What We Do
Frontline Workers, Fenceline Communities United for Justice
COP 26, Glasgow. Photo credit: Mackenzie Marcelin
Since 1997, the Just Transition Alliance (JTA) has brought together environmental justice groups and local unions to tackle polluting extractive industries causing harm to communities and workers. For three decades, JTA has built alignment between the people of color, Indigenous, migrant and poor communities first and most harmed by such industrial impacts and the workers in these industries by sharing vision, principled practice and power.
As a 501(c)(3), we strengthen movement organizing with popular education, policy advocacy, and building strategic relationships. We strive to be a creative catalyst for change, by:
- Building and aligning frontline worker and fenceline community power;
- Negotiating progressive wins in local, state, national, and international policy arenas to stop ongoing toxic trespass and subsidies to polluters;
- Challenging and supporting our allies to work together in solidarity and mutuality;
- Changing the dominant narrative to expose corporate greenwashing and “false solutions,” while centering grassroots visions of change that serve people and planet; and,
- Shifting philanthropy to distribute more funding to the many locally-rooted economic and environmental justice initiatives cultivating transformative change on the frontlines and fencelines of colonial extractivism and climate chaos.
Our vision is to cultivate widespread grassroots capacity to organize just transition strategies for solidarity economies at appropriate local or regional scales that are designed, built and governed by those workers and communities on the frontlines and fencelines of harmful production. We ground our work in building relationships with workers in polluting industries and communities affected by those industries. We strengthen collaboration between these groups to activate just transition pathways away from toxic processes and towards safe, dignified and deeply rewarding livelihoods.
At a time when “just transition” has become a popular buzzword, JTA stands firm in taking back our narrative, insisting that a true just transition will always move us toward an economy that is not only safer and healthier, but also democratically self-determined, with those first and most harmed having the first and most say in which solutions should be pursued and how to achieve them.
José Bravo, Executive Director
@jtalliance There is no cookie cutter approach to #JustTransition—but both workers and communities are essential in a just transition. Just Transition Alliance Executive Director José Bravo explains more in this video. He also talks about how the #UNFCCC is using #justtransition language that promotes climate #falsesolutions such as nuclear energy and hydrogen. José joins Central Florida Jobs with Justice, Familias Unidas por la Justicia and United Steelworkers Local 675 as part of the Workers & Communities delegation and #ItTakesRoots. #JustTransition #JustTransitionNotNetZero #NoNetZero #COP27 #ClimateReparations #ClimateJustice #EnvironmentalJustice #ItTakesRoots #KeepItInTheGround @josetoscano2022 ♬ original sound - Just Transition Alliance
Ananda Lee Tan, Strategy Advisor
@jtalliance Our Strategy Advisor Ananda Lee Tan is at #COP27 as part of the Workers and Communities delegation and #ItTakesRoots; we are urging global leaders to pick a side. Are the on side of dangerous polluters or in the side of communities and people? #JustTransition #KeepItInTheGround #JustTransitionNotNetZero #PeopleOverProfits #Hoodwinked #NoNetZero #COP27 #ClimateReparations #ClimateJustice #EnvironmentalJustice #ItTakesRoots #justtransitionalliance ♬ original sound - Just Transition Alliance
Our History
The concept of “just transition” was first crystalized within the labor movement by Tony Mazzocchi. When Mazzocchi’s Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers Union (OCAW), and many other radical unions – the “frontline workers” – aligned with neighbors most harmed by their industries – the “fenceline communities” – newly shared goals transformed the nature of their struggles. Where communities face negative health impacts from polluting energy, petrochemical and waste corporations, industrial workers and their unions face hazardous working conditions. Guided by common cause, workers and communities resisted divisive, false binaries around “jobs versus environment” to build trust through the 1990s.
The Just Transition Alliance (JTA) formed in 1997 when grassroots leaders José Bravo, Tom Goldtooth, Richard Moore, Pam Tau Lee, Connie Tucker and Jenice View saw the urgent need for cross-movement collaboration between environmental justice (EJ) struggles and labor unions. JTA nurtured early collaboration between Environmental Justice and Labor movements, positioning just transition at the intersection of worker rights, occupational health and safety, as well as environmental, economic and racial justice.
Since our founding, JTA has successfully propagated our just transition vision to the point where governments and corporations internationally are co-opting the term for their climate crisis PR campaigns. We continue to insist that only dialogue between frontline workers and fenceline communities can truly define a just transition in each localized case. Today, the climate justice movement adheres to just transition as a unifying body of principles, processes and practices that help us shift away from polluting extractive industries and towards place-based economies that serve the needs of communities, workers and the environment.
Tony Mazzocchi. Photo credit: U.S. Dept. of Labor