feminist lens provides a view of labour regimes connected to the energy transition (in the paid and unpaid economies) and how transition industries (like mining and processing raw material or manufacturing green technology) rely on the exploitation of unpaid or underpaid and marginalised workers. Most often they are women.

A just transition goes beyond “greening” energy systems. It must put social reproduction at the centre of the just transition. Reproductive and care work subsidies the energy transition, thus making it financially profitable within today’s capitalist system...

Industries connected to the energy transition such as industrial mining, processing and the manufacturing of electric batteries are often portrayed as dominated by a male workforce...These industries are underpinned by a highly stratified gender division of labour, where poor and racialised women often bear the brunt...

The energy transition, and its associated industries, do so too. And the conditions in which reproductive labour takes place happen under particularly dreadful working conditions. For example, labour in mining sites in resource-rich countries is highly precarious. Industrial mining tends to rely on artisanal or small-scale miners as mining zones become unprofitable...

Artisanal miners frequently combine and switch between subsistence economies, supported by reproductive labour at the household and community. Women play a central role in the mining industry and outside of it. According to the Extractive Industries Transparency Innitiative, around 40 million people contribute to artisanal and small-scale mining worldwide. Up to 50% of the global artisanal and small-scale mining workforce is conducted by women...