Conjunctures of eco-social partnership unionism: The German Trade Union Confederation’s climate policies over three decades

The article analyses the climate policy of the German Trade Union Federation over the last 30 years. It defines a new form of eco social partnership unionism where unions use existing institutions to adapt to the challenges of climate change without embarking on more transformative avenues questioning the status quo. We show that unions climate policy has been subject to little change over the past three decades: German trade unions have fairly consistently been promoting a vision of what we call state-driven ecological modernisation, an affirmation of the given socio-economic order of German welfare state capitalism and calling upon the state to enable technological innovation to mitigate and adapt to climate change, protect national economies from green dumping, and ensure that workers negatively affected by climate action are compensated. In voicing this position, unions see themselves as a mouthpiece of their members, and they perceive these demands as dictated by the interests they represent.