The event on 22 February 2021 was organised by the network of Offices for University and Trade Union Co-operation in Lower Saxony and Bremen in co-operation with the Lower Saxony Alliance for Sustainability was organised. The event on 18.4.2021 was organised in co-operation with the Left Forum Oldenburg will be organised.

Klaus Dörre's highly interesting text has a blind spot: if he correctly states that trade unions need an interventionist state in order to be able to enforce binding social rules (because the weakening of the trade unions means that the route via collective agreements has little prospect of success), then it should have been explained in more detail how this interventionist state would have to act and what role the trade unions would have in this.

The proposal of the economic and social councils is not new, but it would still be correct if it were enriched with civil society actors - such as environmental organisations. But here, too, it remains unclear what rights these economic and social councils would have.

The necessary socio-ecological restructuring of society requires companies to make different investment decisions (e.g. when converting lignite mining to renewable energies). This idea immediately raises the question of how it is possible in a capitalist society, in which companies organise their investments according to profit expectations, to exert influence on this, i.e. centrally on the question of ownership. If we currently consider the all-round nationalisation of large companies to be unrealistic or even not expedient, then in my opinion state ownership should at least be enforced, whereby the economic and social councils, linked to these state shareholdings, would then be in a position of power to enforce social and ecological goals.* These bodies would be ineffective as mere advisory bodies. Only if they were equipped with some form of power instruments could they enforce anything.

by Hans-Henning Adler, Oldenburg
* see section in my book: Kapital-Macht wirksam bändigen VSA-Verlag 2020, p. 61

Klaus Dörre diagnoses a pincer grip on the trade union's ability to act: by enforcing its goals, it promotes the ecological crisis, without enforcing its goals, it promotes the erosion of its power base through the migration of members to the right. As a solution to this pincer grip, he proposes a litmus test for trade union demands based on the two criteria "will ecological resource consumption be reduced" and "will the quality of life of members be improved".
Following this analysis, Klaus Dörre develops a series of ideas on how trade union activity could be linked to social and ecological initiatives in order to achieve transformations of labour that are ecologically beneficial but do not represent a loss for employees. These proposals are certainly worthy of discussion in a positive sense, even if they are not always entirely free of contradictions.

1. you may be underestimating the extent of the divergence that has now been achieved in working conditions in the post-Fordist economy and thus the contradictions "in the class". With an average annual salary of 67,000 euros, employees in the German car industry are far removed from the disposable income of a cleaner or a Hartz IV recipient, yet Klaus Dörre mentions them in the same breath. After 25 to 30 years of full-time employment and an inheritance, employees in the German car industry are likely to quickly reach the wealth thresholds where Credit Suisse places the 1% richest households in the world, starting at 850,000 euros (including the value of their own home, etc.). It follows from this that both belong in the justification of trade union action: ideological-moral attitudes (e.g. as shame and sensitivity towards the destruction of nature and social injustice), which have always played a major role in the left-wing movement, as well as interest-orientated justification of objectives that more or less unwillingly bow to an ecological emergency and are more in line with Klaus Dörre's considerations.

2) Linked to this is another point, namely the extensive neglect of the question of the self-empowerment of dependent employees in relation to their labour, co-operation and exchange relationships with nature. In this respect, Klaus Dörre proposes the creation of regional or even nationwide committees that work towards the constitutional goal of sustainability in state investment control. However, the increased risk of subjective deformation (through the real subsumption of living labour under capital valorisation and Fordist class compromise) remains outside his direct considerations, although he analyses this in detail for the lignite industry. Nor does he really touch on the historical fact that capitalist society is unique in that it represents the general interest only retrospectively and anonymously as market prices, thus taking property individualism to the extreme.

To put it somewhat provocatively, Kaus Dörre's proposal should therefore be supplemented as follows:
1) Nature is granted personal rights with constitutional status, not just sustainability, as Dörre writes. Countries such as Ecuador and Bolivia have taken these important steps
2) The aim of trade union intervention should be - and not only for car production - to reduce the proportion of working time used in the respective production of the companies, with a complementary increase in the working time used for this, - to make production more humane and more cooperative (i.e. less hierarchical), - to think about processes and products that are more ecological, - to improve individual instrumental and social skills - for care tasks in the individual social environment. The first three points can be thought of as analogous to vocational school lessons, but not for simple vocational training, but for the development of a morally superior exchange with nature and with each other. By changing the relationship between necessary working time in production and free working time alongside it, there is a simultaneous reduction in productivity and an increase in the ecological sustainability of its realisation and an avoidance of mere consumerism as a temporal compensation for an "unfilled" reduction in working time.
3) Trade unions formulate a "political wage share" that is realised through a common. E.g. the production of renewable energy not in the form of private economic accumulation and exclusion of ownership, but completely decentralised, as a common technological project for all, with intelligent network and consumption structures, as the joint work of artisanal-technical and scientific intelligence. To satisfy a basic need, but also to be able to maintain mobility and migration individually and collectively in a resource-neutral way.
As in the other two points, the self-referential reinforcement of ways of thinking and behaviour that have always formed the core or litmus test of left-wing and solidarity movements would also be central here: Freedom, equality, care and co-operation

Hellmuth, Oldenburg

On 7 February 2021, the Left Forum Oldenburg discussed Klaus Dörre's text in the SPW and some of the contributors wrote statements that provide interesting suggestions for the debate on the role of trade unions in the socio-ecological transformation.

Statements from the circle of the Left Forum Oldenburg