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And that’s a problem for the United Auto Workers.
The United Auto Workers’ six-week strike has won large concessions from the Big Three American automakers, including substantial wage hikes.
But in order to win the war over the future of unionized labor in the auto industry, the UAW will need to do something even harder than extracting raises from Ford, Stellantis, and GM: It will have to grow the union by bringing foreign automaker and non-union workforces into the UAW, something it has largely failed to accomplish. Today, it only represents around 15% of the roughly one million autoworkers in the United States.
The UAW leadership had tread a narrow path on electrification. Its president Shawn Fain has said he and the union support it, but the UAW has harshly criticized the Biden administration when subsidies go to non-union battery plants. Conservatives have tried to drive a wedge between the UAW and the Democratic Party by arguing that electrification will lead to American autoworkers being displaced by cars and batteries from overseas.
The UAW is well aware of the risk that electrification poses to its workforce and it made demands during its strike accordingly. The union won an important concession around EVs, easing the way for battery plant workers to be represented by the union, even though the plants are often joint ventures. This means that the UAW’s presence within the Big Three will not be fissured by the electrification of the American auto fleet. And at Stellantis, the UAW even won a commitment to add “over a thousand jobs” at a planned battery plant in Belvidere, Illinois.
But despite decades of trying, the union has failed to organize foreign automakers’ factories in the South or Tesla, let alone startup electric vehicle companies like Rivian. And it’s these automakers and these regions that are seeing big increases in investment thanks to government-encouraged electrification, with subsidies for the purchase of vehicles made in the United States.
The union has dismissed fretting from the Big Three — especially at Ford — that a generous deal could make them uncompetitive compared to foreign and non-union automakers.
“The days of the UAW and Ford being a team to fight other companies are over. We won’t be used in this phony competition. We will always and forever be on the side of working people everywhere. Non-union autoworkers are not the enemy, those are our future union family,” UAW president Shawn Fain in live stream. “We’re going to organize non-union auto companies like we’ve never organized before.”
Any future organizing efforts will be an uphill battle for the UAW, but one that offers large potential gains in membership and influence, especially as the American auto sector electrifies.
The bulk of American EV purchases are from non-union automakers. These automakers are electrifying the fastest, and they’re also perfectly happy to build these vehicles in the United States, taking advantage of the nexus of subsidies and incentives to do so.
About half of the EV market is controlled by Tesla, according to Cox Automotive, while traditional automakers with at least 10% of their sales coming from EVs are all foreign. (Even though Ford sells the second most electric vehicles, it only delivers about one tenth of what Tesla does).
In short, when someone in the U.S. buys an electric crossover or sedan, they are likely buying from a non-union automaker. But when they buy a pickup truck, there’s a good chance it rolled off a line worked by UAW members.
In the U.S., according to Kelly Blue Book, Tesla has sold 494,000 cars in the first nine months of this year. Ford, by contrast, has sold 47,000 electric vehicles so far this year and GM has sold around 56,000 battery electric vehicles. Stellantis doesn’t even sell an all-electric car yet. (It has sold around 98,000 plug-in hybrids this year though.)
During the first seven months of the year, only two of the top 10 battery-electric vehicles in the United States were made by the Big Three, according to a Morgan Stanley report. These were Ford’s Mustang Mach-E and the Chevrolet Bolt.
Another two cars on the list — the Jeep Grand Cherokee 4xe and Wrangler 4xe — are plug-in hybrids made by Stellantis.
But the list was otherwise dominated by models — such as the Tesla Model Y, Rivian R1T, and Hyundai Ioniq 5 — that are made either abroad or in a non-union American factory. Most of those vehicles are nonetheless eligible for some or all of a $7,500 federal subsidy for lease or purchase.
That deviates from what the Biden administration had once hoped. While early drafts of what would become the Inflation Reduction Act restricted tax credits to union-made vehicles, the provisions were stripped out at the insistence of Joe Manchin, the Democratic senator from West Virginia. (Toyota, which is not unionized, operates an engine and transmission plant in his state.)
In other words, the majority of fully electric vehicles sold in America today are not made by UAW members, and nothing about the country’s EV policy per se will force that to change.
And precisely because the U.S. auto industry is already heavily non-union, any burst of new manufacturing will tend to flow to non-union shops, which is largely what’s occurred as the American auto fleet becomes electrified.
Electric Volkswagens roll off the line in Chattanooga, while Tesla churns out cars for the U.S. market in Fremont, California, and Austin, Texas. BMW and Honda are planning battery factories in South Carolina and Ohio, respectively, and Mercedes already has one in Alabama.
In the 10 largest UAW union elections since 2000, the UAW has won six and lost four. Of those losses, three were at foreign automaker factories in the South, including at the Chattanooga Volkswagen plant in 2019, where the union had previously lost a vote in 2014. The UAW’s big recent organizing victories, which grow the size of the union’s membership, have largely been on university campuses, organizing graduate student workers at Harvard, Columbia, and the University of Southern California.
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The nonprofit laid off 36 employees, or 28% of its headcount.
The Trump administration’s funding freeze has hit the leading electrification nonprofit Rewiring America, which announced Thursday that it will be cutting its workforce by 28%, or 36 employees. In a letter to the team, the organization’s cofounder and CEO Ari Matusiak placed the blame squarely on the Trump administration’s attempts to claw back billions in funding allocated through the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund.
“The volatility we face is not something we created: it is being directed at us,” Matusiak wrote in his public letter to employees. Along with a group of four other housing, climate, and community organizations, collectively known as Power Forward Communities, Rewiring America was the recipient of a $2 billion GGRF grant last April to help decarbonize American homes.
Now, the future of that funding is being held up in court. GGRF funds have been frozen since mid-February as Lee Zeldin’s Environmental Protection Agency has tried to rescind $20 billion of the program’s $27 billion total funding, an effort that a federal judge blocked in March. While that judge, Tanya S. Chutkan, called the EPA’s actions “arbitrary and capricious,” for now the money remains locked up in a Citibank account. This has wreaked havoc on organizations such as Rewiring America, which structured projects and staffing decisions around the grants.
“Since February, we have been unable to access our competitively and lawfully awarded grant dollars,” Matusiak wrote in a LinkedIn post on Thursday. “We have been the subject of baseless and defamatory attacks. We are facing purposeful volatility designed to prevent us from fulfilling our obligations and from delivering lower energy costs and cheaper electricity to millions of American households across the country.”
Matusiak wrote that while “Rewiring America is not going anywhere,” the organization is planning to address said volatility by tightening its focus on working with states to lower electricity costs, building a digital marketplace for households to access electric upgrades, and courting investment from third parties such as hyperscale cloud service providers, utilities, and manufacturers. Matusiak also said Rewiring America will be restructured “into a tighter formation,” such that it can continue to operate even if the GGRF funding never comes through.
Power Forward Communities is also continuing to fight for its money in court. Right there with it are the Climate United Fund and the Coalition for Green Capital, which were awarded nearly $7 billion and $5 billion, respectively, through the GGRF.
What specific teams within Rewiring America are being hit by these layoffs isn’t yet clear, though presumably everyone let go has already been notified. As the announcement went live Thursday afternoon, it stated that employees “will receive an email within the next few minutes informing you of whether your role has been impacted.”
“These are volatile and challenging times,” Matusiak wrote on LinkedIn. “It remains on all of us to create a better world we can all share. More so than ever.”
A battle ostensibly over endangered shrimp in Kentucky
A national park is fighting a large-scale solar farm over potential impacts to an endangered shrimp – what appears to be the first real instance of a federal entity fighting a solar project under the Trump administration.
At issue is Geenex Solar’s 100-megawatt Wood Duck solar project in Barren County, Kentucky, which would be sited in the watershed of Mammoth Cave National Park. In a letter sent to Kentucky power regulators in April, park superintendent Barclay Trimble claimed the National Park Service is opposing the project because Geenex did not sufficiently answer questions about “irreversible harm” it could potentially pose to an endangered shrimp that lives in “cave streams fed by surface water from this solar project.”
Trimble wrote these frustrations boiled after “multiple attempts to have a dialogue” with Geenex “over the past several months” about whether battery storage would exist at the site, what sorts of batteries would be used, and to what extent leak prevention would be considered in development of the Wood Duck project.
“The NPS is choosing to speak out in opposition of this project and requesting the board to consider environmental protection of these endangered species when debating the merits of this project,” stated the letter. “We look forward to working with the Board to ensure clean water in our national park for the safety of protection of endangered species.”
On first blush, this letter looks like normal government environmental stewardship. It’s true the cave shrimp’s population decline is likely the result of pollution into these streams, according to NPS data. And it was written by career officials at the National Park Service, not political personnel.
But there’s a few things that are odd about this situation and there’s reason to believe this may be the start of a shift in federal policy direction towards a more critical view of solar energy’s environmental impacts.
First off, Geenex has told local media that batteries are not part of the project and that “several voicemails have been exchanged” between the company and representatives of the national park, a sign that the company and the park have not directly spoken on this matter. That’s nothing like the sort of communication breakdown described in the letter. Then there’s a few things about this letter that ring strange, including the fact Fish and Wildlife Service – not the Park Service – ordinarily weighs in on endangered species impacts, and there’s a contradiction in referencing the Endangered Species Act at a time when the Trump administration is trying to significantly pare back application of the statute in the name of a faster permitting process. All of this reminds me of the Trump administration’s attempts to supposedly protect endangered whales by stopping offshore wind projects.
I don’t know whether this solar farm’s construction will indeed impact wildlife in the surrounding area. Perhaps it may. But the letter strikes me as fascinating regardless, given the myriad other ways federal agencies – including the Park Service – are standing down from stringent environmental protection enforcement under Trump 2.0.
Notably, I reviewed the other public comments filed against the project and they cite a litany of other reasons – but also state that because the county itself has no local zoning ordinance, there’s no way for local residents or municipalities opposed to the project to really stop it. Heatmap Pro predicts that local residents would be particularly sensitive to projects taking up farmland and — you guessed it — harming wildlife.
Barren County is in the process of developing a restrictive ordinance in the wake of this project, but it won’t apply to Wood Duck. So opponents’ best shot at stopping this project – which will otherwise be online as soon as next year – might be relying on the Park Service to intervene.
And more on the week’s most important conflicts around renewable energy.
1. Dukes County, Massachusetts – The Supreme Court for the second time declined to take up a legal challenge to the Vineyard Wind offshore project, indicating that anti-wind activists' efforts to go directly to the high court have run aground.
2. Brooklyn/Staten Island, New York – The battery backlash in the NYC boroughs is getting louder – and stranger – by the day.
3. Baltimore County, Maryland – It’s Ben Carson vs. the farmer near Baltimore, as a solar project proposed on the former Housing and Urban Development secretary’s land is coming under fire from his neighbors.
4. Mecklenburg County, Virginia – Landowners in this part of Virginia have reportedly received fake “good neighbor agreement” letters claiming to be from solar developer Longroad Energy, offering large sums of cash to people neighboring the potential project.
5. York County, South Carolina – Silfab Solar is now in a bitter public brawl with researchers at the University of South Carolina after they released a report claiming that a proposed solar manufacturing plant poses a significant public risk in the event of a chemical emissions release.
6. Jefferson Davis County, Mississippi – Apex Clean Energy’s Bluestone Solar project was just approved by the Mississippi Public Service Commission with no objections against the project.
7. Plaquemine Parish, Louisiana – NextEra’s Coastal Prairie solar project got an earful from locals in this parish that sits within the Baton Rouge metro area, indicating little has changed since the project was first proposed two years ago.
8. Huntington County, Indiana – Well it turns out Heatmap’s Most At-Risk Projects of the Energy Transition has been right again: the Paddlefish solar project has now been indefinitely blocked by this county under a new moratorium on the project area in tandem with a new restrictive land use ordinance on solar development overall.
9. Albany County, Wyoming – The Rail Tie wind farm is back in the news again, as county regulators say landowners feel misled by Repsol, the project’s developer.
10. Klickitat County, Washington – Cypress Creek Renewables is on a lucky streak with a solar project near Goldendale, Washington, getting to bypass local opposition from the nearby Yakama Nation.
11. Pinal County, Arizona – A large utility-scale NextEra solar farm has been rejected by this county’s Board of Supervisors.