The Growing Fight for Green Economic Populism
In Chicago and across the country, unions and progressive leaders are implementing policies to address the climate crisis while improving working people’s lives.
Ruthy Gourevitch and Batul Hassan

From battling extreme heat on the job to flooding at home, the working class is on the frontlines of extreme weather this summer, fueled by an escalating climate crisis. This crisis is also making life more expensive, from higher utility bills in poorly insulated rental units to medical bills resulting from treatment after days spent in the dangerous heat.
But at a time when the federal government is dismantling the social safety net and climate investments, working class movements are not sitting back and waiting for their bosses, landlords or politicians to act. Instead, labor and tenant unions are taking matters into their own hands, creating a blueprint for how to organize around both the climate and cost of living crises at the same time.
In Chicago, tenants, workers, and climate advocates have united to improve homes and schools. In April, the Chicago Teachers Union ratified a contract that includes repairs and decarbonization investments, including upgrading HVAC equipment and installing heat pumps. The average age for Chicago school buildings is 84 years, with a $3 billion backlog of critical building repairs. As the confluence of the climate crisis and deteriorating facilities — from exposure to toxins like lead and asbestos to an inability to keep classrooms cool through hot days — reach a breaking point, CTU members saw the fight for healthy, green schools as necessary for connecting student learning, health and safety issues, and rising energy costs for the district.
Four years ago, a cohort of CTU teachers and environmental organizers united to win a campaign to stop a toxic industrial metal shredder, General Iron, from opening next to a public school in a majority Latino, working class Southeast Side neighborhood. Since that victory in 2023, environmental leaders in the union continued to build a base behind environmental and climate issues as union-wide priorities.
Through the 2025 contract campaign, teacher-organizers worked steadily to build mass support for green, healthy schools as a topline common good demand. They organized members to walk their coworkers through schools to identify safety hazards, utilized school based committees to advocate for necessary retrofits, and highlighted how malfunctioning HVAC caused lead paint to fall from classroom ceilings. Through listening sessions with members, organizers pushed back on misconceptions that green school demands are no more than greenwashed recycling projects. In both bargaining and messages to the school board, CTU representatives linked how investments in decarbonization projects like rooftop solar can reduce the energy costs of school buildings.
As Lauren Bianchi, Chicago Teachers Union teacher and leader of CTU Climate Justice Committee said at the Socialism 2025 conference, green, healthy schools “are about safe, healthy, joyful learning environments for students. At the end of the day if students are too hot, don’t have drinkable water and good food to eat they can’t have a transformative learning experience.”
The final contract language reflected the will of members: among other line items, CTU won four new clean energy jobs pathways for Chicago Public Schools students after graduation, more access for age-appropriate resources to teach students about environmental and climate awareness and combat climate despair, the creation of a new committee that forces the district to collaborate on securing specific funding sources for green facilities initiatives and an updated Climate Action Plan. This opens the door for keeping classrooms safe 365 days a year by replacing windows and upgrading improved HVAC equipment like heat pumps, implementing stormwater mitigation strategies to reduce flooding, and installing solar panels at 30 schools.
This summer, rank-and-file teachers in Chicago are training public school students as part of their Environmental Justice Freedom School, a two-week program where students who go to school in buildings ridden with mold and lead paint learn about and plan towards a more sustainable future. In the words of one participant, “AC and heating would help us focus more. It’s super hot, you can’t focus because of heat exhaustion.”
And earlier this year, the union and its environmental justice coalition partners won support for a Chicago Board of Education resolution that builds on these contract victories. The fight isn’t over to win the budget required for full implementation, but by consistently and strategically building a base for necessary climate-safe improvements to the public education system, CTU is charting a course for teachers unions across the country.
Meanwhile, tenants on the South Side of Chicago have been organizing for better conditions in their homes. The climate crisis is making rental housing more hazardous, with extreme weather exacerbating long-standing concerns like indoor air quality and mold growth. Chicago is home to one of the oldest building stocks in the country. Decades of deferred maintenance and negligent management have left low-income tenants with limited options for safe housing.
In response, organizations like Southside Together are organizing to win safer homes and neighborhoods. Organizing across the community and borrowing tactics from the labor movement, Southside Together helps tenants organize majority unions where they live to confront their landlord with the goal of collectively bargained leases and other pressing demands to improve affordability and health. The group recently launched a new majority union — over 150 tenants from across 30 properties — in a portfolio of properties formerly managed by CKO Real Estate. These homes have some of the worst conditions in the city: walls falling apart, water pouring through ceilings and utility shutoffs. The union has already won an agreement to meet monthly with the landlord regarding repair needs and rent forgiveness in five buildings as of June 1, 2025. In buildings where tenants have been told to vacate, the union demanded and won expanded relocation assistance to support their moves.
For Southside Together, climate and environmental justice are deeply embedded in their tenant organizing work towards more affordable and safe housing. As Dixon Romeo, executive director of Southside Together, told us, “for us, our environmental justice organizing is an extension of the tenant and housing work we do, not separate. The tenant organizing feeds into broader campaigns so tenants not only have a union in their building but are also fighting for better neighborhoods.” Right now, that looks like a neighborhood-wide effort to stop the development of the PsiQuantum facility, which has stoked concerns among residents about exacerbating heat island effects, displacement and pollution. As tenants across the country organize for green investments, these organizers can learn from the tactics and strategy employed by Southside Together.
As the working class also works to elect its own champions into local government, examples of policy wins that unite climate and affordability are also coming to fruition. In Chicago, where former union organizer Brandon Johnson is mayor, the city recently approved a $135 million bond for mixed-income housing that has to comply with the sustainability codes of the city’s planning department and paves the way for additional sustainability standards set by the board. As Jung Yoon, Chief of Policy for Mayor Johnson and the former leader of the Illinois Green New Deal coalition, told us, “this idea came from the movement. At the end of the day, workers just needed to pay rent. We need to connect material conditions to the climate crisis to build a wider political base to fight climate change at scale.”
This echoes the strategy of New York state assemblymember Zohran Mamdani, who has campaigned for mayor on a policy platform that unites affordability and climate progress, and won the Democratic primary in late June. Policies like fast and free buses and rent freezes prioritize reducing the cost of commuting and living in the city, while also encouraging low-carbon lifestyles necessary to address carbon emissions head on. Mamdani frontlined green schools in his climate platform, which calls for the renovation and retrofitting of 500 public schools to accelerate New York City’s climate progress while creating 15,000 new union jobs and bringing the city’s public schools up to 21st century standards.
The climate crisis is a catastrophe we cannot afford to ignore, means-test, or isolate as an “add-on” to other problems, and workers and tenants across the country understand that. Beyond Chicago, unions are coordinating and learning from one another to strengthen their organizing at the bargaining table, while recognizing this will help them build the organized power necessary for future governing. The national Tenant Union Federation, which launched last year and which Chicago’s Southside Together is a member of, is training hundreds of tenants nationally on how to organize in their buildings and coordinating campaigns across state lines for safer and more climate-resilient homes. Meanwhile, members of the labor movement, including the Chicago Teachers Union, are setting their eyes on coordinated demands for a potential 2028 general strike, and incorporating a climate justice lens into those horizons.
Together, these examples show the importance of a green economic populist vision that can come directly from those on the frontlines of the climate crisis: the workers and tenants organizing on the job and in their communities. A platform of transformative policies that delivers material benefits to working class people can engage those who have been left behind and demobilized to support a transformative agenda that helps redistribute economic power and rebuild institutions that can drive decarbonization and change how the climate crisis is managed.
Ruthy Gourevitch is the Housing Director at Climate and Community Institute.
Batul Hassan is the Labor Director at Climate and Community Institute.