5. Conclusion

The climate crisis is also a crisis for labour law. Because labour law is a dimension of sustainability, it is possible to view the climate crisis as an opportunity for reasserting and expanding the existing core concerns of labour law, such as the importance of collective bargaining, protections against unfair dismissal and discrimination, occupational health and safety protections and the reduction of barriers to protection created by tests for employment status.^[1] These matters are, and will remain, critical contributions to ensuring that the growing work of adaptation in Australian society can be undertaken at the necessary scale and on just terms.

We have also suggested in this chapter that climate change enlivens a new set of challenges for labour law that are different in kind to the discipline’s more familiar crises of scope, boundaries and enforcement.^[2] This perspective is founded on a conception of labour law’s function as a space for collective struggle over the terms by which human beings may be permitted, required or forced to transform the world through their labour. From this perspective, existing Australian labour law exhibits limitations in four main ways: it lacks environmental objectives, it restricts the scope of collective bargaining and industrial action, it does not provide a basis for systemic climate action and planning, and it is premised on continuous economic growth. To shift from these climate-destructive foundations, we have suggested four ways to begin reorienting Australian labour law as a positive contributor to a participatory and democratic response to climate change. For labour law scholars, practitioners and students, recognising these new stakes is crucial. It is a turning point of both extreme danger and significant opportunity.^[3]