Every workplace needs a green rep: Futureproofing your workplace

This means reacting powerfully when attacks come, but it also means being an essential part of building the conditions by which jobs and workplaces can survive and thrive when we see change coming down the track.

In an era of net zero and destabilising climate change, safeguarding livelihoods means we need to get on the front foot. Recognising environmental and economic change as the new normal is essential to be able to organise effectively.

This is about job security. But it’s also about helping our members keep up with the times, and be part of shaping a future of positive growth in our organisations.

A just transition for workers

Trade unions invented the term ‘just transition’. It came out of 1970s North American trade union campaigns to reduce pollution, safeguard local communities from industrial hazards, and promote protections for populations from take-them-or-leave-them dirty jobs.

In the UK, trade unions have been pushing since the late 1980s to build sustainability into workplace strategies and industrial relations. But over the last decade, we’ve seen growing demand from members to be part of more ambitious workplace climate action.

We’ve seen a number of industrial actions where managers have refused to include workers in their planning, but we’ve also seen collaboration agreements struck with unions on this agenda nationwide.

Only the latest of these is the Just Transition Framework recently agreed in Further Education, where annual negotiations resulted in a recommendation that all colleges work alongside unions and staff to both rapidly decarbonise and make provision to futureproof jobs. This is the first sector-wide agreement, but it builds upon local agreements from workplaces the length and breadth of the UK, and we expect other sectors to follow suit.

A green rep in every workplace

At the grassroots level where the real work gets done, we’re also now seeing a growing number of trade union branches electing ‘green reps'.

Green reps are our movement’s workplace climate champions, shopfloor members elected by their colleagues to focus on futureproofing their colleague’s livelihoods.

They educate members and colleagues on the importance of sustainability and how it can be achieved. They work with bosses and enterprise sustainability leads to progress climate action and workplace decarbonisation, offering shopfloor perspectives and insights, providing useful grounding voices, and jockeying along more ambitious action. And they provide prized conduits for workers’ concerns, enabling effective operational change that works for workers.

Sustainability is a broad topic, so green reps sometimes go by different names with different focuses. We have environment officers; sustainability reps; climate officers; health, safety, and environment reps; just transition reps.

Whatever their title, green reps’ essential framing is the trade union concept of ‘just transition’, ensuring that change happens, but that it happens in a way that members can support and value.

Where they’re established, green reps can be great assets to their colleagues, and huge helps to get workplace change working well.

While health and safety reps, union learning reps, and (once the Employment Rights Bill passes) equality reps are supported by the law to take facility time, green reps still lack these statutory rights. Many employers who see their worth provide this, of course, but it has be won workplace by workplace—and is hardest to win where the need is the greatest.

The trade union movement—and several MPs we’re working with—want this to change, and many in the movement are continuing to pursue it. But it’s important to remember that winning this battle would only make the cause easier. Green reps can already get facility time through old-fashioned negotiation.

But now’s the time to push!

Next steps for local organising

Within the trade union movement, 2025-26 (the period from the October 2025 and October 2026 meetings of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change—known as COPs) has been designated the Year of Trade Union Climate Action. We’re expecting a large number of events, from climate action stalls to green rep recruitment drives to sustainability CPD to action to secure legal maximum working temperatures to fresh policy interventions.

Maybe something is already planned for your branch. If not, maybe you could give it a go?

In the Trades Union Congress, we’ve been celebrating and supporting trade union sustainability activists and their successes for years, but we’ve recently redoubled our efforts, and this Year of Climate Action is another chance for us to push yet further.

We’ve rewritten our Green Reps at Work training course to provide reps with the best education and strongest tools for creating impact in each workplace. We’ve recently released our Greener Workplaces Toolkit, a handbook for worker climate action that’s proved very popular already and made the Top Read list in May’s Green Edge Podcast. We’re also looking to hold the first National Green Reps Conference in many years in summer 2026. Watch this space on that!

We’re very proud of our green reps, these proactive, everyman climate activists with workers’ voices at their heart. Their passion and make-change-work attitude are always amazing to see in action, and their workplace impacts are growing by the week.

But there’s always room for more. We want to see a green rep in every workplace, safeguarding workers’ futures as urgently and impactfully as workplace safety reps safeguard your health in the here and now.

Ask yourself this: Is your workplace futureproof? Are workers at the heart of future planning? Are your members’ jobs, terms, and conditions safe and guaranteed when your bosses start to think about big changes over the coming years?

If there’s any doubt, you need a green rep.