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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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Lee Zeldin is upending the mission of the agency largely in secret.
Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin said earlier this week that he had canceled more than 400 grants “across nine unnecessary programs.”
What were those unnecessary programs? Why were they deemed unnecessary? The Trump administration refuses to say.
This is the fourth round of grant cancellations that Zeldin, working “hand-in-hand” with Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, has announced, which together will “save” the American people more than $1.9 billion in funds. After contacting the EPA four times over the course of a week for more information on the grants in question and getting no response at all, the agency finally instructed me to “refer to the March 10 announcement,” which doesn’t contain any additional details about which grants were canceled, “and to the Department of Government Efficiency’s webpage for additional updates.”
The efficiency department website has not yet been updated to reflect the more than 400 grants that were canceled on Monday. The previous rounds of cancellations are listed by date and amount, but there is no information about which programs the funds were from or whether they were already under contract.
“The claims of these grants being unnecessary, or wasteful, or saving American taxpayers funding, in my mind, is complete misinformation,” David Cash, the former EPA regional administrator for New England under the Biden administration, told me. “These grants were created because of statutes passed by Congress.”
The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act gave the EPA more than $100 billion to spend across more than 70 programs. By the end of last year, about 88% of appropriated funds had been awarded to cities, states, tribes, researchers, nonprofits, and companies. “The EPA was given both the authority and the requirement to invest federal taxpayer dollars into projects that are going to bring down energy costs for families, grow clean energy jobs, make the air cleaner for communities,” said Cash. “The real savings are in energy costs that families would have been able to benefit from.”
Zeldin’s announcements are an escalation of President Trump’s “freeze” and review of funding for climate change and DEI-related programs. Despite a federal judge issuing a temporary restraining order on the freeze in February, followed by a preliminary injunction last week, the administration has continued to lock out grant recipients from the government’s payment system, and now, apparently, cancel grants altogether with no explanation. In refusing to comply with the court’s orders, Trump is teeing up a Supreme Court challenge to the Impoundment Control Act, a 50-year-old law that says the president can’t revoke funds without requesting permission from Congress.
Without knowing which grants Zeldin is trying to cancel, we can’t know for sure whether they would have helped consumers save money, created jobs, or produced cleaner air. But Zeldin appears to be scrubbing that last goal — arguably the entire purpose of the EPA — from the agency’s mission statement. On Wednesday, he announced a plan to “reconsider” dozens of environmental rules in “the biggest deregulatory action in U.S. history.” Since its inception, the EPA’s mission has been to “protect human health and the environment;” Zeldin, by contrast, said his priorities were to “lower the cost of buying a car, heating a home and running a business.”
After scouring a social media-like feed on the efficiency department homepage, I found information on just two of the targeted grants:
Cash questioned the logic of canceling an effort to track spending. “That makes for efficient government. We should know where we’re spending our money and the impact that it’s having,” he said. “And shouldn’t we want to be investing in those areas that have suffered the highest asthma rates or have had a history of water pollution? Why wouldn’t we want to invest in those communities?”
The sudden cancellation of billions of dollars in government funding with no disclosure as to what the money was earmarked for is in stark contrast to President Trump’s pledge to have “the most transparent Administration in history,” as well as the EPA’s assertion that it “is committed to accountability and transparency for the American people.”
The grant cancellations come on top of Zeldin’s much-publicized termination of the $20 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, a program created by Congress to set up nonprofit lending authorities that would finance clean energy projects around the country. Zeldin claims to have “identified material deficiencies which pose an unacceptable risk to the lawful execution of these grants,” but has given no explanation as to what those deficiencies are. The closest thing to a suggestion of impropriety has been the fact that the money was being managed by an outside institution, an arrangement that the federal government has used to disburse funds for decades, including under the previous Trump administration.
In a letter to the Department of Justice and FBI on Tuesday, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island requested evidence predicating a criminal investigation of the GGRF. He accused the Trump administration of “purposefully misusing the tools of law enforcement, and pursuing false allegations of criminal conduct, with the improper purpose to wrongfully freeze assets appropriated by Congress and obligated to designated recipients.”
Whitehouse held a hearing on Trump’s funding freeze on Wednesday, during which he accused Trump and Musk of “stealing from the American people to pay for tax cuts for the ultra-wealthy” and deeming this “gangster government.”
During the hearing, Caley Edgerly, the president and CEO of a bus dealership in Virginia, described the “chaos” caused by a freeze on grants for electric school buses. His company ordered 48 buses for five school districts that had been awarded funding. He’s worried about interest on those orders piling up, his ability to make payroll, and being left holding the bag. He’s also worried about the impact on manufacturers, who have invested in the materials, batteries, transmissions, and inverters to deliver on these electric bus orders. “The entire industry, all school bus manufacturers, by my estimation, has about a billion dollars invested in these materials,” he said. “They’re sitting on the shelf.” On top of that, he said, the local utility, Dominion, has spent about a million dollars on chargers for the school districts to charge the buses.
It’s unclear whether the electric bus grants that Edgerly discussed are among those Zeldin is attempting to cancel.
On deregulation, climate grants, and green infrastructure
Current conditions: Health officials in Mumbai are warning vulnerable residents to take care as temperatures hover around 104 degrees Fahrenheit • Storm Konrad is battering Portugal and Spain with torrential rain • Cloudy weather is likely to spoil many Americans’ plans to catch tomorrow morning’s lunar eclipse.
Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin yesterday launched an attack on U.S. environmental regulations, announcing a review of dozens of agency rules aimed at safeguarding the water and air, and the health of all Americans. In what he called the “biggest deregulation action in U.S. history,” Zeldin said he was “driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion” in the name of unleashing American energy and bringing down costs. As The New York Timesnoted, Zeldin’s announcement did not once refer to protecting the environment or public health, “twin tenets that have guided the agency since its founding in 1970.”
Among the many rules and regulations up for reconsideration are:
Environmental advocates swiftly and forcefully condemned the announcement. Former EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy called it “the most disastrous day in EPA history.”
Amanda Leland, executive director of Environmental Defense Fund, said “those seeking to make America healthier should be deeply concerned.”
Margie Alt, director of the Climate Action Campaign, said “the EPA has officially abandoned its mission to protect health and the environment.”
“The scale and scope and speed with which this administration is attacking environmental safeguards is unprecedented,” Jason Rylander, the legal director at the Center for Biological Diversity’s Climate Law Institute told NBC News.
One of the EPA’s most concerning announcements is its plan to reconsider the agency’s 2009 science-backed conclusion that six planet-warming gases, including carbon dioxide and methane, are a danger to public health. This finding is the basis for federal climate regulations, and gutting it would significantly curb the EPA’s ability to limit greenhouse gas emissions. Any attempt by the EPA to undo the endangerment finding will no doubt be met by legal challenges, and the agency would face an uphill battle to demonstrate that greenhouse gases are not a public health threat. “You’ve got to explain away decades of statements by every administration that there are negative consequences of climate change that can be reasonably anticipated,” Jonathan H. Adler, a conservative legal expert and professor of environmental law at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, told the Times.
There are a few updates on the Trump administration’s escalating battle against nonprofits that were granted some $20 billion under the Inflation Reduction Act’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. Documents show that Citibank, where the money was parked, was told to freeze the funds by the FBI, and the FBI is investigating the nonprofits for possible criminal charges of wire fraud and conspiracy to defraud the United States. Earlier this week, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announced he had terminated the funds, which had been approved by Congress. Several of the grantees have launched lawsuits against the EPA and Citibank.
Yesterday a judge in one of the cases gave the administration until Monday to present evidence of fraud, waste, or abuse that justifies terminating the grant contracts. “You can’t even tell me what the evidence of malfeasance is,” U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan told a lawyer for the Trump administration during a hearing. “You have to have some kind of evidence.”
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The Department of Transportation has reportedly told its officials to pause green infrastructure projects funded by Biden-era grants while the agency scrutinizes them to determine whether they “advance climate, equity, and other priorities counter to the administration's executive orders.” The review will identify for cancellation any projects aimed at “equity analysis, green infrastructure, bicycle infrastructure [and] EV and/or EV-charging infrastructure.”
In case you missed it: Breakthrough Energy, the climate philanthropy organization founded by Bill Gates, is closing its policy and advocacy office and has laid off much of its staff in Washington, D.C., Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer reported yesterday. The layoffs will effectively gut an organization central to the effort to enact the package of clean energy tax cuts passed during the Biden administration. They will also silence one of the few environmental nonprofits that supported nuclear energy, direct air capture, and other new zero-carbon energy innovations. More than three dozen employees across the United States and Europe are affected by the layoffs, including the office’s senior leadership. “A major chapter in climate giving has ended,” Meyer said.
A new four-lane highway is being carved through Brazil’s Amazon rainforest to make way for an influx of traffic from the COP30 climate summit in Belém later this year.
Breakthrough Energy is winding down its policy and advocacy office, depriving the Inflation Reduction Act of a powerful defender.
This is part of a Heatmap series on the “green freeze” under Trump.
A major chapter in climate giving has ended.
Breakthrough Energy, the climate philanthropy organization founded by Bill Gates, is closing its policy and advocacy office and has laid off much of its staff in Washington, D.C., Heatmap News has learned.
The layoffs will effectively gut an organization central to the effort to enact the package of clean energy tax cuts passed during the Biden administration. They will also silence one of the few environmental nonprofits that supported nuclear energy, direct air capture, and other new zero-carbon energy innovations.
More than three dozen employees across the United States and Europe are affected by the layoffs, including the office’s senior leadership.
The layoffs, first reported by The New York Times, come amid a wider billionaire pullback from donating to climate causes. The president and CEO of the Bezos Earth Fund departed last month, and the fund has yet to name a permanent replacement. Gates had already significantly diminished his climate giving earlier this year, slashing Breakthrough Energy’s grantmaking budget last month.
Gates’s investments in clean energy companies do not seem affected by the cutback. Breakthrough Energy’s venture capital and investment arm, its fellows program, and its efforts to catalyze new green products remain intact.
“Gates and Breakthrough Energy remain committed to advancing the clean energy innovations needed to address climate change,” a Breakthrough Energy spokesperson told me in a statement. “Our work is focused on accelerating the transition to a cleaner, more prosperous world.”
The closure of Breakthrough’s policy arm — and the presumed end of its grant-making operation — will alter the world of climate nonprofits. Breakthrough Energy was unusual among environmental and energy nonprofits for its enthusiastic support of all forms of zero-carbon energy, including nuclear fission, geothermal power, carbon capture and removal, and nuclear fusion. Many other prominent nonprofits — even some that have shifted to principally fighting against climate change, like the Sierra Club — are more traditional and conservation-minded, and actively oppose the expansion of nuclear power.
“The closure of Breakthrough is indicative of a broader trend that often happens when there’s a change in power in Washington, which is a retreat from federal policy and also often a retreat from the center,” Josh Freed, the senior vice president for climate and energy at Third Way, told me. The Third Way energy team was funded in part by grants from Breakthrough Energy.
“Breakthrough played a critical role in elevating and making clean energy innovation policy very mainstream. That’s going to continue — in part because of … the partners who they brought together, who remain committed to working on this,” Freed added.
The unwinding of Breakthrough Energy’s policy and advocacy arm means that the group will not see the coming battle over the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean tax cuts, which some Republican lawmakers hope to repeal later this year as part of President Trump’s broader package of tax cuts. Gates was seen as instrumental to the lobbying effort to pass the IRA, meeting with Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia and other lawmakers to support the 2022 legislation.
In an exclusive interview with Heatmap News in 2023, Gates warned that re-electing Donald Trump could derail the Inflation Reduction Act’s effectiveness.
“Right now, companies are responding to the IRA incentives. But you know, if you get Trump elected, and he really gets rid of it, there’s a lot of business plans that will [make people] feel foolish,” he said.
Even if Democrats ultimately enact new provisions similar to the IRA after Trump leaves office, Gates said, the damage of repealing the law would be permanent. “People [will] say, ‘Well, you’re asking me to make a 30-year investment. And half the time, I’m stupid.’”
Just over a year and one election later, Gates reportedly had a more than three-hour dinner with Trump at Mar-a-Lago. He later told Emma Tucker, The Wall Street Journal’s editor in chief, that he was “frankly impressed” by the president-elect.