Urban Futures 2024: BWI drives agenda on decent work and inclusivity in green jobs

Trade union voices from the Building and Wood Workers’ International (BWI) highlighted the need for inclusivity and decent work for workers in the building and construction industries at the Urban Futures conference in Rotterdam, Netherlands on June 5-17, 2024.

BWI representatives Zamaney Menso of FNV Netherlands and BWI World Board member, and Ronja Endres of the PECO Institiut/IGBAU Germany, spoke at various events, where they reiterated workers’ demands of ensuring the integration of labour rights and decent work safeguards into green jobs. Jobs in retrofitting buildings as well as in sustainable construction, or the so-called green jobs, are not necessarily aligned with the principles of decent work because they are usually precarious and dangerous in nature. Just because they are green does not mean they are good jobs, Menso and Endres said. It is crucial to ensure that green construction jobs are fully matched with social protection policies such as pension policies, disability insurances and workers’ right to unionize. 

At the “Green Skills, Decent Work and the Future of Construction” session hosted by BWI and C40 Cities, one of the questions posed at the panel was how to address Europe’s workforce shortage in the construction sector. For Endres and Menso, the answer to this is to make the construction sector attractive for young people, migrants, women and other vulnerable communities. This should mean overhauling longstanding issues on working conditions, precarity, wages as well as racial and gender discrimination. 

“For young people wanting to contribute to the green transition, working in the construction sector can be exciting because of the new and innovative ways of building. But in order for those young people to want to take on these jobs, these green jobs need to be well-paying and unionized,” Edres said. Likewise, the issue of inclusivity and diversity needs to be taken more seriously in the sector if it wants to attract more workers. “The construction sector needs to be more diverse. Before I leave the house for work, I don’t think of myself as a black woman; I am just an ordinary human being. But whenever I go to the sites, I am reminded of how different I am, that I am indeed a black woman. There needs to be more inclusivity in construction,” Menso said. 

Workers in the built environment face the impacts of climate change daily such as heatwaves and harsher winter conditions, while also suffering from poor working conditions, precarious contracts and a lack of social protection. However, the construction sector will also be a key driver of climate action. Therefore, safeguarding workers’ rights from the start will be crucial in ensuring a better future for the construction industry, which is tasked with the responsibility of delivering the buildings and infrastructure necessary for a climate-safe future. Making sure that equity and justice lie at the heart of green transition plans is imperative to this goal, according to Menso and Edres.