According to the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, 76% of Canadian small-business owners plan to exit their businesses in the next decade, most of them to retire. Roughly 2-trillion dollars in business assets could change hands. But only 10% of these business owners have a succession plan. Some businesses will wind down, others will be sold to management or to a third party or be bought by private equity. The scale of the shift could significantly affect the country’s business landscape and have a lasting impact on Canadian workers and communities.

After spending 25 years building Paradigm, Chartier and his business partners want to ensure that the company continues to thrive after they retire. “We didn’t want to sell to a big company or to private equity. We were concerned about all the horror stories we’ve heard about losing corporate culture,” Chartier says. “We want the company to keep going and leave it in the hands of the people that helped us make it what it is.”

The company launched an employee share ownership program in 2021, but uptake was limited because its 30- and 40-something staff’s household budgets were tied up in mortgage payments and daycare costs. And a management buyout wasn’t in the cards.

So Chartier and his partners began exploring a transition to an employee ownership trust (EOT) model. The federal government had amended the Income Tax Act in 2024 to enable EOTs and announced a temporary $10 million capital gains tax exemption for qualifying business transfers between January 2024 and December 2026 to create an incentive for business owners.

An EOT is a model in which a trust holds a company’s shares for the benefit of its employees. The employees don’t buy shares from the company; instead, in a succession scenario, the trust finances the purchase from the owner and shareholders. The owner is paid back over time instead of all at once. And employee-owners receive profit-sharing, which enables them to build wealth and equity in the company they work for. Evidence from the United States and the United Kingdom, which have both promoted the model for some time, shows that EOTs increase productivity, resilience, entrepreneurship, and employee retention and wealth. Supporters of EOTs in Canada say encouraging the model here could also keep more companies in Canadian hands.

“It really made perfect sense for our company,” Chartier says. “It aligned with our philosophy of employee ownership, our business size and what we anticipated our value to be.” Paradigm fully transitioned into an EOT on January 1, 2026. “The tax exemption was a huge benefit and allowed us to close the gap between what we would’ve gotten on the market and what we were able to sell it to the trust for.”

Employee ownership trusts in Canada

Paradigm is one of a handful of EOTs in Canada. Friesens, a book printer based in Altona, Manitoba, was a pioneer in employee ownership in Canada and has been employee-owned since 2010. Grantbook, a strategic tech consultancy, was the first company to become an EOT under the current model in January 2025. In September 2025, Taproot Community Support Services, a 41-year-old B.C.-based company that employs 750 people, became Canada’s largest EOT.

Momentum has been building since the federal legislation took effect in 2024. Tiara Letourneau of Rewrite Capital, a firm that helps companies make the EOT transition, says that more than 80 businesses have approached her to explore the possibility. Transitions can take anywhere from one to two years, depending on the firm. Justine Janssen, interim executive director at Employee Ownership Canada (EOC), says they expect that the number of EOTs across Canada will rise to between 20 and 30 by the end of 2026. “What’s true now that wasn’t true when we started is that there’s a much bigger understanding in Canada about the importance of owning our assets and what that means for economic sovereignty and the overall wealth and strength of the nation,” Janssen says.

Letourneau believes there is urgency in keeping Canadian companies in Canadian hands and believes EOTS could encourage economic activity to flourish in local areas. “Who owns businesses matters,” she says. “If a huge number of our mid-market companies end up being just about the numbers, not about the people, the community or the services they provide, we’re going to change the landscape of what it feels like to be an employee, a consumer and a community member all across this country.”

Supporters of EOTs say the key to unlocking more transitions is to remove the time limit and cap on the tax exemption and to broaden eligibility and who can access those incentives. In the United Kingdom, which introduced EOTs in 2014 and offered a complete and unlimited capital gains tax exemption to business owners selling to an EOT until 2025, the number of employee-owned businesses grew to 2,470 by mid-2025. In the United States, where employee ownership has been a model since the 1970s and where business owners can access a capital gains tax deferral, there are more than 6,500 employee-owned businesses.

However, the future of EOTs – and of those dozens of interested Canadian companies – became more uncertain in November 2025 when the Liberal government presented a federal budget that did not extend the capital gains tax exemption beyond the end of 2026.

“I’ve been getting messages from owners who have been looking at the EOTs and who have to now put that on pause because they won’t be able to get [the transition] done in time,” says Jon Shell, chair of Social Capital Partners, a non-profit that has led the charge on encouraging EOTs in Canada. “Now we’re all holding our breath [until the April 2026 economic statement] because that will determine the path of employee ownership in Canada.”

Watchers have speculated about the reasons the government didn’t jump on what some consider an easy win that would cost taxpayers little and would have provided a good-news story for Canadian-owned businesses at a time when they’re in short supply. Maybe the issue got lost in the shuffle of the big-ticket items in the Liberals’ long-awaited budget. Maybe the Department of Finance opted to be fiscally prudent about reductions to tax revenue at a time of economic uncertainty. Or maybe the government chose to defer the decision until closer to the December 2026 end date. Whatever the reason, many fear that the lack of clarity will slow momentum at a time of significant transition for Canadian businesses.

“It has probably put sand in the gears of EOT conversions and will delay any early momentum there was towards EOTs, which I think is quite regrettable because it’s a no-brainer,” says former Alberta premier Jason Kenney, a proponent of EOTs. “It has all the parties’ support, and it aligns perfectly with the government’s strategy of strengthening the Canadian economy and retaining capital in Canada.”

How EOTs build wealth and engagement

Andrew Achoba has been working at Taproot Community Support Services for more than seven years, running family support programs in northern Alberta. When Taproot transitioned to an EOT in fall 2025, Achoba became a trustee. He and Taproot’s two other trustees represent the interests of the company’s 750 employee-owners, working with leadership to ensure the sound management of the company.

Achoba says he often gets questions from friends who can’t believe he became an employee-owner without having to make a financial investment. He believes EOTs are an important vehicle for employee wealth-building at a time of increasing economic precarity – especially for those earning hourly wages or in lower salary brackets. “We’re seeing the price of things go up and the affordability rate going down. Any extra money that can go to the individuals doing the hard work, I think, is important.”

A 2025 Harvard Business School report, The Possibilities of Worker Ownership, cited a 2017 finding from the National Center for Employee Ownership (NCEO) that employee-owners in the United States reported 92% more wealth than people working in non-employee-owned businesses. In the United Kingdom, a report found that employee-owned businesses were 8% to 12% more productive than comparable businesses, and regional studies showed that EOTs are more stable in downturns and report fewer layoffs. There is also evidence that EOTs can encourage greater business skills development, deepen employees’ commitment to the business and expand entrepreneurship.

Achoba is seeing some changes firsthand. “We’re seeing a very high level of ownership among staff now. People are more responsible because they have a collective vision for the agency.”

Prior to becoming an EOT, Taproot was owned by a small group of about 30 shareholders, many of them former employees who had retired and wanted to sell their shares. CEO Michael Fotheringham says leadership explored several models, including selling to a third party, a management buyout and expanding its ESOP model beyond the current owners. The EOT model was the simplest option and the one most aligned with the company’s values. The capital gains tax exemption was a key factor in the company’s decision to move forward.

In Taproot’s model, every employee has an equal ownership share in the company. “Now, when I meet with my employees, they’re my owners, so I have this built-in check and balance every day,” Fotheringham says. “That changes some of the traditional dynamics that I think need to change anyway. It‘s a democratization of the workplace, so to speak.”

At a time when all eyes are on how Canada will respond to economic and political headwinds it faces, proponents of EOTs hope that leaders will consider the potential of employee ownership and the importance of small- and medium-sized businesses to building individual, community and national economic strength and vibrancy.

“I don’t want us to wake up in Canada a decade from now and find that we’ve watched a hollowing out of what’s left of our industrial heartland because we were unwilling to be creative and ambitious about solutions like this,” Kenney says.

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Before the Biden administration could finalize the rule, Donald Trump was re-elected president, ushering in another era of deregulation. Earlier this month, the Trump administration announced plans to revise or repeal 63 workplace regulations that Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer said “stifle growth and limit opportunity.”

OSHA’s heat-stress rule wasn’t among them. And though the new administration has the power to withdraw the draft regulation, it hasn’t. Instead, OSHA has continued to move it forward: the agency is currently in the middle of soliciting input from the general public about the proposed policy. Some labour experts say that this process, typically bureaucratic and onerous even in the absence of political interference, is moving along faster than expected – perhaps a sign that civil servants at OSHA feel a true sense of urgency to protect vulnerable workers from heat stress as yearly temperatures set record after record.

But labour advocacy groups focused on workers along the food supply chain – many of whom work outside, like farmworkers, or in poorly ventilated spaces, like warehouse and meat-processing facilities – say workers have waited too long for basic life-saving protections. Earlier this month, Senator Alex Padilla and Congresswoman Judy Chu, both from California, reintroduced a bill to Congress that, if passed, would direct OSHA to enact a federal heat standard for workers swiftly.

It’s a largely symbolic move, as the rulemaking process is already underway, and the legislation is unlikely to advance in a Republican-controlled Congress. But the bill signals that Democratic lawmakers are watching closely and urgently expect a final rule four years after OSHA first began drafting its proposed rule. The message is clear: however fast OSHA is moving, it hasn’t been enough to protect workers from the worst impacts of climate change. “Since OSHA started its heat-stress rulemaking in 2021, over 144 lives have been lost to heat-related hazards,” Padilla said in a statement emailed to Grist. “We know how to prevent heat-related illnesses to ensure that these family members are able to come home at the end of their shift.”

The lawmaker added that the issue is “a matter of life or death.”

Heat is the deadliest form of extreme weather, according to the World Health Organization. In the United States, the Environmental Protection Agency estimates that 986 workers died from heat exposure on the job from 1992 to 2022, or about 34 per year.

This is very likely an undercount. Prolonged heat exposure can exacerbate underlying health problems like cardiovascular issues, making it difficult for medical professionals to discern when illness and death is attributable to extreme heat. As heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions continue to push global temperatures higher, experts expect heat-related illnesses and deaths to follow.

The life-threatening impacts of exposure to extreme heat in the workplace have been on the federal government’s radar for more than 50 years. Labour unions and farmworkers have long pushed for federal and local heat standards. In 2006, California became the first state to enact its own heat protections for outdoor workers, after an investigation by the state’s Division of Occupational Safety and Health found 46 cases of heat-related illnesses the year prior. Legislative efforts to protect workers or nudge OSHA along often follow or name farmworkers who died from heat stress. Padilla and Chu’s bill from this year is named after Asunción Valdivia, a 53-year-old who died in California in 2004 after picking grapes for 10 hours straight in 105°F heat.

OSHA’s proposed heat standard would require employers to establish plans to avoid and monitor for signs of heat illness and to help new hires acclimate to working in high heat. “That should be implemented yesterday,” says Nichelle Harriott, policy director of HEAL (Health, Environment, Agriculture, Labor) Food Alliance, a national coalition of food and farmworkers. “There really is no cause for this to be taking as long as it has.”

In late June and early July, OSHA held virtual hearings in which it heard testimony from people both for and against a federal heat standard. According to Anastasia Christman, a senior policy analyst from the National Employment Law Project who attended the hearings, employees from the agency seemed engaged and asked substantive questions. “It was very informative,” she says. OSHA didn’t respond to Grist’s request for comment.

As written, OSHA’s proposed heat rule would apply to about 36 million workers in the United States. Christman notes that sedentary workers – those who sit for most of the work day – are currently excluded from the federal standard. Ironically, at one point during the agency’s hearings, participants had to take an unscheduled break after the air conditioning stopped working in the Department of Labor building where OSHA staff were sitting. “They had to be evacuated because it was too hot to sit there and be on a Zoom call,” Christman says. She estimates that if sedentary workers were non-exempt, the number of U.S. workers covered by the rule would nearly double to 66 million.

From her point of view, OSHA is moving “very fast on this – for OSHA.” But Christman acknowledges that, even in a best-case scenario, regulations would not be on the books for another 12 to 14 months. At that point, OSHA would publish guidance for employers on how to comply with the regulation, as well as respond to any legal challenges to the final rule. That process, “in an optimistic world,” she says, could take between two and four years.

The life-threatening impacts of exposure to extreme heat in the workplace have been on the federal government’s radar for more than 50 years.

For many farmworkers, as well as other workers along the food supply chain, that’s too long to wait. “For decades, millions of workers have been waiting for federal heat standards that never came,” says Oscar Londoño, co-executive director of WeCount, a member-led immigrant rights organization based in South Florida.

The group has spearheaded multiple campaigns to draw public attention to how sweltering temperatures affect outdoor workers in the region, including plant nursery workers. Londoño says that some agricultural workers have told WeCount it already feels like the hottest summer of their lifetime.

In response to the news of Padilla and Chu’s bill, Londoño says, “We appreciate any step by a lawmaker trying to protect workers, especially as we’re seeing, once again, a record-breaking summer.” But he cast doubt on OSHA’s ability to enforce regulations around heat stress, particularly in the agricultural sector. “We know that there are employers across the country who are routinely violating the laws that already exist,” he says. “And so adding on new laws and regulations that we do need doesn’t automatically mean that workers will be protected.”

WeCount’s organizing is hampered by Florida’s Republican governor and state legislature, which passed a law last year prohibiting local governments from enacting their own heat standards. In the absence of politicians who will stand for workers, WeCount members are trying to publicize the risks that agricultural workers take on. Their latest campaign, Planting Justice, centres on local plant nursery workers, who grow indoor houseplants.

The goal is to try to educate consumers about the labour that goes into providing their monsteras, pothos, snake plants and other indoor houseplants. “If you buy indoor houseplants, it’s very possible that that plant came from workers in Florida,” Londoño says, “workers who are being denied water, shade and rest breaks by working in record-breaking heat, including 90- or 100-degree heat temperatures.”

Down the line, the nursery workers hope to solidify a set of demands and bring those concerns to companies like Home Depot and Lowe’s that sit at the top of the indoor-plant supply chain. Similar tactics have worked for agricultural workers in other sectors; the Fair Food Program, first established by tomato pickers in 2011 in Florida, has won stringent heat protections for farmworkers in part by building strong support for labourers’ demands among consumers.

“Right now we are looking at every possible solution or strategy that can help workers reach these protections,” Londoño says. “What workers actually need is a guarantee that every single day they’ll be able to go to work and return home alive.” This kind of worker-led organizing will continue, he says, whether or not OSHA delivers its own heat standard.

This article originally appeared in Grist. It has been edited to conform with Corporate Knights style. Grist is a non-profit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at grist.org.

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As CEO, Lütke positions Shopify as a positive force in society, enabling individuals and small businesses to trade globally. But success breeds challenges – and tough choices. In 2017, Shopify was criticized for hosting an online store for Breitbart, the right-wing news channel that has promulgated racist and sexist tropes. Lütke defended his client’s free speech rights, calling commerce “a powerful form of expression.” 

As social tensions rose over the years, Lütke seemingly grew less tolerant. In 2021, a noose emoji that had been uploaded to the company’s internal Slack channel sparked a heated debate among staff – until Lütke cut off the conversation, arguing that such talk represents “victimhood thinking” and “threatens” the effective workplace. 

Donald Trump’s election win in November marked a turning point for businesses that have struggled with diversity and freedom of speech, which now felt free to follow Trump’s lead. Shopify, which powers 12% of U.S. e-commerce, met the moment in mid-January by closing its four-year-old support program for Indigenous entrepreneurs. At the same time, members of Shopify’s equitable commerce team left the company, without explanation. Days later, Shopify shuttered a similar program, its ambitious One Million Black Businesses initiative, intended to help a million Black-owned businesses in Canada and the United States launch, grow and scale up by 2030. On February 1, Shopify abruptly shut down the Slack channel that enabled program participants to stay in touch with each other. (Shopify did not comment on the closures, and its former head of equitable commerce did not respond to queries from Corporate Knights.) 

Lütke’s X account documents his shift toward right-wing politics, with standard promotional content about Shopify, artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency increasingly giving way to endorsing Trump’s tariff threats, conservative culture-war talking points, and DOGE’s chainsaw approach to slashing the size of government.

But opposition is mounting. In late February, nearly 400 Canadian tech leaders signed an open letter condemning Shopify’s cutbacks. The signees urged other tech companies to continue to protect equity and inclusion: “The future of our industry – and our country – depends on defending what makes us different.”

The post How Shopify went from Canada’s tech darling to anti-DEI appeared first on Corporate Knights.

The next day, the president extended his purge into the private sector. A second executive order compelled government agencies to certify that organizations receiving grants or contracts do not operate DEI programs. The directive also warned private companies and colleges against maintaining “illegal DEI programs,” presumably referring to a 2023 Supreme Court decision that found colleges’ race-based admissions programs unconstitutional.

Even as the American Civil Liberties Union protested that DEI policies “helped dismantle entrenched race and sex segregation in high-paying industries,” thousands of civil servants were losing their jobs, and companies such as Google, Walmart and McDonald’s started erasing formal DEI policies. 

But some companies stood strong. Delta Airlines said DEI values “are critical to our business.” Soap-maker Lush introduced three new bath bombs: Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. 

The most prominent stalwart was probably Seattle retail giant Costco Wholesale, whose board voted down a proposal from a right-wing think tank to research the “risks” of maintaining its DEI program. The board said “our commitment to an enterprise rooted in respect and inclusion is appropriate and necessary.”

With its motto “Do the right thing,” America’s third-largest retailer has always been an outlier. Founder James Sinegal believes businesses succeed by doing well by their employees. “We’re proud that Costco pays the highest wages among our peers, that we provide benefit and health-care packages that are second to none, and that we’ve grown our business by promoting from within,” he said in 2012.

Three days after Trump’s executive order, chair Tony E. James said Costco’s commitment to inclusion “has never included quotas or systematic preferences, nor does it mean compromising merit. The demands of our business and our steadfast commitment to serve our members mean that we cannot afford to do anything but hire and promote the most qualified individuals.”

Four days later, 19 Republican state attorneys-general wrote a warning letter chastising Costco for “doubling down” on DEI in defiance of federal and state laws. While this story isn’t over, Costco’s stance earned it a 22% increase in online traffic on February 28, the day of a consumer boycott in support of DEI. That day, competitors Walmart, Amazon and Target all saw traffic declines.

The post Fighting back against anti-DEI attacks brings rewards. Just look at Costco. appeared first on Corporate Knights.

“There is an antidote to doom and despair,” the architect of the landmark 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change posted. “It’s action on the ground, and it’s happening in all corners of the Earth.”

Now a decade since Christiana Figueres accomplished the Herculean task of getting 196 countries to put their differences aside and adopt the accord, the former United Nations climate chief and long-time Costa Rican diplomat remains deeply attuned to the emotional toll the climate crisis has taken on those advocating for action. “The pain of the climate communities is at an all-time high,” she tells Corporate Knights on a call from her coastal home in the Guanacaste province of northwestern Costa Rica. She knows their climate anxiety well. “I used to wake up every single morning with an alarm clock ringing in my gut, because scientists are screaming from the rooftops that we have deadlines right in front of us . . . and we all know we are running out of time.” 

That “pre-traumatic stress disorder,” as she calls it, is only intensifying as administrations in the United States, Argentina and even the green poster child of Costa Rica brandish chainsaws to climate regulations, while Trump is “breaking the very bones of society.” And yet somehow, Figueres manages her trademark mix of “outrage and optimism” (which, by the way, is the name of her popular climate change podcast) from a much more Zen space. Now she’s working on sharing her secret to alchemizing our collective pain into personal and planetary resilience with thousands of climate leaders, at a time when they need it most. 

By the time Figueres took on the role of executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change in 2010, she had been working as a diplomat, renewable-energy advocate and international climate negotiator for three decades. Figueres was in the thick of dealing with the pressures of preparing for the Paris Agreement in 2013 when “out of the clear blue sky” her 25-year marriage fell apart. Overwhelmed by grief, she was wracked with suicidal thoughts, until, she says, she discovered the teachings of Zen master and long-time peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh. “It was really – I mean literally – a lifesaver for me.”

She remembers reading and re-reading his calligraphy that said “The tears of yesterday have become rain.” “Slowly I began to understand that I had a choice about the pain that was overwhelming me.” That pain could become the “chrysalis for learning and growth,” she explains – “the mud needed for a lotus to grow.”

Hanh was known as the “father of mindfulness” in the West, but to Figueres, he soon became her spiritual father, without whom, she says, the Paris Agreement may not have happened. For those keeping count, that gives Figueres two high-profile dads. Her birth father, José Figueres, was equally formative in shaping her brand of climate diplomacy: the coffee grower turned revolution leader served three elected terms as president of Costa Rica and is considered the founder of the Central American nation’s democracy.

Is the energy that I bring to myself, to others, to this work stemming from grief, pain and despair, or am I transitioning my energy to one that stems from love and care?

— Christiana Figueres, co-founder, Global Optimism, and former UN climate chief

Before the 95-year-old monk’s death in 2022, Figueres had begun working with the monastics at Plum Village, Hanh’s global community of mindfulness centres/Buddhist monasteries, to share his teachings, through week-long meditation retreats for leaders in the climate and biodiversity space and a seven-week online course for broader reach. During Zen and the Art of Saving the Planet (ZASP), the virtual course based on Hanh’s bestselling book of the same name, a dozen monks, nuns and Zen community leaders – including Figueres – led a cohort of 1,400 participants from 70 nations through a tumultuous fall season. 

ZASP students – myself among them – ranged from activists and scientists to sustainable business consultants and concerned citizens. We were shown a number of daily practices to ground our nervous systems, including mindful breathing and walking. But the teachings go beyond the usual mindfulness techniques that have burgeoned on meditation apps for the last decade. Daily talks and short meditations are designed to cultivate a deep reverence for and sense of interconnection or “interbeing” with the earth, an approach that was quintessential to Hanh, who was exiled from Vietnam for his activism during the war. At Plum Village, Europe’s largest Buddhist monastery, Hanh established his own brand of “engaged Buddhism” rooted in caring for the earth. It’s not just about quieting the mind; the course encourages us to slow down to cultivate the mindset, openness and understanding needed to work collaboratively to address the climate crisis.

Getting out of our judgment box

At the course’s first sharing group two days after the U.S. election, participants are guided to break off into groups of four and practise deep listening – listening without interrupting or commenting. Admittedly, it’s tough not to jump in and turn it into a venting session about Trump’s win. But as Figueres has reminded us in her weekly talks, with practice, deep listening is a gift we can give loved ones and a powerful technique that can transform our work in the world. 

“What I love about the deep-listening skill that we are taught is the fact that it takes us out of our judgment box,” Figueres says. “If I’m in a conversation with anyone, my default is to bring my own prejudices, but when you enter into a conversation from that space, you already enter a dead conversation.”

Figueres confesses that during the last stretch of negotiating the Paris Agreement, she had to check her judgments at the door in conversations with governments that she disagreed with “from the bottom of my gut.” 

“That’s where it got truly challenging for me, to be able to not react immediately but rather stay with my breathing, stay with my listening skills.” Instead of preaching at them, she decided to ask them each about their history, their concerns, their aspirations. Although every country started from a different place, their realities began to merge, she explains, when they each came to the realization that “those future aspirations boil down to a stable, safe planet” – without her needing to sermonize, she adds. “Once you touch the pain or the fear that is behind people’s words and actions, then you have a rich conversation that can move you forward.”

Today, she’s teaching the technique as an antidote not just to the polarization splintering societies, but also to the divisions within environmental communities that can, at times, descend into what she calls “circular firing squads.”

“How many times do we not agree with colleagues who are also doing the utmost to address climate change? So many activists, leaders, scientists, corporates, financial institutions, all of whom are working toward the same direction of decarbonizing the economy with a different view,” she says. “If we have the space within ourselves, the inner space to have these conversations from a sincere non-judgmental perspective, we actually are able to find common ground and move forward together.”

Damned if you’re doomed

Of course, Zen has its limits. All the compassionate listening and mindful breathing in the world won’t stop Trump’s administration from smashing environmental regulations and opening the floodgates to more drilling and tree-felling. What then? Remembering that the world is bigger than the United States is key, Figueres says, and that the clean energy transition is larger than one government. “Trump is not the be all and end all of everything.”

She says to look for tectonic shifts in leadership, from states, from other countries, and from companies. “The largest companies in the United States understand that this is going to be yet another four-year hiatus in efforts to decarbonize the global economy or the U.S. economy, but that four years is not eternity – it is four years,” says Figueres, who launched a coalition of CEOs, investors, mayors, governors, scientists and youth activists last June called Mission 2025, all inviting governments to ratchet up their climate action plans.

“These companies know that they actually have to plan much longer-term than four years, and they know that decarbonizing their products and services is the only path that they can follow because that is irreversible right now.”

Her work with Mission 2025 and Plum Village, along with her Outrage + Optimism podcast and other offshoots of her Global Optimism organization, all ultimately flow into the same river: Figueres is laser-focused on sparking mindset shifts, “radical collaborations” and new narratives that foster the urgent action needed on climate change. 

It’s all part of an effort to “change the narrative in the way that I’m sharing with you now for us all not to succumb to this doomism and think that the world has come to an end,” Figueres says. 

Admittedly, some days, she does find herself overwhelmed by pain and anger, knowing that millions of people are already losing their homelands, their livelihoods to climate change. “That moral injustice is unacceptable to me.” But as painful as it is for us to hear, for instance, a growing number of climate scientists warn that the Paris Agreement’s target of limiting global warming to 1.5°C is already “deader than a doornail,” Figueres says that focusing on failure only distorts reality. “The challenge is that we humans are programmed for a negative bias; we’re wired for always being vigilant about the threats. We’re not wired to be vigilant about opportunities.”

And that, Figueres says, is our personal responsibility as climate advocates. “I don’t need to worry about not being informed of the threats. Those are a tsunami that comes at me all the time. I do need to put energy and intention on being much more mindful and conscious of positive things that are happening. That’s how I balance. And that actually is more representative of reality,” she adds, pointing to the momentum behind wind and solar energy and the rise of EVs.

No mud, no lotus

During the last week of teachings, as with every week, Figueres reminds the Zen students “why this all matters.” She challenges us to mirror the change we want to see in our work and in the world. 

“I’ve been reminding myself that yes, I do want policy changes at the level of governments and corporations, and I asked myself what policy changes am I operating with respect to my thoughts and actions? Yes, I do want to accelerate the energy transition, and therefore am I transitioning my own energy? Is the energy that I bring to myself, to others, to this work stemming from grief, pain and despair, or am I transitioning my energy to one that stems from love and care? Am I nurturing and caring for my own personal resilience so that I’m not in constant burnout mode?” 

Seven weeks into the course, my own energy feels more renewable, though some days just following breaking news can still feel like an emotional mudslide. But as Hanh would say, ‘No mud, no lotus.” 

“Lotus flowers only grow in ponds that have a muddy bottom,” Figueres tells students. “And that is the beautiful symbol of how we transform the mud in our life into lotus flowers. We can choose to be overwhelmed by all the mud ponds in our life, of which there are many, or we understand that every mud pond is precisely where the lotus flowers can grow and bloom.”

Adria Vasil is the managing editor of Corporate Knights and author of the bestselling Ecoholic book series.

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By early summer, conservative activists were targeting companies like Tractor Supply and John Deere for supporting Pride festivities and climate policies, pressuring them to roll back DEI initiatives. A domino effect followed: Harley-Davidson, Lowe’s, Ford, Toyota and Molson Coors pulled back as well. By November, Boeing had dissolved its global DEI department entirely.

This retreat comes as Donald Trump begins his second term as president of the United States, and he’s made his intentions on the topic clear: to purge DEI programs from federal agencies, calling them “anti-white racism.” With the 2023 Supreme Court’s decision to strike down affirmative action in U.S. colleges already fuelling anxieties, companies are bracing for what’s to come.

The rise and fall of DEI programs

As quickly as corporate DEI policies rose to prominence, the scaffolding of modern, resilient leadership has started fraying at the seams. What was once a surge of commitment to equity is now under relentless attack, and the stakes couldn’t be higher.

It’s a sharp pivot from 2020, a year when DEI surged into the corporate spotlight. Following the murder of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police, the Black Lives Matter movement reignited a global reckoning on racial injustice. Alongside the rise of the #MeToo movement, companies across industries made bold commitments to equity. DEI roles were created at record levels, boards diversified, and women and racialized leaders began stepping into long-overdue positions of power.

For many DEI professionals, the promise of change faded fast. As one former DEI executive in a communications agency tells Corporate Knights, asking not to be named,“We were hired to lead change, but it quickly became clear that leadership wanted optics, not transformation. You can’t drive systemic change when you’re treated like a checkbox.”

This performative approach – treating DEI as a PR move rather than a foundational pillar in corporate strategy – permeated corporate culture, leaving companies exposed. When the backlash hit, those commitments crumbled under pressure, revealing just how fragile their so-called progress really was.

The anti-equity movement has been emboldened by figures like Robby Starbuck, labelled by The New York Times as the “anti-DEI agitator that big companies fear the most.” His mission is explicit: “I won’t rest until we eliminate leftism from corporate America.” Starbuck, a former music-video director turned conservative activist, and others portray DEI not as a corrective framework but as a divisive ideology, rallying around a call for “neutrality.”

We will continue to focus on increasing representation.

– Dawn Jones, chief diversity and inclusion officer, Intel

But let’s be clear: neutrality is a privilege. It upholds the existing system of exclusion and inequality, allowing companies to disengage from meaningful change under the guise of impartiality.

The narrative shift has been amplified by the Supreme Court’s ruling on affirmative action. The court’s decision, which interprets the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution, applies specifically to public and private colleges that receive federal funds. It doesn’t apply to private and public corporations.

Race-based employment decisions, like reserving hiring slots for racialized candidates, were already illegal under Title VII. of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a federal law that prohibits discrimination in employment based on race, colour, religion, sex or national origin. In states like California, where Proposition 209 has banned race-based affirmative action in state university admission, state hiring and state congracting for nearly three decades, companies have continued their DEI programs without legal challenges.

What’s changed isn’t the legality of DEI – it’s the story being told about it. By retreating from DEI, companies aren’t avoiding legal headaches; they’re choosing a side. They’re aligning with a status quo built on exclusion, sending a message that inclusion is expendable when it’s inconvenient.

But the economy itself isn’t leaning toward exclusion; it’s hurtling away from it. Gen Z – poised to become the largest working demographic – prioritizes DEI so strongly that one in two won’t work at a company without diverse leadership, and 68% believe employers aren’t doing enough to foster diversity, according to ManpowerGroup, a multinational recruitment agency.

DEI isn’t about optics – it’s about survival

CEOs who treat DEI as window dressing – a splash of colour for their press releases and LinkedIn feeds – are fundamentally missing the point. In today’s polarized market, DEI isn’t a political statement; it’s a business survival strategy.

The data is clear: companies that invest in DEI outperform their peers in innovation, customer loyalty and market relevance. A 2015 McKinsey report on 366 public companies found that those in the top quartile for ethnic and racial diversity in management were 35% more likely to have financial returns above their industry mean. But DEI works only when it’s embedded into the foundation of an organization. When it’s treated as an afterthought, it collapses under the weight of scrutiny.

True resilience demands more than lip service. It’s more than one-off initiatives or employee resource groups tucked into a dusty corner of the HR department. Resilience comes from a culture of inclusion that runs so deep it holds firm through economic downturns, political headwinds and shareholder pressures. Companies that understand this know that a successful DEI strategy isn’t cosmetic; it’s rooted in long-term commitment and integrated into every aspect of the business.

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In a landscape where many are retreating from DEI, some companies have stood as beacons of resilience. Intel first launched a US$300-million Diversity in Technology initiative in 2015 aimed at doubling the number of women and underrepresented communities in technical roles. Despite cutting 15% of its workforce in August, Intel retained its vaunted commitment to DEI and continued to prioritize an inclusive culture.

“We will continue to focus on increasing representation,” the company’s chief diversity and inclusion officer, Dawn Jones, said in September. (Whether that commitment holds now that Intel forced out its CEO in December remains to be seen.)

Outside of the United States, where DEI is less contentious, South Africa’s Investec Bank as well as Vitasoy, Unilever and StarHub have been recognized by Corporate Knights’ 2025 Global 100 ranking for their racially diverse leadership, demonstrating that embedding DEI into corporate strategies drives innovation and sustainable growth.

This isn’t about “virtue signalling” or appeasing critics. Real DEI work – transformative DEI work – upends traditional corporate structures and power balances. It’s uncomfortable by design, made to challenge ingrained biases, to question privilege and to open doors where they’ve historically been closed. Leaders committed to this work know that resistance is part of the journey.

Here’s how corporate leaders can establish a DEI framework that lasts:

1. Make DEI part of the business, not just the brand

DEI shouldn’t just be a side hustle for HR and marketing departments. It has to be integral to how your company operates. Heineken’s Women in Sales program offers a compelling example. Sales isn’t a peripheral department – it drives revenue and growth. Despite 24% of women in the overall company, only 9% of the senior sales roles were occupied by women in 2020. By increasing women senior managers in sales from 9% in 2020 to 19% in 2022, Heineken began aligning its leadership with the shifting demographics of its consumers, as women begin to outnumber men as alcohol consumers.

2. Build enduring DEI infrastructure

DEI efforts fall apart when they lack accountability and follow-through. Real progress requires systems to track and measure impact. Set goals for diversity in hiring and promotions and regularly assess whether you’re meeting them. Ongoing training – tailored to challenge biases and promote equity – is key. A company’s commitment to DEI can’t stop at entry-level hires; it has to be a ladder, not a revolving door.

3. Dig deep to make real gains

In a world where visibility can make you a target, DEI doesn’t need to be loud to be effective. Dig into internal issues that drive inequity: pay gaps, lack of diversity in leadership, inequitable promotion practices or a toxic workplace culture. Real benefits are the initiatives that directly improve employees’ lives: fair wages, comprehensive healthcare, flexible working options and robust support for mental health and well-being. These aren’t social media wins; they’re the hard-won gains that position you for lasting relevance.

As we 2025 begins, the call for DEI isn’t fading into the background. The question isn’t whether DEI is worth the risk; it’s whether your company can afford to ignore it. Real leadership won’t be measured by who avoids backlash or sidesteps discomfort. It will be measured by who builds for the future while others retreat to the past.

Shilpa Tiwari is an ESG consultant and the founder of No Women No Spice. She lives in Tanzania and Toronto. 

The post Just because Trump wants to kill DEI doesn’t mean CEOs should appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Based on data from more than a billion members in 43 countries, LinkedIn’s 2024 Global Green Skills Report projects that a full half of the jobs required by the green economy in 2050 will lack qualified candidates. “This data is a wake-up call, and there’s no more time to hit the snooze button,” says Sue Duke, LinkedIn’s vice president of public policy.

The study says that global demand for green talent is currently growing nearly twice as fast as supply, with demand increasing by 11.6% and supply by just 5.6%. The industries stocking up fastest on green expertise are utilities (23% of their job postings require green skills), construction (20.6%) and manufacturing (13%). Last year, demand for green skills grew most in the technology industry, where the energy appetite of artificial intelligence has led to a 60% surge in the share of jobs requiring green skills.

The study lends details and urgency to a transition that’s already been talked to death. A November 2024 blog post from the Smart Prosperity Institute warned that “Canada’s success depends on investing more in green jobs and skills.” Representing business, a Conference Board of Canada report called Teaching Green Skills, released in August 2024, found that Canada’s colleges and universities face grave challenges meeting the demand, including a lack of administrative focus, ongoing disconnects with employers, funding constraints and a shortage of advocates who could drive system change.

A giant advantage for green job seekers

LinkedIn’s deep data offers one positive indicator that could help move the needle. If green upskilling is to succeed, it has to start with talented job seekers wanting to learn complex new skills. Here’s their incentive: LinkedIn’s data finds that the hiring rate for green talent globally is 55% higher than for the general business population. In the United States, that advantage is actually 80% – at least it has been under the Biden administration.

The study found that government policy is a big driver of the green skills revolution. President Joe Biden’s infrastructure-building policies, especially the Inflation Reduction Act, have helped produce an 80-times boost in the share of U.S. workers with building-performance skills, LinkedIn notes. Progress is likely to continue at the state level. And while Trump has vowed to repeal the IRA, calling support for electric cars and wind power “the new green scam,” even the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which opposed the IRA under Biden, now says it will defend parts of it. Some 85% of IRA investment funds have gone to Republican states, which will be loath to turn off the taps.

North of the border, building the green skills ecosystem will require a “team Canada” approach in which business, labour, government and educational institutions bury their differences and partner up to get things done – locally, regionally and nationally. Entire industries, from energy and forest products to plumbing and risk management, will have to be re-engineered. Business and post-secondary schools have to work together to create curricula, get more people trained and find the best ways to retrain older workers.

But there’s a bright green light at the end of this tunnel. “We see this as a great opportunity,” says Hem Dholakia, a senior research associate at the Smart Prosperity Institute in Ottawa. The challenges of building these new educational links – consensus-building, creativity and communication – are the same skills required for the energy transition. If Canada can accelerate these twin transitions, Dholakia says it will build an international edge that will make the country a magnet for foreign capital once again. “By putting in the building blocks of a skilled and inclusive workforce, we would be setting ourselves up for long-term economic growth.”

Of course, if Trump goes ahead with his recent threat to impose a 25% tariff on Canadian goods, Canada’s economy could tumble into an immediate recession that would throw off every economic forecast. Even so, that would be all the more reason for Canada to double down on the green economy and focus on international markets.

The post Green jobs are abundant. Green workers are not. appeared first on Corporate Knights.

DuPont may have hired her in the hopes of boosting its troubled environmental image, but in her 12 years with the corporation, Fisher surprised many by bringing in changes that led to notable reductions in pollution. She pushed executives to see climate issues not just as an emissions problem, but as the source of new business opportunities through innovations in sustainable materials and processes, such as producing ethanol from plant waste and reducing the volatile organic compounds in paints. As executive vice-president James Collins said at the time, “Under Linda’s leadership, DuPont announced its first set of market-facing sustainability goals in 2006, tying how we invest in R&D and grow revenue with sustainability in mind.”

Fisher’s personal rise from simply tweaking the supply chain to resetting corporate strategy became emblematic of the growth of the CSO position itself – in sheer numbers and in increasing clout. Where sustainability efforts were initially thought to belong on the soft side of business, somewhere between human resources, marketing and communications, and health and safety, companies are now recognizing that CSOs do their best work at the top of the organization, working closely with the heavy hitters in finance, operations and strategy, and even the CEO and the board of directors.

“The role of the CSO is evolving. The CSO is taking centre stage,” says Prathmesh Raichura, KPMG Canada’s national ESG governance leader. “Besides taking an active role in identifying ESG-related risks, they’re identifying the levers for reducing greenhouse gas production.”

“They’re talking to the investor community, they’re collaborating with the [chief financial officer], aligning with the CEO’s goals, and communicating with the board,” Raichura adds. “We’re seeing the CSOs becoming more and more important and more integrated with their organizations’ financial performance.”

CSOs’ central role is likely to only grow. As more organizations grapple with reducing their Scope 3 emissions, up and down their supply chains, CSOs will be more responsible than ever for creatively collaborating with suppliers, customers and end users. The relationships they manage, built on mutual needs and opportunities, will reshape industries.

Raichura, who has worked in the ESG (environmental, social, governance) area for two decades, says most organizations first engage with sustainability as a box-checking exercise. It takes time for them to see “soft” sectors such as climate regulation, diversity and community as sources of business growth. “Compliance and risk still play an important role, but we see CSOs increasingly take more responsibility for value creation.”

At first, only a few visionaries could see the potential in building ESG into their business plans. U.S. outdoor clothing producer Patagonia made sustainability core to its brand, promoting recycled and organic materials, supporting fair trade practices, and actively advocating for environmental causes.

By 2010, household products giant Unilever had developed a “Sustainable Living Plan” geared to reducing the company’s environmental footprint. The 10-year plan cut carbon dioxide production in Unilever’s manufacturing by 75% and reduced manufacturing waste by 96%.

As a Deloitte study pointed out in 2021, “In a world where the speed, volume and complexity of change can threaten to throw organizations off their stride, there is a pressing need for strategic thinkers who can clarify the issues at stake, mobilize their colleagues and orchestrate purposeful change.” In many cases, Deloitte found, “the CSO is emerging as the ‘sense-maker in chief’ in the organization.”

“My role is to purposely not fit in. My role is to bring change into the company.”
—Alanna Boyd, chief sustainability officer, Sun Life Financial

Sense-makers are in high demand. Weinreb Group – a San Francisco–based, woman-owned recruiting agency specializing in ESG professionals – published its first CSO survey in 2011, when just 29 U.S. public companies employed CSOs. As of 2023, Weinreb found that 183 U.S. public companies have CSOs, and, its founder Ellen Weinreb noted, “CSOs are gaining substantial power and influence, which means the country’s most prominent companies are better positioned to rise to the challenge of growing social and environmental issues.”

There is no single model for a successful CSO. Some juggle many responsibilities but have no direct reports and little influence, while others run professional departments and hobnob regularly with top executives. Studies show that organizations get the best results when they set up their CSOs to succeed – by giving them clear mandates and having them report directly to the CEO.

One way to speed things up is to make the CEO the CSO – or vice versa. Global retailer H&M made news in 2020 when it promoted its former head of sustainability, Helena Helmersson, to CEO – replacing the founder’s grandson. In her sustainability portfolio, Helmersson led the company’s commitment to using organic cotton and recycled textiles and phasing out hazardous chemicals in production. As CEO, she sees her job as embedding sustainability throughout the company, which aims to reduce emissions by 56% by 2030 – a big challenge for a fast-fashion brand. In 2023, she was named co-chair of The Fashion Pact, a global alliance aiming to make the industry carbon-neutral.

At Ikea, each country CEO also wears the CSO hat. “Sustainability is core to our product development, to our operations and to our people agenda,” says Selwyn Crittendon, the recently appointed CEO/CSO for Canada. In an email interview with Corporate Knights, Crittendon explains that the dual role ensures that “in the Ikea spirit of togetherness, we’re all pulling in the same direction.”

Ikea’s sustainability is wide-ranging. “Operationally, we’re focused on transforming into a circular business, becoming climate-positive and regenerating resources while growing our business,” Crittendon says. At Ikea, sustainability is everybody’s business, he says, and “sustainability measurements are included in every unit’s performance scorecard,” though the company does not have a mandatory sustainability-linked bonus model.

Not that having a high-ranked CSO means a company has a flawless environmental record. In 2022, the Netherlands Authority for Consumers and Markets forced H&M to remove its green “Conscious” and “Conscious Choice” tags from clothing until it can comply with relevant rules and regulations. Also in 2022, a Romanian non-profit filed a complaint against Ikea, alleging that the company was “clear-cutting without a permit and without an environmental impact assessment in an Ikea-owned old-growth forest.” Ikea’s third-party auditor, Forest Stewardship Council, denied Ikea was breaking any rules.

One good thing about the improvisational approach to the CSO function is the opportunity to bring new voices into the executive suite. “In my 20s, my question was where can I have impact?” says Alanna Boyd, who studied political science and international development while volunteering with Oxfam and an intercultural development program in Bolivia. After stints in government advising on trade and finance, and then working on global social issues with Barrick Gold, she joined Sun Life Financial in 2016 as vice-president of government relations, regulatory affairs and sustainability. Being a bigwig in finance “never entered my mind,” she says, but in 2021 she was named senior vice-president and CSO.

Impact came naturally to Boyd. At first, she oversaw two sustainability staff; now she has 35 direct reports. In 2019, she launched a sustainability program that integrated ESG values into the company’s investment programs (including prioritizing low-carbon solutions in the construction projects it funds) while integrating with Sun Life’s core mandates of health and financial security.

Viewing diversity and inclusion through a business lens helped Sun Life develop new products for more diverse families, such as fertility and adoption benefits.

Today, Boyd meets regularly with the CEO and other senior officers and sits in on all board meetings. When asked if her activist background sometimes leaves her feeling that she doesn’t quite fit in, she deftly turns the tables: “My role is to purposely not fit in. My role is to bring change, and what’s going on globally, into the company. Having more diverse people around the table who don’t all fit in leads to better outcomes and better decisions.”

The post The rise of the chief sustainability officer appeared first on Corporate Knights.

That stark comparison is just one way to measure the growing gap between the incomes of corporate leaders and those of the people on whom they depend to generate revenue. By 9:47 a.m. on January 2, 2024 (the first day of work for many in the new year), Canada’s 100 best-paid CEOs would already have made roughly $60,600 – as much as the average Canadian worker will pull in for the entire year. The findings are contained in a new report on CEO pay released this month by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA).

The report tracked 234 companies on the S&P/TSX composite index and found that the average pay for the 100 best-paid CEOs jumped to $14.9 million in 2022 (the year the report measured), which is an increase of 4.4% from the previous year. The average highest-paid CEOs in 2022 made 246 times more than the average worker, or $7,162 an hour, the CCPA reports. That’s a new record and up slightly from the previous year, when it was 243 times. In 2022, the average worker in Canada got a raise of $1,800, or 3%, which was less than half of inflation and brought their salary to $60,600.

Other stark details: only four of the 100 CEOs were women (which matched the number of CEOs with the name Mark or Scott), while inflation, which is demolishing the purchasing power of most Canadians, has been fuelling companies’ profits and subsequently the swollen compensation of CEOs  because of a shift in their pay structure. In 2022, the average Mark made $18.5 million and the average woman made $11.7 million. That translates into the top CEO who is a woman making 63 cents for every dollar that a CEO named Mark makes.

“While the wave of inflation has been crashing down hard on regular Canadians, Canada’s 100 highest-paid CEOs have been riding it to another record-smashing year,” the CCPA says. “Inflation presented a once-in-a-lifetime chance for corporate Canada to jack up prices and pad their profit margins.”

The highest-paid CEO in 2022, according to the report, was J. Patrick Doyle, the executive chairman of Restaurant Brands International Inc., which owns Tim Hortons, Burger King and Popeyes; he pulled in $151.8 million that year. Next was Matthew Proud of Dye and Durham Ltd., a legal-software and payments-technology company, at nearly $99 million, and Seetarama S. Kotagiri, of auto parts manufacturer Magna International Inc., at $36 million. The bottom of the list was also the most lucrative it has ever been, with the lowest-paid of the top 100 CEOs, Randy Smallwood, of Wheaton Precious Metals Corp., pulling in $6.7 million.

The Corporate Knights research team also tracks the ratio of CEO-to-average-worker pay as part of its annual ranking of the 50 most sustainable corporate citizens in Canada. The CEOs of the companies that made the list earned 108 times more than the average worker in 2022, up from the 74-to-1 ratio in 2021. Hydro One (27th on the list) and Transcontinental (26th), a printing company, fared the best on this key performance indicator in 2022. Hydro One’s CEO earned nearly nine times what the average worker did, while Transcontinental came in at 22 times. On the other end of the spectrum, the CEO of Gildan Activewear, which ranked 24th overall, earned 713 times the average worker’s wage. The Corporate Knights Best 50 ranking traces public and private Canadian companies as well as Crown corporations with more than $1 billion in revenues.

It’s inflation that’s been ultimately driving these bonuses, due to historic profits in the corporate sector.

 

– Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives

Report author and economist David Macdonald notes that it’s important to understand the shifting compensation mechanisms that have fuelled the growth in CEO pay. Salaries account for an increasingly smaller share of CEO pay; the average CEO salary  has been relatively constant at around $1 million a year, rising to $1.2 million in 2022. Bonuses tied to revenue, profit and stock prices are driving CEO pay now, he writes.

“It’s inflation that’s been ultimately driving these bonuses, due to historic profits in the corporate sector, which is interesting, given CEO pay is frequently claimed to be based on merit,” the report notes. In June 2022, after the height of the pandemic, annual inflation peaked at 8.1%. While corporations contended that their costs were going up and price increases were necessary to keep their businesses afloat, the CCPA reports that companies used inflation to “drive profits and margins way outside of historical norms.” That, in turn, has helped fuel the rise in CEO compensation.

The organization suggests some ways these earnings could be redistributed: by taxing the income of the highest earners more aggressively, reducing the tax deductions that corporations can claim related to CEO pay, and introducing a wealth tax.

The post The pay gap between Canada’s CEOs and workers is widening fast appeared first on Corporate Knights.

“The choices and solutions are not really gonna work unless labour is involved with them,” said Dana Kuhnline, director of Reimagine Appalachia. It works with union leaders and environmental grassroots groups to bring good jobs to coalfield communities that need them. “I think that’s a lesson climate activists really have to take to heart.”

The reality of a warming world was a central concern for UPS, Amazon, and airport workers who demanded, and in many cases won, concessions protecting them from extreme heat. But the biggest gains were made by the 150,000 members of the reinvigorated United Auto Workers, or UAW, who made a just transition a key demand in one of the most high-profile strikes of the year. Though the union’s primary demands concerned wages and sick days, no small amount of negotiating focused on the looming transition to electric vehicles. Workers wanted to ensure the factories that will make that happen for Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis will be union shops, with wages and benefits equal to those provided at traditional auto factories. Forty years of internal organizing brought UAW to a place where it was willing and able to address energy transition, whereas in previous years, its leaders had gotten fidgety at the idea.

Autoworkers were right to be concerned. Many of the sectors making decarbonization happen are not unionized (this is particularly true of Asian and European automakers with factories in the United States). Salaries also run lower on average than those paid by fossil fuel industries, where good pay and benefits were hard won, often with union contracts written in the blood of workers from more contentious times. Yet many workers in those fields remain hesitant about the coming changes — California oil workers, for example, have been far less supportive of policies supporting the energy transition. That’s why many labour experts considered it a big deal when UAW overwhelmingly approved a contract that will deliver higher wages, assure its members a role in the EV transition, and possibly lead toward greater unionization of the auto sector.

“The UAW strike showed the vision a lot of people have been looking for,” said J. Mijin Cha, an environmental studies professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz. “The way you have power is through money or through people. We’ll never have as much money as the fossil fuel industry, so we need people.”

It’s also given a public face to work that’s happened all year in meetings and negotiations between unions, climate activists, public officials, and employers. In many of the nation’s fossil fuel communities, clean energy projects — often buoyed by federal incentives that require employing union workers — have embraced organized labour. In West Virginia, for example, the United Mine Workers and United Steelworkers signed contracts with battery factories. Solar Holler, which will install photovoltaic panels throughout the state, is working with the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers to create apprenticeship pathways and a measure of long-term job stability.

Labour leaders and climate organizations are jumping at the possibility that a skilled workforce with a strong training pipeline could bring jobs to struggling fossil fuel communities. Union involvement, they said, will ensure that those jobs remain local, as opposed to going to an out-of-state contractor, and offer competitive wages.

“Our main concern is local hire, and getting the people that have been affected by this economic transition from coal,” said Beau Hawk, who with a labour coalition called Labor at the Table. It strives to represent labour interests and ensure funding from the Inflation Reduction Act and bipartisan infrastructure law is spent in the communities where it’s most needed. He said the organization hopes to build a solid apprenticeship infrastructure and ensure long-term job security that will buoy communities in which the instability of the fossil fuel industry has left wide gaps.

Environmental organizations became vocally supportive of labour this year, with Sierra Club, Greenpeace, and others supporting the UAW’s calls for a just EV transition and vaunting union contracts in the energy transition space as they advocated for climate policy.

“We need both movements to create pressure and we need legislative changes to really capitalize on that,” Cha said.

Unions eye EV campaigns

As the excitement of the year winds down, Cha says, the only way to codify labour’s victories is to increase funding to the National Labour Relations Board and integrate labour standards into the green energy buildout. While the IRA heavily encourages using unionized labour for federally funded infrastructure projects, incentives are not the same as mandates. Michigan has taken some steps in this direction, with Governor Gretchen Whitmer signing a policy package that created an energy transition office and guaranteed union jobs for clean energy workers.

Without such action, Cha said, many trade unions — representing many of the carpenters, welders, electricians, and other labourers who are sorely needed in the race to build the infrastructure of the energy transition — may not trust the renewables industry to provide for them.

Meanwhile, United Auto Workers is setting its organizing sights on 13 automakers that have so far been resistant to union campaigns. Even as the UAW announced its win last month, Toyota factories in Kentucky and Alabama had already raised their base wage to $28 per hour. A nascent union drive has started at Tesla, a notorious union-buster. Hyundai, which operates electric vehicle battery plants in the South, has said it will raise factory pay beginning next year. Solar workers in New Jersey, fed up with unstable, seasonal labour and low pay, asked the UAW for help. “These are the jobs of the future,” the effort’s leaders wrote in an op-ed. They vote on their union this week.

On Monday, UAW president Shawn Fain visited Chattanooga, Tennessee, to support a renewed campaign at Volkswagen, where two failed unionization attempts cast doubt on labour’s chances with foreign automakers in the South. Thirty percent of VW employees have signed on, a move reportedly met with intimidation by the company, and Fain delivered a letter to management indicating it is on notice for illegal union-busting. That’s in line with the tough and ambitious tone the UAW has taken this year.

“We may be foul-mouthed, but we’re strategic,” Fain said in October. “We may get fired up, but we’re disciplined. And we may get rowdy, but we’re organized.”

This article originally appeared in Grist. Read the original story here.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

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