Care workers are essential to a “just transition”

By Just Transition and Care (JTC), article originally published in Global Labour Column

Cover image: the artist is Emma Gascó, for Pikara magazine

At the 2025 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP30) in Belém, Brazil, a new proposal sought to address the fragmented state of global Just Transition efforts. The Belém Action Mechanism for a Global Just Transition aims to bring together governments, workers’ organisations, and communities under shared principles and commitments. In large part inspired by this proposal, COP negotiators emerged from the two-week discussions with an agreement to develop a Just Transition Mechanism. This development suggests that the Just Transition is gaining ground as a key framework in global climate policy.

The Just Transition and Care (JTC) initiative has been working since 2021 to connect the Just Transition framework with care work. In June 2024, the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD) published our policy brief, Care Work in the Just Transition: Providing for People and Planet (also available in Portuguese and Spanish) and in November of 2025 published our report, Just Transition and Care Work: An International Inquiry. This column summarises our main argument and findings.

Our starting point was recognising that the COVID-19 pandemic and the ecological and climate crisis share a root cause: a global economy that systematically puts profits before life. The pandemic had worsened what many already described as a generalised crisis of care. This crisis involves rising demand for caring due to the depletion of both human life and the natural environment, combined with the impossibility for overburdened and impoverished care workers to meet that demand under current conditions.

We saw the Just Transition framework as a unique opportunity to reorient transition policies towards meeting the largely unmet needs of both care workers and care receivers: people and the environment. But we also recognised that this connection was largely absent from mainstream Just Transition policy discussions. This led us to ask: what would a Just Transition look like if it took care work seriously? We put this question to 17 representatives from five different areas of care work across 12 countries.

Using a “workers’ inquiry” approach, our coordinating group (four academics and a UNRISD research specialist) organised five online meetings between 2021 and 2023. We listened to care workers, union representatives, and members of social movements and grassroots organisations.

Our report rethinks two key terms as they are currently used in policymaking. We treat “care” as work, even when it is unwaged, informal, or not commonly recognised as such — as in subsistence food production, for example. We define “carers” or “care workers” as those who do the work of caring in both social and environmental spheres, whether inside the household or not. This includes domestic workers, community organisers, urban and rural commoners, environmental defenders, health providers, educators, and others who “produce, sustain and provide for human life and the environment.” By this definition, care workers are the majority of working people.

As for “just transition,” we understand it to include both a concern for jobs and for the conditions that sustain people’s lives beyond the job: the household, the community, the natural environment, and the infrastructure and public services essential to human wellbeing. In this view, a just transition encompasses all ecosocial welfare policies — health care, education, employment, pensions, occupational health and safety, and housing. While a just transition has recently and appropriately been connected to climate change, it was not originally conceived this way, nor should it be limited to decarbonisation. A truly just decarbonisation requires a transition away from inequitable conditions — whether patriarchy, racism, xenophobia, ableism, or other forms of injustice. Building on these foundations, our argument can be summarised as follows:

Firstly: Markets have failed to meet the needs of both caregivers and care receivers, whether people or nature. We call for a decisive shift towards an ecosocial political economy with a broader and deeper democratic public sphere, moving away from the capitalist system and culture that still shapes most transition policies.

Secondly: Human rights should be expanded to include the right to social and environmental care, with particular attention to working people and their communities.

Thirdly: To realise this right, governments must take direct responsibility, providing adequate funding based on meaningful political representation and participation of care workers, waged and unwaged, in shaping transition policies.

Fourthly: Just transition frameworks should be guided by principles of global justice, including reparations for the debt accumulated by the global North towards the global South, and by the rich towards the poor in every country, through the exploitation of the bodies and territories of working people across all communities — starting with women and girls.

Our central argument is that the conditions sustaining human life are not naturally given or infinitely available, rather, they are the product of human work — care work. This labour, whether waged or unwaged, must be recognised as central to the just transition, and those who perform it are entitled to proper compensation and recognition. The just transition framework offers a unique historical opportunity to achieve this. We hope our report will help trade unions, social movements, community organisers, and policymakers move in this direction.

Just Transition and Care (JTC) is an international network of researchers and care work representatives hosted by the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development, in collaboration with the Center for Environmental Justice at Colorado State University (USA) and the Interuniversity Research Centre for Atlantic Landscapes and Cultures (CISPAC) at the University of Santiago de Compostela (Spain). The JTC initiative is coordinated by Stefania Barca, Zoe Brent, Rocío Hiraldo, Gea Piccardi, and Dimitris Stevis.