Climate Video

Webinar: Coronavirus Capitalism, the Climate Crisis and Bargaining for the Common Good

As part of the recent Bargaining for the Common Good Climate and Environmental Justice convening, we welcomed activist and author Naomi Klein to speak on the COVID-19 crisis in the context of the dual climate and environmental justice crises communities face across the country. Following Klein, Saqib Bhatti of the Action Center on Race and the Economy and Judith Le Blanc of the Native Organizers Alliance gave an introduction to the Bargaining for the Common Good movement.

Excerpts from the webinar

What is the Bargaining for the Common Good (BCG) approach? Community and union members partnering around a long-term vision for the structural changes they want to see in their communities and using union bargaining as a critical moment in a broader campaign to win that change.

Naomi Klein, author and activist, co-founder The Leap:

Pandemics have been very powerful tools for the imposition of capitalism throughout history. Certainly in the Americas, smallpox was the greatest killer and tool of genocide against indigenous people. This is a virus that, while it impacts everyone, like all disasters, it doesn’t impact equally. We know that our elders are more vulnerable to this disease. Anybody who has a range of preexisting conditions, especially respiratory preexisting conditions, is particularly vulnerable to the virus. We know that those illnesses are unevenly distributed because pollution is unevenly distributed. And pollution is racistly distributed throughout the United States, throughout communities of color, indigenous communities. So, the preconditions to vulnerability for this virus are sited in those communities. And we’re hearing anecdotally, reports from health care workers about who is most impacted and we have every reason to believe that the people who will be most overrepresented in the death counts will be people from those communities. So, it is particularly outrageous in the past few days, we have hard news that the Trump administration is using this crisis to attack environmental standards including those specifically targeting air pollution. Rolling back emissions standards. Refusing to enforce a whole panoply of EPA regulations. This has been the wish list of fossil fuel companies, the American Petroleum Association. The coal industry has said that in the name of this pandemic they shouldn’t have to pay into the funds that they have for workers with black lung disease.

Naomi Klein: 

If there’s one thing that gives me hope in this moment it's that there’s been so much intellectual work done in our movements, in between our movements. Coming out of our silos. The climate movement and the labor movement which this discussion convened by Bargaining for the Common Good represents is one of those silo busting exercises. Bringing together activists for homes for all, a jobs guarantee, labor rights, worker cooperatives with the common imperative that we have to keep our planet safe for all of us. We have been coming out of our silos and we have begun to articulate what our vision for the next world looks like.

Judith Le Blanc, Native Organizers Alliance:

We are in a place and space that we’ve never been in before. The reality is, life will never go back to the way it was before, both in big and small ways. The major shift, as Naomi spoke about, is in the binary and linear narrative of rugged individualism and segregation. The coronavirus, just as the climate crisis, has ignited an awareness that what we do together in response to this crisis matters. Traditional indigenous teachings tell us that we learn from the past, the ancestors, and walk in the present with our future and our descendents in mind, always guided by our values, spirituality, and beliefs. The present brings together those two moments in time. Bargaining for the Common Good will now be defined by the pandemic. The strategy can utilize this interruption, this moment we are in, the present, to interrupt the dominant narrative of rugged individualism. Build labor and community partnership, transformative system change. 

Saqib Bhatti, Action Center on Race and the Economy:

Political and economic power in the United States has been hyper concentrated in the hands of a few corporations, wealthy individuals, and billionaires. When we fight to improve our communities, we find ourselves up against some of the most powerful people on the planet. This reality creates an opportunity as well. With this concentration at the top, the same small set of people and corporations that are driving and profiting from many forms of injustice in our communities. The same folks that are fueling gentrification in our neighborhoods are also defunding public education, polluting our neighborhoods, profiting from predatory lending, and propping up a racist criminal justice system. And so enter Bargaining for the Common Good, BCG. BCG is ultimately about bringing together concentrated community and labor power on a common set of corporate villains that are standing in the way of the changes we want to see in our communities and our workplaces.