Are green jobs better jobs? Lessons from the French labour market

The “good green jobs” narrative beyond promises

By the late 2000s, “green jobs” had emerged as a source of hope for overcoming the Great Recession by combining environmental sustainability with economic prosperity. In 2008, the UNEP published a seminal report that popularized the concept while emphasizing that “green jobs need to be decent work, i.e. good jobs which offer adequate wages, safe working conditions, job security, reasonable career prospects, and worker rights”.

Yet this assumption (or aspiration) of green jobs being “good jobs by default” is far from self-evident. The key issue is precisely whether this claim is actually supported by evidence. Addressing this question is all the more important since good and attractive green jobs could both foster the reallocation of labour necessary to the ecological transition but also strengthen public support for this transition. In our article, we test this hypothesis using French labour market data.

Studying green job quality empirically

Following the French national framework, we define green jobs as occupations whose purpose and skills contribute to measuring, preventing, controlling, or correcting damage to the environment. In practice, it consists of a list of more than 140 green occupations, ranging from park and garden workers to waste sorting agents, energy engineers and environmental consultants.

To assess quality, we drew on the French 2021/2022 Labour Force Survey, a large and representative dataset covering nearly 47,000 wage-earners. Job quality was measured across multiple dimensions: wages, contract type (permanent vs. temporary, full-time vs. part-time), working time arrangements (regular, atypical, remote, etc.) and access to training. The goal was to move beyond normative claims and look directly at what green job conditions look like in practice.

A lower quality… but not for everyone

Our central finding is that, in France, green jobs are on average associated with lower job quality than non-green jobs. This job quality penalty is clear for wages and contract types. Green workers earn around €155 less per month than their non-green counterparts with comparable characteristics. They are also less likely to hold permanent contracts and full-time jobs, which are important dimensions of job quality. However, they are a bit better off in terms of working hours: they experience more regular hours and less frequent atypical hours (night, evening or weekend work).

Most importantly, the penalty in terms of wages and contract types is not evenly distributed. It is concentrated on low-skilled (blue-collar and clerical) green workers who experience both a significant wage penalty and weaker socio-economic security compared to low-skilled workers in non-green jobs. By contrast, high-skilled green workers face either comparable or better job quality than their non-green counterparts, particularly in terms of autonomy over working hours and access to remote work.

Green jobs are not all the same: evidence of strong heterogeneity

Beyond these average results, our analysis reveals striking heterogeneity within the green jobs category. Using classification techniques, we identified four distinct clusters of green jobs:

1. Good green jobs (22% of green workers) – high wages, stable contracts, full-time work, and access to training; dominated by highly qualified workers, from the public sector and big firms
2. Green stable average quality jobs (61%, the largest group) – stable full-time employment but modest pay; mostly blue-collar workers employed by territorial authorities
3. Green odd jobs (10%) – very low wages, irregular hours, small firms; often trainee or apprenticeship contracts, potentially transitory but precarious
4. Precarious green jobs (7%) – involuntary part-time, fixed-term contracts, very low earnings, no training and no control over working hours

This heterogeneity challenges the idea of a single “green jobs model”. Conversely, some green jobs offer relatively good conditions, while others reproduce or even deepen labour market inequalities.

Implications for inequality and the just transition

These findings carry important implications for the politics of the ecological transition. We already know that climate policies can be regressive in their distributional effects. In France, for example, the Mouvement des gilets jaunes was, in part, a revolt against energy costs that fell disproportionately on working-class households. Our results suggest that the employment dimension of the transition may reinforce this dynamic if left unaddressed, since low qualified green jobs are at risk of lower quality. They call for accompanying environmental policies with labour and skills policies.

Rethinking policy assumptions around green employment

Unfortunately, green jobs are not “good jobs by default”. Our research shows that being “green” does not automatically confer quality – institutional context, employer type, sector, and the underlying valuation of environmental work all shape outcomes. Some green occupations, particularly those involving “dirty work” or “care for nature” may be structurally undervalued.

It does not mean that green jobs cannot become good jobs. However, achieving this goal requires proactive policies responses that need to be targeted and specific: conditional subsidies tied to job quality standards, support for collective bargaining in green sectors, recognition of green qualifications through certifications or degrees, expanded training to diversify tasks for low-skilled workers, and a more deliberate use of the state’s role as a major employer of green workers.

Ecological transition is a political project. Its success depends on the support of workers and consequently on our ability to make green jobs good jobs for all.

For reference:

• Assessing the quality of green jobs: An empirical analysis of French data
• “Métiers verts”, list of green jobs following the French national framework.

• Green Jobs: Towards Decent Work in a Sustainable, Low-Carbon World