Rethinking the Labour-Environment (Land) Nexus: Beyond Coloniality, Towards New Epistemologies for Labour Law Ania ZBYSZEWSKA * & Flavia MAXIMO ** The existential threat posed by anthropogenic climate change is a powerful indictment of contemporary capitalism. It requires us to directly confront modern capitalism as a civilizing project that renders irrational and obsolete other possibilities of organizing economic and social life. Adopting a decolonial perspective that incorporates theories of racial capitalism, coloniality, and social reproduction, we examine how racial/colonial capitalism articulates the labour- environment nexus in ways that facilitate or undermine different sorts of livelihoods and socio- ecologies. We then reflect on how the differentiation and hierarchization that flow from exploitation (labour) and expropriation (labour and land) are reproduced in labour law’s epistemology, evidencing its coloniality. We conclude with a call to embrace epistemic pluralism as crucial to developing labour law that reflects and facilitates heterogeneous livelihoods and ecopolitical justice. Keywords: Coloniality, Racial Capitalism, Labour and Land, Socio-Ecology, Environment, Social Reproduction, Decolonial Thinking, Dissident Epistemology, Legal Pluralism 1 INTRODUCTION The existential threat posed by anthropogenic climate change is a powerful indictment of contemporary capitalism, with ecopolitics emerging as a key area of contestation that reaches beyond environmental movements to encompass various reformist causes and counter-hegemonic struggles. 1 Workers and labour movements have also stepped onto the ecopolitical terrain, not least since the climate crisis and the ongoing policy efforts to address it inevitably affect many people’s conditions of work while threatening the viability of livelihoods for others entirely. Exemplary of labour’s engagements are demands for transitional justice for Zbyszewska, Ania & Maximo, Flavia . ‘Rethinking the Labour-Environment (Land) Nexus: Beyond Coloniality, Towards New Epistemologies for Labour Law’. International Journal of Comparative Labour Law and Industrial Relations 39, no. 3&4 (2023): 293–314. © 2023 Kluwer Law International BV, The Netherlands * Carleton University, Department of Law and Legal Studies. Email: ania.zbyszewska@carleton.ca ** Federal University of Ouro Preto, Department of Law. Email ID: flavia.pereira@ufop.edu.br 1 Stefania Barca, Forces of Reproduction: Notes for a Counter-Hegemonic Anthropocene (Elements in Environmental Humanities) (Cambridge University Press 2020); Nancy Fraser, Climates of Capital, (127) New Left Rev. (Jan./Feb. 2021).