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| Steve Gray |
It backed a wide ranging strategy to combat climate change and to recognise that the climate crisis is a crisis of social justice, with those who have done least to cause the crisis, and who are least able to address it, facing the worst impacts.
It supported Aberdeen Trades Union Council’s call to recognise the severity of the climate emergency and to join with other partners across the trade union movement and civil society, to support the COP26 Coalition for an international Just Transition and to campaign here in Scotland for a Climate Change Emergency Act to be brought into law by the Scottish Parliament.
In supporting the composite, ATUC delegate Steve Gray told Congress that Aberdeen Trade Union Council recognises that Climate Change and the COP26 negotiations are issues for all working people.
“The Climate Emergency is a Health and Safety issue,” warned Steve. “Because of the accelerating Climate Change impacts, workers, their families and communities face increasingly hostile living and working conditions.”
He added that the Climate Emergency is a cross generational workers’ dispute pointing out that the employers held their first Climate Change Conference in 1992.
“A few years later the bosses introduced annual climate change conferences, the COPS. 26 years later working people can see the annual COPS have been Cop Outs,” slammed Steve.
“There are no seats for working people at the negotiating table, no just transitions and no progress on halting the increasing damage and loss of life that climate change causes not just in Scotland but across the world.
“COP 26 is an opportunity for the Scottish working people to demonstrate their solidarity with working people and their communities across the world and to organise together to create the just and green world we want and need, to allow us to live safely and fairly.”
