This presentation arises from the agreements reached regarding the socio-environmental crisis at the Forum "Just Transition: Threats and Responses on and from Latin America and the Caribbean", developed at the 9th Latin American and Caribbean Conference of Social Sciences in Mexico City from June 7 to 10, 2022, as a product of the work carried out in the GT "Future of work and care of the common home" (2020-2022) coordinated by Dr. Emilce Cuda.

At this stage, we aim to consolidate the regional network and advance both in the production of knowledge about the new forms that the socio-environmental crisis assumes in the post-pandemic era and in linking projects with workers' organizations (unions and popular movements), civil society in general, responsible companies and government entities.

Our goal is to establish and strengthen ourselves as an inter-institutional, intercultural, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary network at the Latin American and Caribbean level in order to promote just transitions and thus contribute to overcoming the current socio-environmental crisis.

The ecological crisis of our Common Home manifests itself in two aspects: the environmental and the social. The social crisis is correlated with the transformations that quality production and work have been undergoing for decades (ILO, 2019). And, as a result of the logic of plunder and waste, it manifests itself in the form of unemployment and structural informality in Latin America and the Caribbean (CUDA, 2020).

The environmental crisis manifests itself as climate change and energy crisis, putting life on the planet at risk of extinction due to unsustainable interventions on ecosystems, and whose matrix lies in the dominant and globalized technocratic paradigm to sustain extraordinary profit rates (Dussel, 2003).

We are at a historic moment of risk, of civilizational collapse (UNDP, 2020). There is a conservative backlash ready to deny the socio-environmental crisis, to blame the most vulnerable sectors for social inequalities, and to disseminate hate speech. This backlash promotes exclusion through the deepening of the neoliberal model.

The progressive movement faces a challenge in reinterpreting and appropriating an international agenda that is favorable to it. The ILO and the UN's 2030 Agenda are clear on this matter regarding the importance of decent work and socio-environmental risk. The same is true of Pope Francis's encyclicals Laudato Si' (2015) and Fratelli Tutti (2020), the apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium (2013), which highlights the management of economies and how they produce an unjust, inequitable, and unequal world; and his speeches to popular movements (2014), which underscore the problems of housing, land, and labor.

In this context, one of the key tools is social dialogue, as a concrete expression of the democratic politics needed to overcome polarized tensions. Our starting point is to adopt the aforementioned international agenda and open it up to social actors and their experiences in order to jointly activate processes of just transition.

Just transition is an internationally recognized approach whose potential lies in understanding that the current scenario requires a balance between technological change, environmental impact, the organization of production and work.

The notion of "just transition" emerged from the US labor movement in the 1970s in response to the dismissal of workers during the process of phasing out polluting industries to contribute to the improvement of the environment.

The first mention of a just transition as a planned policy is attributed to the US trade union leader Tony Mazzocchi (1993), who called for a fund that would provide opportunities and financial support for access to higher education for workers who lose their jobs due to environmental protection policies (ILO, 2018).

The term "Just Transition" continued to be used in various documents by regional trade union organizations until June 2010, when the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) included it as a strategy for sustainable development. A significant step forward was the inclusion of the concept in the final agreement of the United Nations Climate Change Conference held in Cancún in December 2010 (UNFCCC 2010). Finally, the concept was recognized in the Paris Agreement (UNFCCC, 2015) as a strategy for transitioning to sustainable development.

The just transition approach implies that environmental and labor priorities are based on shared interests and the transitional approach is based on cooperation between companies, states and trade unions at a negotiating table (ILO, 2018).

Just transition policies refer to measures aimed at transforming the economic structure into one that is carbon-neutral (or low-carbon), environmentally friendly, and socially inclusive through decent work. To avert climate disaster and foster a sustainable and inclusive economic recovery, multi-sectoral and democratic policy instruments are essential.

However, these policy and social dialogue instruments cannot be a "delivery" from international organizations but rather a perspective input that allows us to think, in a situated way, about the processes of inclusion and decarbonization from the experiences that actually exist in Latin America and the Caribbean.

The concept of a "just transition" must be properly contextualized in accordance with international responsibilities regarding ecological debt. Latin America and the Caribbean account for 6% of CO2 emissions, Asia 56%, the United States 17%, Europe 16%, Africa 4%, and Oceania 1,3%. Analyzing the data by country, the main threat to the environment in terms of CO2 emissions comes from China (9,257.90 million metric tons) and the United States (4.761,30 million metric tons) (World Bank, 2019).

A post-pandemic context is emerging, where the global map is being reshaped in the face of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine over the energy sector. Against this backdrop, inequality levels in our region remain persistently high, even though they showed a reduction during the pre-pandemic period. In 2002, the region's Gini coefficient was 0,538; it decreased substantially by 2014 before stagnating at around 0,465 (2021). The same occurred with poverty. It showed a reduction until 2014, then stagnated, and in 2021 returned to 2008 levels (33%), with an increase in extreme poverty (ECLAC, 2022).

The region's productive profile is characterized by the predominance of the primary sector, with production concentrated in a few resource-intensive activities, a low level of industrial activity, low technological intensity, and limited value-added generation, with the exception of Mexico (ECLAC, 2019). High levels of informal employment (51% of total employment in 2019) and self-employment (30,5% of employment in 2018) (ECLAC, 2019) are related to the low prevalence of high value-added activities.

It is in dialogue with these regional characteristics that we will explore the transformative potential of a just transition in the current international context. We do not aspire to a use of the concept that merely reflects good intentions, but rather to examine the conditions of possibility that the post-pandemic era opens up for transformative structural change.

The configuration of the current social question could be located at the moment when the working class, in addition to being exploited, began to be discarded, excluded from the labor market (Castel, 1995; Rosanvallon, 1996). The breakdown of the capitalism known as the "welfare state" in the mid-1970s signified a reconfiguration of social relations as they had been structured up to that point.

The breakdown of the regulatory framework, which we call the "Fordist Pact" (Holloway, 1988), opened a process of business modernization that modified the pre-existing socio-labor order (Figari, 2001). This order shaped a well-known and highly complex phenomenon that deserves further study: flexibilization (Sennett, 2000).

Flexibility has become an organizational reality in the business world. We define it as a mechanism that organizes labor practices by readjusting organizational, technological, and legal instruments that promote the reduction of labor costs and greater productive use of the workforce (Alvarez Newman, 2018).

Neoliberalism, as the hegemonic expression of global capitalism, was the turning point in the way the socio-environmental crisis began to manifest itself. Labor market flexibilization processes excluded millions of wage earners, expelling them from the formal labor market and leading to widespread precarious and informal employment. The institutionalization of these processes in the region began in the 1990s, following the majority of governments' adherence to the Washington Consensus (Murillo, 2009).

Neoliberalism has exacerbated the pre-existing socio-environmental problem in its drive to eliminate all limitations or regulations on cost reduction and the unlimited increase of the profit rate. In this sense, the problem lies in a framework where the profit rate is linked to cost reduction and the maximization of the productive consumption of workers' bodies and natural resources (Alvarez Newman, 2022). The organizational truth in the business world is to be flexible in order to allow things to happen.

Under this framework, the use of Industry 4.0 technologies marked a further step towards civilizational collapse. One of the most widely accepted theses in mainstream research on Industry 4.0 is the belief that technology can unilaterally influence socioeconomic development and, by itself, cause structural transformations. These theses are present in the text "The Fourth Industrial Revolution" (Schwab, 2017) and form the core from which multiple justifications or reinterpretations about the future of work arise.

The problem lies in the fact that this technological determinism narrows the debate around how "Industry 4.0 technologies" will transform the world of work. Strikingly, this perspective fails to consider established hypotheses in labor studies that prioritize the organization of work, with technologies being tools that respond to organizational methods. As Louis Hyman (2018) argues, social change is driven by the decisions we make about how to organize our world; only then does technology arrive to accelerate and consolidate those changes.

We believe we are facing an epistemic problem, which is political. We are witnessing once again a technological fetishism, characterized in other hermeneutic frameworks as idolatrous, that leads to a reversal of the relationship between means and ends. Transformations are not driven by technology itself, but by the decisions we humans make about how to organize and use technologies.

If we orient technology towards minimizing costs and maximizing the productive consumption of workers' bodies and nature in pursuit of unlimited capital accumulation, artificial intelligence will respond to that paradigm.

We argue that there is no such thing as "technological unemployment," but rather organizational processes of production and labor that orient technology toward levels of rationalization and exclusion that compromise the sustainability of work as a social integrator. There is no end to work, but rather disintegration through the generalization of precariousness.

The core of the problem of labor unsustainability is manifested in structural informality because in the informal economy the denial of labor rights, the lack of opportunities, the exclusion from social security, and the absence of social dialogue are more pronounced.

Meanwhile, the problem of environmental unsustainability focuses on the exploitation of natural resources. Latin America and the Caribbean have one-third of the world's freshwater reserves, one-fifth of the world's natural forests, 12% of the world's arable land, and abundant biodiversity and ecosystems of global climate importance, such as the Amazon, in addition to substantial resources linked to the mining and hydrocarbon sectors (ECLAC, 2013).

However, the fact that our continent does not have a substantial impact on the global landscape regarding CO2 emissions highlights aspects of the inequalities between different regions. In terms of energy consumption, the United States, Canada, Russia, Japan, and the European Union account for 15% of the world's population but consume 43% of total available energy (World Bank, 2019).

Environmental effects are universal, but the wealthiest 10% of the world's population is responsible for 52% of cumulative CO2 emissions since 1990. Furthermore, with the COVID-19 crisis, the wealth of a small global elite of 2,755 billionaires has grown more during the pandemic than in the previous 14 years combined. This is the largest annual increase ever recorded, occurring on every continent (OXFAM, 2022). The core of the problem is the concentration of wealth and an environmentally unsustainable lifestyle.

Questions arise regarding the possibility of a second progressive wave. Pending socio-environmental reforms, the pandemic crisis, the rise of conservative reaction, and the war between Russia and Ukraine have constituted a liminal time (García Linera, 2022). Social time seems to have stopped because there is no chain of events oriented toward an imagined destiny. We know what isn't working and what's wrong, but we don't know how to navigate the times ahead. We need to build a belief in our future. Hence the need for better politics, with a focus on the people.

We believe that rebuilding hope from the progressive field (García Linera, 2022) can be achieved by recovering and putting into social dialogue the available international agenda; rethinking the public policy tools that have been successful in the first generation of progressive reforms; and the experiences of unions and social movements with a transformative vocation in dialogue with the academic world.

Our work plan will be directly related to the following objectives:

To continue the critical production of knowledge regarding the hegemony of global neoliberal capitalism in its post-pandemic digital phase and its aspects that make life on the planet unsustainable.

Gather data and case studies, and connect with just transition experiences that can demonstrate alternatives for social inclusion and environmental sustainability.

To propose alternative public policies capable of contributing to overcoming the socio-environmental crisis.