Green jobs and skills: 5 things unions should be asking

Prince Asafu-Adjaye

3 months ago
3 months ago

Green jobs and skills: 5 things unions should be asking

Green jobs need new skills but skills are often treated as compensation, not strategy. A union approach to the just transition skills debate.

There are two ways in which the skills debate is usually framed.

The first treats skills as human capital. This is the skill that lives in an individual worker: their qualifications, their training, the competencies they carry from one job to the next. When a worker is retrenched, it is this that we try to compensate them for losing. Framed this way, skills are a welfare question.

The second treats skills as capability – the capacity of a firm, a sector, or a whole economy to do something it could not do before: to run a solar plant, to process lithium locally instead of exporting it raw, to retrofit buildings for a low-carbon economy. Framed this way, skills are an industrial question.

In the just transition debate, these two framings have run on separate tracks. Governments talk about skills as welfare, as the soft landing offered to workers displaced by the shift away from carbon. Industrial planners talk about capability, but rarely connect it to the workers who will actually build it. I want to propose a synthesis of the two: skills that protect the individual worker and build the economy’s capability at the same time, treated as one thing rather than two.

Where you place skills, on the welfare line or the industrial line, decides who gets a seat at the table, which budget survives the next round of austerity, and whether workers are the authors of the transition or simply its casualties. Below are five questions every union should be asking in just transition planning.

1. The skills-innovation gap

If innovation is the engine of the just transition and skills are the fuel, why do most national frameworks still treat skills development as a social protection measure rather than a core industrial and innovation policy instrument?

This divergence is not an accident. Just transition grew out of a social dialogue and social protection tradition, where skills are treated as compensation. Innovation and industrial policy grew out of a different tradition altogether. The two have never been properly integrated, so budgets tend to sequence compensation after the industrial decision, instead of the other way round. The industry gets decided first, and then someone asks, ‘what about the workers?’ Skills then arrive as compensation, on the welfare budget line, which is the line that gets cut first in austerity.

So the skills-innovation gap is not a budgeting problem. It is a sequencing problem. We decide the industry first and the people second. If skills are part of industrial policy they become a capital investment. This shift needs meaningful involvement of workers and their trade unions in the industrial policy making and decision making.

2. Who trains the trainers?

Green skills curricula, competency standards, and technical education systems in the developing world were designed for carbon-intensive economies. What has to change in our TVET colleges, universities, and apprenticeship systems to redesign that infrastructure for a low-carbon, digitally enabled economy, at speed and at scale?

The core problem is that training systems are largely decoupled from production. They are supply-driven and curriculum-centred, disconnected from the firms and sectors where green capability is actually forming. The answer is not simply to ‘rewrite the syllabus for green jobs.’ It is to build the institutions that connect training to production: coordination between sector councils, employer organisations, and trade unions, setting standards together.

For unions, two things matter here. Apprenticeship systems need unions at the table where the standards are set. And social partners have to make sure that ‘trainee’ and ‘apprentice’ do not become polite words for unpaid or underpaid labour. Unions must be represented on the bodies that set sectoral training standards.

3. Informality and the skills gap

The majority of workers are in the informal economy. How do we design skills interventions that reach beyond formal-enterprise employees and credentialed institutions, to the informal workers, care workers, smallholder farmers, and micro-entrepreneurs who are equally part of the transition?

We start from the right premise. The informal economy is not skills void but a different skills regime. Informal apprenticeship trains more people in Africa than the formal system does. The problem is the absence of recognition, and an insistence on delivering accredited training only through colleges that most of these workers will never enter.

The technical fix is recognition of informal apprenticeships. The political fix is delivering training through the institutions that already exist, the associations, cooperatives, and apprenticeship masters, rather than forcing informal workers into a college model. If a green-skills programme reaches only the already-credentialed, those who attend our formal training institutions, it will build a green elite and widen the inequality gap. Unions with informal and precarious members should be asking whether the skills budget even sees those workers, let alone reaches them.

4. Financing the transition

With public investment in education stagnating and donor financing plateauing, which instruments, green skills bonds, employer levies, blended finance, can raise investment in training at the scale the transition needs, and in line with just transition principles?

Every one of these instruments carries a distributional question that unions should read carefully. Who actually pays a payroll levy, the worker or the firm? Where does a skills bond find the hard currency to service its debt, when skills do not earn foreign currency? These questions decide who carries the cost.

More than that, the ‘financing gap’ framing depoliticises what is really a justice question. Climate finance and loss-and-damage payments are owed, not requested as charity. The transition should be funded on a clear principle: make the polluter pay, make the wealthy pay, and recognise that the countries that built their wealth on carbon owe this transition. When employer levies or worker-funded bonds are put forward as the main mechanism, that is a signal the burden is being pushed downward rather than upward.

5. Innovation sovereignty

Green technologies are overwhelmingly designed, patented, and manufactured in the industrialised nations. How do developing countries build the skills base not merely to adopt and operate imported technologies, but to adapt, improve, and ultimately originate their own?

Catch-up is not automatic from importing technology. The evidence on latecomer development is that absorptive capacity has to be built deliberately, through research and company-level learning. Importing the technology does not import the capability. Korea did not become Korea by buying machines. It became Korea by building the capacity to understand the machines, and then to improve them. The pathway runs from adopt, to adapt, to originate. Skipping the middle step means a country never leaves the first, it stays permanently dependent on imported technology.

This is where skills meet Africa’s place in the green value chain. We are being positioned as a supplier of critical minerals when the real question is value capture through beneficiation. The African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) offers one route to the scale that sovereignty requires, and the terms matter. Local content, decent work conditions, and skills and technology transfer have to be written into the deal from the outset. Unions negotiating around mining and manufacturing investment should be asking whether those commitments are enforceable, or merely promised.

A starting point for union strategy

The thread running through all five questions is the same. When skills are treated as compensation, they are handled after the decisions that matter have already been taken elsewhere. When they are treated as strategy, as both a protection for the worker and a capability for the economy, they become a first-order bargaining issue. It means trade unions expecting, and demanding, a seat at the table where industrial strategy is set, where apprenticeship standards are written, where financing instruments are designed, and where technology and minerals deals are negotiated. Workers are not meant to be the object of the just transition, managed and compensated once the plan is made. We are meant to be its authors.

Dr Prince Asafu-Adjaye is Associate at Labour Research Service.

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