In 2020, the European Green Deal (EGD) made the phasing out of fossil fuels the central element of the European Union’s new growth strategy. The Just Transition Mechanism (JTM), created to implement the EGD without ‘leaving anyone behind’, aims at supporting the transition of energy producing regions. In this framework, however, the definition of social justice issues relies on statistical approaches based on single indicators. Gender equality, for instance, while presented as one of JTM’s priorities, is always discussed in reference to employment. The notion of ‘gender’ itself is reduced to the opposition between the categories of ‘men’ and ‘women’, ignoring the issue of gender roles’ construction.

Over the last decade, some researchers have developed a more comprehensive approach that places gender inequalities in the broader context of productive and reproductive labour interactions. In this article, I show how this lens enriches our understanding of social justice as it allows us to connect the development of economic infrastructure with gender roles’ construction. The aim is to confront just transition policies with the limits of their analytical framework. To do this, I discuss the problem of women’s employment central to the JTM and associated public policies.

My analysis is based on a year-long ethnographic study I conducted in the region of Western Macedonia in Greece as part of my ISRF Fellowship. In the late 1950s, the Greek Public Power Corporation (PPC), created by the government to roll out electricity throughout the country, discovered a large lignite deposit between the cities of Kozani and Florina. The region became the centre of Greek electricity production, with a large part of its active population working in the sector. It is also characterised by a high unemployment rate that particularly affects women (61% of all unemployed). In 2019, the right-wing government of Kyriakos Mitsotakis announced the end of lignite-fired electricity production and a transition towards renewables. In Western Macedonia, massive job losses are expected, with repercussions for the entire local economy, which is highly dependent on energy workers’ high wages. In 2021, it became the first region to enter the JTM.

The solution proposed by the policies designed to adapt the JTM to the national context is to increase job opportunities in other sectors and to facilitate the reskilling of energy workers. The organisation of the labour market itself is never put in question. I will show that the transition is part of a continuing process of privatisation that has dramatically increased job insecurity. To understand the effects of this casualisation of employment on women, I will begin by discussing the construction of gender roles shaped by the intermingling of cultural representations, economic strategies and political constraints.

Women’s unemployment: a combination of cultural, economic and institutional factors

In Greece, the extended family forms the basic unit of the economic infrastructure. Individual biographies are often influenced by collective strategies aiming at ensuring the family’s financial security. If this seems to be changing with the latest generations, especially in urban environments, responsibilities towards the family tend to be distributed according to gender roles. In Western Macedonia, the development of PPC in the 1980s marked a turning point in the lives of many men. The attractive wages and job security offered by the public company led them to leave their jobs to join the mines. Kristina Florakis, a schoolteacher born in a nearby village, explains that this choice was sometimes forced on them by their families:

My father had a small company in the construction sector. (...) He didn’t want to work in the mines because he was earning enough money to live and he was independent. It’s my mom who pushed him to go. She wanted him to have a permanent position, to become a public worker, so we would be safe.

For a long time, men resisted PPC’s recruitment efforts because work in the mines was considered difficult and dangerous. In the 1980s, however, rising salaries and the security of public employment have led families to adapt their strategies. And it was left to the men, to whom the role of breadwinner typically devolves, to go and work there.

The high wages they earned allowed for a strict division of labour between genders. Women stayed at home to look after the household, children and grandparents. Thassos, a young excavator operator, sees it as a particularly beneficial family strategy, though one that is now threatened by the fall in salaries due to the privatisation of PPC in the 2000s:

Before, in the region, women were not working. They were taking care of the children. (...) Now men’s wages are not enough and women have to work. It’s really bad for children’s education.

From this perspective, women’s participation in productive work is not a means of individual emancipation, but a constraint generated by men’s inability to fulfil their role as breadwinner. This representation is more widespread among men and among conservatives, but it is also shared by a part of the women who see it as an additional burden to be added to their care-taker role.

Indeed, women’s participation in productive work does not necessarily lead to the redistribution of tasks within the family. And while their daily schedule is already overloaded, they have to cope with institutional constraints. In particular, the Greek school system makes it difficult for them to pursue a professional career: classes end at lunch break, around 2 pm, and children spend their afternoons in different private schools for sports, music or languages. The responsibility of preparing lunch and transporting children from one school to another often falls to the mother, who is sometimes helped by the grandparents.

This brief account shows that women’s high unemployment rate in Western Macedonia is explained by a combination of factors that contribute to the construction of gender roles (cultural representations, family’s economic strategies, institutional constraints, etc.). As other researchers have shown, creating new job opportunities is thus not enough to establish gender equality, which requires major cultural and political changes. But we also need to look at the economic context in which we are trying to integrate women and its effects on their prospects for emancipation.

The privatisation of the energy sector: emancipation in an uncertain labour market

Men and women are often portrayed as homogeneous social groups. Though, looking at the diversity of their individual experiences allows one to question the conditions under which the energy transition could bring positive outcomes. In Western Macedonia, the construction of gender roles tends to keep women away from productive work. However, many have entered the labour market with or without the support of their families. This is the case, for instance, of those who wish to divorce. Their stories are interesting because their efforts to rebuild their lives, independently of their husbands and families, reveal the conditions that facilitate or prevent women’s empowerment.

Divorce can be a difficult choice in a traditional culture where religion plays a central role. Frowned upon by part of the population, divorced women do not always enjoy the support of their community. They also face financial obstacles: often married young, many have never worked before. Uncompetitive on the labour market, they struggle to find work. For them, the social employment policy implemented by PPC as a public company was a rare opportunity. So says Panayiota, who worked for 30 years as a secretary in the company’s plants:

When I divorced my husband, he was not helping. I had to raise my kids alone and it was tough. (...) I am so grateful for this job because I could make it. I had enough money and I was finishing at 5pm so I could go home and take care of my children.

In addition to its role in the electrification of the country, PPC fulfilled non-commercial functions linked to its nature as a public enterprise. In particular, it had to ensure the economic integration of Western Macedonia’s inhabitants by promoting employment based on social criteria. This policy benefited women who could find working conditions enabling them to juggle reproductive work. Thanks to the high wages, divorced women and single mothers could also lighten their workload by hiring household help. Panayiota, for example, who couldn’t rely on her parents as they had passed away a few years earlier, hired a nanny to look after her children between school and the end of her working day.

Divorced women who started to work after the privatisation of the energy sector tell a different story. In 1999, PPC came into private ownership, became a limited company and changed its employment policy. The privatisation of the energy sector, in response to the EU’s requirements, led to a drastic reduction of the workforce and of wages, the delegation of most of the work to subcontractors and the replacement of permanent positions by short-term contracts.

Elektra, who divorced her husband in 2006 and had no prior working experience, struggles to find jobs. She alternates between fixed-term contracts for PPC subcontractors, seasonal jobs in other regions of Greece and periods of unemployment:

With the money since the divorce, it’s been very hard. There are times... I’m not well... When I had my son it was worse, but now at least he’s grown up, he can manage. But me, at 55... What can I do?

The dramatic increase in job insecurity particularly affects the most vulnerable social groups, including divorced women. And while they struggle to ensure their financial autonomy, they have to face the exacerbation of economic exploitation. Indeed, with the constant threat of job loss, workers find it difficult to challenge deteriorating working conditions or to demand respect for their basic rights (on-time payment of wages, rest days and vacations, etc.). As Elektra reports, this threat is concrete:

I complained about my rest days because it was the third time [the subcontractor I was working for was] cutting them. The manager said to me: “Why do you complain? They are gonna let you go.” But I didn’t back down. I told him: “Fine!” And they didn’t hire me again.

The remedies available are limited as precarious workers generally have no trade union representation. In Western Macedonia, the energy unions, once the most powerful in Greece, have lost their grip on workers. The reasons for this disengagement are complex and beyond the scope of this article, but it is worth noting that this makes workers even more vulnerable, left alone to cope with increasing economic violence.

Conclusion

The prism of gender allows one to explore the interplay between the productive and reproductive spheres, revealing the entanglement of cultural, economic and political dynamics in the construction of power relationships. The resulting gender roles largely determine women’s participation in productive work. The high unemployment rate of Western Macedonian women thus cannot be explained only by a lack of opportunities.

But these gender inequalities are part of a web of power relationships that feed into each other. Looking at the particular case of women who have chosen to work, I questioned the conditions in which their jobs support a process of emancipation. I have shown that the privatisation of the energy sector has led to an extreme casualisation of employment exposing workers to economic exploitation and reducing women’s autonomy from their husbands and family.

And yet, this casualisation of employment continues through the energy transition initiated in 2019 with the launch of the lignite phase-out. Indeed, policies for the development of renewable energies favour large-scale private projects carried out by national or foreign companies, based on the employment subcontracting system put in place when the Greek public sector was privatised. Under these conditions, achieving a just transition seems more than unlikely.