The Green New Deal and the Future of Work - by Craig Calhoun & Benjamin Fong (Paperback)

About the Book

This book brings together leading experts to explore the possibilities of the Green New Deal, emphasizing the future of work. They examine transformations that are already underway and put forth bold new proposals that can provide jobs while reducing carbon consumption--building a world that is sustainable both economically and ecologically.

Book Synopsis

Catastrophic climate change overshadows the present and the future. Wrenching economic transformations have devastated workers and hollowed out communities. However, those fighting for jobs and those fighting for the planet have often been at odds. Does the world face two separate crises, environmental and economic? The promise of the Green New Deal is to tackle the threat of climate change through the empowerment of working people and the strengthening of democracy. In this view, the crisis of nature and the crisis of work must be addressed together--or they will not be addressed at all.

This book brings together leading experts to explore the possibilities of the Green New Deal, emphasizing the future of work. Together, they examine transformations that are already underway and put forth bold new proposals that can provide jobs while reducing carbon consumption--building a world that is sustainable both economically and ecologically. Contributors also debate urgent questions: What is the value of a federal jobs program, or even a jobs guarantee? How do we alleviate the miseries and precarity of work? In key economic sectors, including energy, transportation, housing, agriculture, and care work, what kind of work is needed today? How does the New Deal provide guidance in addressing these questions, and how can a Green New Deal revive democracy? Above all, this book shows, the Green New Deal offers hope for a better tomorrow--but only if it accounts for work's past transformations and shapes its future.

Review Quotes

Students, organizers, and academics alike will benefit from this book.-- "H-Environment"

A bold and penetrating collection of essays about the most important problems of our time.

--Frances Fox Piven, author of Challenging Authority: How Ordinary People Change America

As a slogan, the Green New Deal can at times be extended to include almost anything on the current U.S. left's agenda. But what might it really mean? And how would it work? This book is a welcome intervention because it explores from numerous vantage points--often in real detail and with bracing honesty--the possibilities and limits invoked by the idea of a Green New Deal. Headlines will change, new emergencies will arise and fade, but the climate crisis is not going away. That is why this sort of discussion about realistic solutions is so necessary.--Christian Parenti, author of Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence

Calhoun and Fong have crafted an erudite, timely, and often inspiring collection of essays about work and the Green New Deal. No other book I know looks at infrastructure and environment through the prism of labor, culture, and political economy. This will be an excellent resource for teaching, advocacy, and policy making.--Eric Klinenberg, author of Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life

This book is an incredible (and rare) collection from both organizers and scholars on the key challenge of the twenty-first century: how to transform the world of work toward rapid decarbonization. It contains impressive historical depth on the model of the New Deal and explores how to make the Green version a reality.--Matthew T. Huber, author of Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet

About the Author

Craig Calhoun is University Professor of Social Sciences at Arizona State University. He was previously director of the London School of Economics and Political Science and president of the Social Science Research Council. His most recent book is Degenerations of Democracy (2022), with Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar and Charles Taylor.

Benjamin Y. Fong is associate director at the Center for Work and Democracy and Honors Faculty Fellow at Barrett, the Honors College at Arizona State University. He is the author of Death and Mastery: Psychoanalytic Drive Theory and the Subject of Late Capitalism (Columbia, 2016). His writing has also appeared in Jacobin, Catalyst, the New York Times, and Damage Magazine.