8th July 2025:
The 'Our Power: Offshore workers' demands for a just energy transition' report was published in March of 2023, and I first came across it in 2024 during a climate and trade union conference organised by the Campaign Against Climate Change and which I wrote about in 'Legitimising Anti-Environmentalism'. That blog was a critique of the anti-environmental attitudes on display in the workshop given to present the report, and not about the report itself, so it has been on my mind since then to read the report and write up a blog on it to give my thoughts.
The report is based on half a dozen workshops held with oil and gas workers across the north of the UK, along with follow up telephone calls and a survey of the key demands of the report which was filled out and returned by some 1,000 workers. The result was an overwhelming endorsement of the 10 demands fleshed out during the workshops, which some 90% of workers supported.
I'll take a brief look at the ten demands later in this blog, but they do not throw up anything new for those who have been involved in climate activism and who are familiar with the trade union wing of climate activism, but nonetheless there are some surprises, though this is mainly on what is left out, such as the urgent need to deal with climate change, which isn't mentioned in any of the demands at all, but more on that later.
The report commends itself on being worker led, stating at the outset that 'a just transition is essential and it must be worker led', and points out how this report differs from other reports about how to transition away from north sea oil and gas:
'In stark contrast to industry reports and Government consultations about a just transition, this research starts from the perspectives of workers – enabling them to identify their key demands and only then developing policy proposals that flow from these.'
I mean okay, all good, it is definitely important to get the perspective and experience of workers when deciding how to transition away from north sea oil and gas, but I can't say I agree that any such transition must be worker led. I mean deciding how to transition away from north sea oil and gas requires a whole different knowledge base, skill-set and experience than the typical north sea oil and gas worker has. Given that deficit, for me it is important that any transition away from north sea oil and gas is not led by the workers themselves, but has their input. In that sense I welcome this report, giving as it does the views of workers from the industry on how they would want to see a transition done. That is I think a necessary requirement of any just transition plan, but that certainly does not require the workers to lead it, which is I think a misguided notion.
The other thing I am slightly sceptical of is the fact that this report arises from only half a dozen workshops. Given the huge amount of technical information required to make such a key decisions on an aspect of the UK economy that will have repercussions for decades, as well as impacting other sectors of the economy, international trade and diplomatic relations, never mind the complexity of meeting emissions targets, half a dozen workshops does not in my mind really suffice for any kind of sound decision making to have occurred. Instead I wonder just how much the workers themselves have been 'guided' into coming up with these 'ten demands' by the workshop facilitators. They are after all very standard demands that one often sees promoted by the left. That does make me suspect about the impartiality of this process, and it strikes me that this does not so much represent the authentic views of the common mass of workers but rather the agenda of leftist organisations within the climate and trade union movement itself.
The report itself , after a few pages of introduction and explaining their methodology, basically lists the ten demands and then outlines each demand in more detail, and also provides a very informative summary of a potential pathway for how the demand could be implemented (and worked out by the think tank Transition Economics). I have to say, it was this latter part of the report that I found particularly impressive. I mean don't get me wrong, Platform and Friends of the Earth Scotland have done a great job putting this report together, it's one of the best examples of how to engage workers in transition and climate activism I have seen, though to be fair there are not many examples that spring to mind. The report is an excellent one, and is and will remain highly influential within the climate movement and the trade union movement for many years to come I suspect, and will also no doubt influence government policy to some degree. However I did not feel that there were any big surprises here, as the demands all followed pretty standard leftist demands for a green transition away from fossil fuels. What was really informative for me however was the analysis provided by Transition Economics that showed how each demand could be implemented. That was filled with useful policy examples that I found particularly illuminating, and showed how think tanks could combine with worker led approaches in order to provide a more detailed understanding of transition pathways and how they can be implemented. One of my concerns about worker led approaches to transition is the lack of specialist expertise in the workforce, and this approach showed one way to mitigate for that.
Another really useful aspect of each demand was the 'has this been done elsewhere' section of each demand. This listed examples from all around the world of how similar transition pathways that were either worker led or had key worker input had been developed and implemented. The examples were profuse and I found this particularly impressive and useful, and worthy of noting, as this is something I earmarked to come back to again and again to research in order to get inspiration and ideas for how these transitions can work and to inspire my own activism.
The ten demands themselves were as follows:
As I said, I think the demands are fairly standard demands from workers across most industries and don't specifically relate to transitioning away from fossil fuels, which I found a bit disappointing. I mean the whole process of how to transition the UK away from fossil fuels is a complex one, and the ten demands don't really address that at all. At no point are any of the demands talking about the need to take action, the need to address climate change, the need to change our way of life and dependence on fossil fuels. Instead a really simplistic approach is taken whereby climate change is somehow magically solved by replacing oil and gas with wind turbines. I find that attitude typifies worker led approaches to climate change, and represents I think a total lack of understanding of the true scale of the problem and the crisis it is going to create.
Similarly, to suggest that reorganising the tax system or making energy companies publicly owned is going to solve climate change or represents the way to transition away from fossil fuels also requires some explanation, though this is not given. I simply don't see how these kind of demands address how we transition away from fossil fuels or how we give up the north sea oil and gas fields. The urgency of climate change simply isn't addressed in this report, and the whole issue is simplified down to switching to renewables, which simply isn't a realistic transition plan at all if fossil fuels are not left in the ground. And where is that demand – to leave the north sea oil and gas in the ground and go home to other jobs in other sectors? No mention of it in the entire report – not one word! You'll find it mentioned in the International Energy Agency's Roadmap to Net Zero 2050 report, which is probably the most credible roadmap to transition away from fossil fuels (aside from Richard Heinberg's Powerdown), but why no mention here? I would love to hear how north sea oil and gas workers respond to the challenge of having to leave the oil and gas in the ground and what their thoughts are on this, but for some reason the issues is totally avoided. Could it be that the wall of hostility from the workers themselves caused Platform and Friends of the Earth Scotland to totally avoid the issue? That was the gist I got in my earlier blog 'Legitimising Anti-Environmentalism', and I suspect there is more than a grain of truth to it.
So overall I wasn't hugely impressed with the ten demands from the transition perspective. However, if your goal is to imprint leftist demands on the climate movement, then the report has done a good job. I'm not saying that those demands are not just or meritorious, just that they do not in and of themselves represent a transition plan and they look like the workers have just been used as mouthpieces of leftist organisations, rather then having an impartial go at actually finding out about what the workers themselves actually think.
And as for the survey, I mean, present the workers with a totally different set of demands and you may well find 90% support for them too. The survey in and of itself is not a good way to understand where the voice of the workers is, or what the workers actually want. More often than not surveys are used to endorse the views of the survey makers rather than being used for any impartial purposes, and this is I think a classic example of such. As a mathematician, I do not hold the survey in a particularly high regard.
I suspect no mention is made of climate change because many of the workers will react negatively, but rather than present that truth the report effectively swishes it under the carpet and hides it from view in order to garner respectability. Nothing respectable in climate denial or outright hostility towards anything considered environmental after all, so better to just ignore all that.
So overall, while I really enjoyed the report and found it to be worthwhile to speed read and to keep in mind for future research purposes, packed as it is with useful examples, I did not find it contributed that much to the problem of how to transition away from fossil fuels or of any genuine grassroots ideas from the workers themselves. Instead it looks like standard leftist approaches to climate change imprinted on the voices of the workers. Such approaches have their merits, but I don't think they can be held to represent the genuine views of the workers, any more than Marxism can. Both suffer from ideologically driven people who do not seek to find out what the workers actually think and want, but who rather seek to use the workers for their own ends.