Abstract
As the social-ecological transformation permeates ever more sectors of society, workplaces present themselves as critical leverage points, with labour unions playing an essential role in shaping just and sustainable working conditions. This exploratory, qualitative research, conducted in collaboration with the Economy for the Common Good (ECG) movement, investigated how unions define and practically advance both social and environmental employee-level sustainability. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with union representatives, and the collected data was processed with an inductive thematic analysis.
The findings showed that unions frame employee-level social sustainability as a dynamic interplay of values, conditions, and mechanisms, fundamentally centred on human rights, dignity, and equity, and reflected in working conditions such as job security, living wages, and safe working environments. Environmental sustainability, though less prominent, is increasingly integrated through the independently developed “Just Transition” framework. Rather than separating the social and environmental, unions view them as inherently interwoven. However, union sustainability efforts are consistently shaped by practical and system constraints where political realities, internal member resistance, and practical limitations frequently steer towards reformist, incrementalist and system-compatible strategies over more transformative ones.
Despite these constraints, sustainability on the employee level is gaining ground in union agendas, not as a dilution of traditional labour concerns, but as their evolutionary next step. Contemporary unions emerge as both navigators and co-creators of labour sustainability paradigms as they project traditional labour ideals onto novel realities.