Rebekah Diski

The 2300 workers at the Volkswagen factory in Osnabrück, northwest Germany, have been confronted with an unexpected plan for industrial transformation. Last month, it was reported that the car manufacturer was in talks with the Israeli state-owned arms company Rafael to make missile defence systems based on Israel’s Iron Dome. VW has never closed a factory in its home country, but in 2024 it announced that three plants, including Osnabrück, were at risk because of declining sales, high energy costs and competition from Chinese electric vehicle makers.

Every two years, the UK hosts one of the world’s largest arms fairs at the Excel centre in East London. The Defence and Security Equipment International (DSEI) describes itself as the ‘flagship event for the UK’, relied on by ‘the world’s leading defence organisations and most influential stakeholders … to bring the right people together’. It also brings together protesters in a network called Stop the Arms Fair, which has disrupted every DSEI since 2011.

The government’s support for Heathrow expansion is in keeping with the robotic incantations of economic growth that beam out of every press interview and policy announcement from Labour HQ. Forget the climate emergency. As the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, said when asked to choose between net zero and growth at Davos last week: ‘Well, if it’s the number one mission, it’s obviously the most important thing.’

Sitting in a road is annoying; being late to a job interview is inconvenient; missing a funeral is upsetting. But the mass displacement of people, the failure of crops, the loss of entire species: these are rationalised as ‘externalities’, or ignored, or imagined as a distant prospect that will somehow be averted with capitalist ingenuity. The imprisonment of those who are trying to shake us out of this denial is discombobulating.

There is always a tension between a union’s bread-and-butter role to protect its members’ jobs and the wider role that some unions, at some times, have used to improve the world their workers live in. The emphasis on ‘interests at work’ is a rebuke to that wider social role, but it seems increasingly obsolete in the face of the existential threats of nuclear war and ecological breakdown. What about workers’ interests in breathing clean air? Or in affordable rents? Or in protection from floods, droughts and social breakdown? Or in the peace of mind that comes from knowing that the products of their labour have not been used in genocide?