Work, labour and greening the economy (WAGE)

A green shift requires societies across the world to transition from high-emitting, fossil-based energy regimes to low-carbon technologies. Emissions from petroleum and the petroleum industry represent the biggest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the global economy, and countries like Norway, Nigeria, USA and Canada have based much of their economic growth on oil and gas.

The WAGE project and WAGESTORIES seeks to examine how oil workers assess their own role in a green transformation.

The research project WAGE

Oil workers, long seen as champions of economic development, was framed as part of the problem in the climate debate, rather than as part of the solution. In public discourse, there is a tendency to portray the green shift as a trade-off between jobs and sustainable emission levels.

Such portrayals spur resistance and resentment from organized petroleum workers. WAGE has a different point of entry. WAGE attempts to spark conversations around the role of unions, and how oil workers’ skills and competencies can be harnessed to accelerate a green shift. This entails oil workers who view themselves as relevant actors in a transition, as professionals, as union members and as representatives of these workers.

In addition, the project investigates how different pathways affect solidarity within the union movement and between trade unions and environmental actors.

We will also explore media representations of oil workers and the "jobs vs. environment dilemma". The project will shed light on oil workers' identity formation in the climate debate through qualitative methods, including focus groups, interviews, and document and media analysis.

WAGE is an inter-disciplinary project, and its empirical research on oil workers informs, and are informed by, theoretical concepts and debates, including hegemony in media studies, labour agency in human geography, the concept of alienation, as well as a broad debate within social sciences on the relevance of “greening work”, “climate jobs” and “green skills” in a just transition.

The documentary project WAGESTORIES

In 2020, the WAGE project was awarded a second grant from the SAMKUL programme of the Research Council of Norway for the project WAGESTORIES.

The researcher team in WAGE collaborates with the Media Section at Oslo Metropolitan University to develop a documentary project provisionally titled “The Climate Struggle of Oil Workers”, and we have developed four short videos.

Fafo's role: Camilla Houeland had a three-year postdoc in WAGE, where she was part of the focus group study in Norway, responsible for the Nigeria-study and she contributed to WAGESTORIES. At Fafo, she continues dissemination from the research as well as the documentary project.

For more information, see the project webpage at the University of Oslo.