Is there really a conflict between protecting the planet and protecting workers? From political debates in Brussels to factory floors in Italy, the question keeps resurfacing. For Lucien Carré, a doctoral researcher at the EUI Department of Law, this supposed conflict represents one of the central challenges of Europe’s green transformation. His research on just transition focuses on how labour law can align environmental goals with social justice and ensure that climate action does not leave workers behind.
“When I started law, it was already with this interest in more social matters,” Lucien says. During a short traineeship in a labour-law research centre, he realised that legal research could be both technical and human. That early discovery stayed with him and still guides his work today.
Lucien explores how the European Union can make its green transition both ecological and fair. “The big problem is this idea, often in public debates, that there is a conflict between the environment and social issues,” he says. “It’s a very important challenge, but I approach it from the idea that it’s a false opposition.”
He notes that this misunderstanding has been present in public narratives for years. “We often hear that trade unions, especially in coal or oil, are opposing the transition. We forget that the first workers who are sick from mining jobs are the coal workers and their families.” The same people accused of blocking climate action, he adds, are often the first victims of its absence. This contradiction is behind the concept of a just transition which has been shaped by the labour movement. How do we phase out polluting industries while protecting those whose livelihoods depend on them?
Lucien’s research builds on this idea, asking how EU law might support or hinder a fair transition. “Now we have the same question in the green sectors,” he explains. “When there is urgency to develop renewable energies, sometimes they are developed against workers’ rights. It’s the same trade-off between labour and the environment, only in a new form.”
He argues that such conflicts are not inevitable but stem from how transitions are managed. “People won’t follow if they are excluded from the process,” he says. “Beyond the ethical claim that it’s wrong to do it this way, it simply won’t work.”
To illustrate this, he points to a project he once studied in Brittany, on France’s Atlantic coast, where offshore wind farms were planned with little local consultation. “At first, people were really enthusiastic,” Lucien recalls. “It’s a region with strong environmental awareness, so everyone wanted to support the transition.” However, turbines were sited in fishing areas and cut off waters local fishers relied on without any alternative. “People still wanted the transition,” he says, “just not one that came at their expense.” For Lucien, the case shows how even communities committed to environmental goals can lose trust when they are excluded from the discussions.
In his doctoral thesis, Lucien looks for EU legislation that addresses the intersection of labour protection and environmental sustainability. He finds fragments of this approach scattered across European law but never connected under a single vision. “We have funding tools and political commitments,” he explains, “but no legal architecture tying them together.” He argues that this gap leaves Europe’s just transition vulnerable to inconsistency.
For Lucien, the EU level is key because it is where major industrial and climate policies are shaped. “These big industrial policies, they are shaped at the EU level,” he says. “But how they are shaped at the EU level depends on decisions involving the Member States, and we can see tensions, including an important East–West divide.”
The absence of a coherent framework led Lucien to test a more creative approach. Together with Paolo Tomassetti, Associate Professor of Labour Law at the University of Milan, he published an EUI Law Working Paper which sketches how a directive on just transition could look. Their proposal is not the first one on the topic. European trade unions also push for such a law and already drafted an EU just transition directive.
“The proposal is not an official text, obviously,” he smiles. “Normally it’s the Commission proposing a directive, but it hasn’t moved.”
The paper started as a research experiment and an attempt to translate political discourse into legal language. He notes that while the European Commission has launched funding instruments under the “Just Transition Mechanism”, it has never defined just transition in law. “At the moment, it’s more of a slogan than a legal framework,” Lucien explains. “Our goal was to make it concrete enough to debate and improve.”
He hopes this draft directive, fully hypothetical yet grounded on extensive discussions with trade unions in several countries, will contribute to the debate among policymakers, unions, and academics. It should focus on the need for a legal intervention from the EU about the social aspects of climate neutrality. The draft recognises a right to a just transition for all workers and communities affected by environmental restructuring. It requires companies to prepare transition plans and involve workers’ representatives in decision-making. Creating funds for retraining and local diversification is also one of the points.
The proposal expands the traditional definition of “worker”, extending protection to the self-employed, platform workers, and others whose livelihoods depend on local fossil-fuel economies. “Our text is not against the proposal from the trade unions,” Lucien says, “it’s just a way to put on the table another complementary and hopefully ambitious proposal.”
Lucien argues that if such a directive were ever adopted, it would do more than fill a gap. It could reshape labour law itself. “There is almost a consensus among labour scholars that we can’t continue with the traditional legal institutions of labour law,” he explains. “The discipline has long relied on the assumption that economic growth can reconcile capital and labour. That’s a big problem for environmental sustainability.”
To legislate for a just transition, the language of labour law would need to change, according to Lucien. We would have to redefine what counts as work and who counts as a worker. “Labour law has been shaped with the idea that the worker is the formal employee of an industry,” Lucien says. “But this excludes so many working people. If we only think of the formal industry employees when shaping a just transition, we leave behind many of those exposed to the same hazards in the same regions.”
That, he warns, is where the danger lies. “There is a great risk of no text being adopted, but to me it’s equally risky to have an empty text adopted,” he says. “If we end up with a Just Transition Directive that is useless or empty, then it’s just another sign that ‘Just Transition’ is just a slogan, another delusion for the workers and communities, especially the most vulnerable ones.”
Shortly after arriving in Florence, Lucien found a real-world example that mirrors his research. The former GKN automotive factory in Campi Bisenzio stands just a few kilometres from the EUI. “The factory closed very abruptly,” he recalls. “They reauthorised the dismissals after the COVID period in Italy, and the next day they said: Tomorrow everything is shut down.” Instead of dispersing, the workers formed a permanent assembly and occupied the site. They turned it into a laboratory for ecological re-industrialisation. Together with environmentalists and local activists, they drafted a plan to convert production toward solar panels and sustainable mobility.
“Their struggle became a reference for many of us thinking about the link between labour and climate,” Lucien says. The collective also inspired a regional law on industrial reconversion, later adopted by the Tuscan authorities, which links social rights and ecological transformation. Although the factory remains closed and its future uncertain, the movement that grew around it continues to demand cooperative and climate-conscious re-industrialisation. For Lucien, GKN illustrates what a just transition can look like when those most affected by change are allowed to lead it.
Back at the EUI, Lucien finds a supportive environment for this kind of cross-disciplinary work. “The PhD can be lonely in terms of work,” he says, “but being at the EUI makes it so much more collective.” Conversations with researchers from different disciplines have broadened his perspective. The international setting has exposed him to a range of experiences of work and social rights across Europe. Meeting colleagues from Central and Eastern Europe has made him more aware of the East–West divides that also shape the debate on just transition. “It made me realise how differently labour relations are structured across the continent,” he says.
He also values the opportunities to connect research with practice, for example through initiatives like the Alternative State of the Union, where local activists and the GKN workers spoke alongside researchers. “It was really nice because it was a time to engage with people from other fields,” he says. “We tried this different way to organise a conference. We had the workers from the collective come.”
Lucien sees his work as both academic and civic. He belongs to a generation of scholars who use legal research not only for interpreting change but for guiding it. For him, the question that opened this story already has an answer. There is no real conflict between protecting the planet and protecting workers. There is only the challenge of designing laws that make both possible.
Lucien Carré is a PhD researcher at the EUI Department of Law. His doctoral project, “Workers’ voices in the EU’s green transition”, supervised by Professor Claire Kilpatrick, explores how EU labour law can support a socially just climate transition, bridging environmental and workers’ rights across Europe.
Photo by Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash