The transnationalization of the offshore wind energy sector and the international fragmentation of the working class

Abstract

The structural power of the organized working class to effectively negotiate with employers’ associations and capitalist states at wider geographical scales has been strongly shaped by workers’ capacities to establish control over the production and circulation of energy. This capacity is conditioned in large part by the materialities and geographies of energy production networks (Mitchell 2011; Malm 2016; Sica 2021).

The decarbonization of energy production and the rapid growth of the renewable energy industries pose new challenges and opportunities for organized labor. Although each renewable energy technology is materially and geographically distinct, there are some challenges that are common across the renewable energy industries. The first is that the manufacturing process of renewable energy equipment is highly fragmented across regional and international borders. The second is that the workers who manufacture the main components of wind and solar PV power plants are often spatially separated from those workers who install, operate, and maintain renewable energy systems (Franquesa 2022).

Our case study of the offshore wind energy sector serves to illuminate these issues. For any given offshore wind farm, the wind turbine generators, blades, foundations, cables, substations, and vessels are produced in different sites by workers pitted against one another in a distinct form of “multi-scalar competitive fragmentation” (Hürtgen 2021). In addition, the offshore wind energy sector inherits certain techniques of labor control from the offshore oil and gas and maritime transport industries, namely the use of Flag of Convenience (FOC) vessels and the segmentation of the global maritime workforce along lines of language, gender, race, and nationality (Campling & Colas 2021).

While the restructuring of the global energy industry through decarbonization is having some disorienting effects on the global energy proletariat, there are at least two countertendencies that may serve to facilitate transnational labor organization. First, due to the intermittency of renewable energy, one of the necessary outcomes of its increasing penetration is the unification of electricity systems across international borders. This process of internationalization and capital’s need to rapidly produce a global workforce by sending workers abroad for training are both bringing renewable energy workers from different territories into increasing contact with one another. Second, we are presently witnessing a tremendous degree of concentration and centralization in the global renewable energy industries, and this tendency can be favorable to progressive forms of transnational collective bargaining. However, this is far from automatic, and we need much more detailed analyses of labor process transformation in the renewable energy industries in order to understand the concrete capacities of organized labor in the transition.