In our first session on labour rights, we focused on global supply chains. In the second session, we shift to a more European perspective. The right to organise and to engage in collective bargaining has been fundamental to the construction of Europe’s welfare states and a core element of the social contract between the state, capital, and citizens. These rights were even written into the peace treaties signed in Versailles at the end of the First World War. They have functioned as key democratic institutions and could potentially be powerful tools for securing a socially stable transition to a regenerative economy.

And yet, the prevailing sense is that workers’ rights are in retreat rather than advancing. One clear example is Tesla’s global anti-union policies. In Sweden, Tesla has refused to sign a collective bargaining agreement, a stance that is highly unusual for companies operating in the country, including American ones. As a result, IF Metall has been in conflict with Tesla since October 2023, making it the longest strike in Sweden in over 100 years.

For this second session on labour rights, we have invited Aleksandar Zuza from IF Metall to help us unpack and better understand the conflict with Tesla.

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After dedicating four episodes to unpacking and turning the concept of growth inside out, we now move on to a much more specific dimension of sustainable development: labour rights. In the next three episodes, we will examine how fundamental human rights at work are respected and implemented across global value chains. We’ll be speaking with world-leading academics, local trade union representatives, and entrepreneurs to understand these issues and identify a path forward.

Our first guest is Sarosh Kuruvilla, Professor at Cornell University and perhaps the world’s leading researcher on labour conditions in global supply chains. The picture he paints is undeniably bleak. Despite more than thirty years of codes of conduct and compliance systems, very little has actually improved on the factory floor. Brands, governments of producing countries, and even traditional trade unions all come under scrutiny. But Sarosh also offers a concrete way forward for brands that genuinely want to drive change, along with a new and potentially revolutionary tool: Risk-Based Outcome Metrics.

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After three conversations on growth, it’s time to pause, step back, and reflect. In this fourth episode, Sasja Beslik, Carolina Sachs, and Joel Lindefors come together to summarize and unpack the different perspectives we’ve explored so far. We revisit our conversations with Sam Tidswell, who argued that technological innovation and capital can enable continued growth even on a finite planet; with Isadora Wronskij from Greenpeace International, who challenged the growth paradigm itself and called for sufficiency, wellbeing, and system-level change; and with Anders Wijkman, former co-chair of the Club of Rome, who pushed us to rethink economics, institutions, and the role of policy beyond both techno-optimism and simplistic degrowth.

What did we learn from placing these perspectives side by side? Where do they fundamentally disagree, and where do they unexpectedly overlap? What actually needs to grow, what needs to shrink, and what does a credible path forward look like in a world facing ecological limits, social fragmentation, and political headwinds?

This episode is less about definitive answers and more about sharpening the questions. If growth can no longer be treated as a neutral or self-evident goal, what replaces it? And how do we move from critique to action?

What is to be done?

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In the first part of our growth trilogy, we explored what infinite growth on a finite planet might look like. In the second conversation, we depart from the opposite position and explore what system-level change could look like, what needs to grow, what needs to shrink, and what it means to build a future defined not by excess, but by enough. Our guest in the studio is Isadora Wronskij from Greenpeace International.

Greenpeace International has recently articulated a new strategic direction, one that looks beyond single-issue campaigns and asks much bigger questions: How do we redesign our economies around wellbeing and sufficiency rather than growth? What alternatives are already emerging? And what kinds of alliances, political strategies, and forms of activism might actually get us there?

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After our initial pilot episode, we’re diving straight into one of the many complex themes we plan to explore. First up is the concept of growth, which we’ll devote three episodes and three interviews to. At the end of this trilogy, we’ll share our own reflections on the different perspectives offered by our guests.

In the first part of the trilogy, we meet Sam Tidswell, a venture capitalist focusing on cutting-edge technologies, from seaweed-planting robots to biomining and building materials engineered from atoms rather than mined from the earth. Sam not only believes that a regenerative capitalism and infinite growth on a finite planet is possible, he believes it’s something we’re likely to see in the near future.

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