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The United Auto Workers’ contract with the Big Three automakers is almost up. Its replacement is going to be hotly contested.
One of the dirty little secrets of the electric vehicle boom is that many of its workers are paid less and enjoy fewer benefits than those who manufacture the nation’s gas guzzlers. But if unions have their way, that won’t be the case for long.
On September 14, the United Auto Workers' contract with the Big Three automakers — GM, Ford, and Stellantis — will expire. Negotiations for a new agreement are set to begin in July, and electric vehicle jobs will be a defining issue with potential to put the 380,000-member union on strike this fall. The union’s leadership team held a town hall late last month where they laid out the stakes.
“To be clear, I and the UAW leadership support this transition, but it must be a just transition,” said vice president of the union Mike Booth. “These must not only be union jobs, but they must be jobs that maintain the wages, benefits, and safety standards that generations of UAW members have fought for.”
So far, the industry has been trending in the opposite direction. Booth pointed to the Ultium battery cell manufacturing plant in Lordstown, Ohio, which is a joint venture between GM and LG. Workers there currently start at $16.50 per hour, and can work their way up to $20 per hour after seven years. That’s well below the $32 per hour that union workers made at a nearby GM assembly plant that closed in 2019. “Meanwhile the company is receiving billions in government subsidies. This is not a just transition, and this is not an acceptable standard to set,” said Booth.
The Big Three are facing pressure to keep EV costs down amid inflation, materials scarcity, and increasing competition from international automakers — particularly from China. They also must contend with the fact that workers for other preeminent players in the nascent industry — Tesla and Rivian — aren’t unionized, although movements are cropping up to change that. While Elon Musk argues Tesla pays its workers more than their unionized counterparts, his company has been accused of serious labor violations and the National Labor Relations Board has ruled it illegally fired a worker involved in labor organizing.
The upcoming negotiations are a bellwether for many on the left's belief that the transition to clean energy can and should “create millions of good, high-wage jobs.” But as Booth’s remark suggests, union members aren’t just frustrated with the automakers, but with Biden. His signature climate policy, the Inflation Reduction Act, has begun fueling the growth of a domestic electric vehicle manufacturing industry with billions of dollars in incentives and little support for organized labor.
According to a database of clean manufacturing announcements maintained by Jack Conness, a policy analyst at the nonprofit Energy Innovation, companies have announced upwards of $70 billion in investments in U.S. battery and electric vehicle manufacturing since the law was passed.
The IRA has been hailed by labor advocates for including wage and apprenticeship requirements for many of its subsidies. But those provisions are geared at construction jobs, not manufacturing jobs. For example, while automakers must pay prevailing wages and hire apprentices to build their battery factories in order to qualify for the full “Advanced Energy Project Credit,” they do not have to make similar commitments to the workers who will actually make the batteries.
The only relevant labor requirements for those workers came in federal guidance on the tax credit for the manufacturing of clean energy parts that was published last month. It noted that the Internal Revenue Service would only consider projects recommended by the Department of Energy. That agency must base its endorsements on a set of criteria that includes having a “clear and appropriately robust plan” to engage with labor unions.
These kinds of provisions, like requiring developers to put their plans for workforce and community engagement in their applications, may help give unions a leg up. David Madland, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a liberal D.C. policy think tank, pointed to the recent unionization of the Blue Bird electric school bus factory in rural Georgia. The company received funding from the EPA that required it to be “committed to remain neutral in any organizing campaign.”
“The Biden administration is doing a lot to ensure the jobs created by industrial policy are good jobs,” Madland told me in an email. “But more work needs to be done.”
Recently-elected insurgent president of the UAW Shawn Fain sent a memo to the union’s 380,000 members in early May warning that the shift to EVs was “at serious risk of becoming a race to the bottom.” He stated that the union would not endorse Biden for re-election until he does more to support labor standards in the transition.
It’s not yet clear whether the transition to EVs will result in a net loss or gain of manufacturing jobs. Industry studies have noted that electric vehicles have fewer parts, and will therefore require fewer workers, than internal combustion engine vehicles. Ford CEO Jim Farley made waves in November when he said the job required 40% less labor, a statistic that echoes a similar warning by the UAW back in 2020
But some researchers and analysts have contested the idea. Carnegie Mellon engineers analyzed production data from leading automotive manufacturers and found that although EVs have fewer parts, their components collectively require more labor-hours than conventional vehicle parts. But the researchers note that despite this, the shift to electric vehicles could still lead to job losses in certain regions depending on where companies choose to locate new battery factories.
While the IRA has seemingly given automakers enough incentives not to move these facilities abroad, many of them are building their plants in southern states where organized labor has always struggled to gain a foothold.
Outside analysts predict the negotiations will break down and lead to a strike. Four years ago, when the union went on strike against GM for 40 days during the last round of negotiations, it cost the company $3.6 billion. Workers lost nearly $1 billion in wages.
UAW leadership began to prepare its members for that possibility during its town hall last month.
“I want to be clear on this, and I know this might sound crazy, but the choice of whether or not we go on strike is up to the Big Three,” said UAW Secretary-Treasurer Margaret Mock. “We are clear about what we want.”
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Did a battery plant disaster in California spark a PR crisis on the East Coast?
Battery fire fears are fomenting a storage backlash in New York City – and it risks turning into fresh PR hell for the industry.
Aggrieved neighbors, anti-BESS activists, and Republican politicians are galvanizing more opposition to battery storage in pockets of the five boroughs where development is actually happening, capturing rapt attention from other residents as well as members of the media. In Staten Island, a petition against a NineDot Energy battery project has received more than 1,300 signatures in a little over two months. Two weeks ago, advocates – backed by representatives of local politicians including Rep. Nicole Mallitokis – swarmed a public meeting on the project, getting a local community board to vote unanimously against the project.
According to Heatmap Pro’s proprietary modeling of local opinion around battery storage, there are likely twice as many strong opponents than strong supporters in the area:
Heatmap Pro
Yesterday, leaders in the Queens community of Hempstead enacted a year-long ban on BESS for at least a year after GOP Rep. Anthony D’Esposito, other local politicians, and a slew of aggrieved residents testified in favor of a moratorium. The day before, officials in the Long Island town of Southampton said at a public meeting they were ready to extend their battery storage ban until they enshrined a more restrictive development code – even as many energy companies testified against doing so, including NineDot and solar plus storage developer Key Capture Energy. Yonkers also recently extended its own battery moratorium.
This flurry of activity follows the Moss Landing battery plant fire in California, a rather exceptional event caused by tech that was extremely old and a battery chemistry that is no longer popular in the sector. But opponents of battery storage don’t care – they’re telling their friends to stop the community from becoming the next Moss Landing. The longer this goes on without a fulsome, strident response from the industry, the more communities may rally against them. Making matters even worse, as I explained in The Fight earlier this year, we’re seeing battery fire concerns impact solar projects too.
“This is a huge problem for solar. If [fires] start regularly happening, communities are going to say hey, you can’t put that there,” Derek Chase, CEO of battery fire smoke detection tech company OnSight Technologies, told me at Intersolar this week. “It’s going to be really detrimental.”
I’ve long worried New York City in particular may be a powder keg for the battery storage sector given its omnipresence as a popular media environment. If it happens in New York, the rest of the world learns about it.
I feel like the power of the New York media environment is not lost on Staten Island borough president Vito Fossella, a de facto leader of the anti-BESS movement in the boroughs. Last fall I interviewed Fossella, whose rhetorical strategy often leans on painting Staten Island as an overburdened community. (At least 13 battery storage projects have been in the works in Staten Island according to recent reporting. Fossella claims that is far more than any amount proposed elsewhere in the city.) He often points to battery blazes that happen elsewhere in the country, as well as fears about lithium-ion scooters that have caught fire. His goal is to enact very large setback distance requirements for battery storage, at a minimum.
“You can still put them throughout the city but you can’t put them next to people’s homes – what happens if one of these goes on fire next to a gas station,” he told me at the time, chalking the wider city government’s reluctance to capitulate on batteries to a “political problem.”
Well, I’m going to hold my breath for the real political problem in waiting – the inevitable backlash that happens when Mallitokis, D’Esposito, and others take this fight to Congress and the national stage. I bet that’s probably why American Clean Power just sent me a notice for a press briefing on battery safety next week …
And more of the week’s top conflicts around renewable energy.
1. Queen Anne’s County, Maryland – They really don’t want you to sign a solar lease out in the rural parts of this otherwise very pro-renewables state.
2. Logan County, Ohio – Staff for the Ohio Power Siting Board have recommended it reject Open Road Renewables’ Grange Solar agrivoltaics project.
3. Bandera County, Texas – On a slightly brighter note for solar, it appears that Pine Gate Renewables’ Rio Lago solar project might just be safe from county restrictions.
Here’s what else we’re watching…
In Illinois, Armoracia Solar is struggling to get necessary permits from Madison County.
In Kentucky, the mayor of Lexington is getting into a public spat with East Kentucky Power Cooperative over solar.
In Michigan, Livingston County is now backing the legal challenge to Michigan’s state permitting primacy law.
On the week’s top news around renewable energy policy.
1. IRA funding freeze update – Money is starting to get out the door, finally: the EPA unfroze most of its climate grant funding it had paused after Trump entered office.
2. Scalpel vs. sledgehammer – House Speaker Mike Johnson signaled Republicans in Congress may take a broader approach to repealing the Inflation Reduction Act than previously expected in tax talks.
3. Endangerment in danger – The EPA is reportedly urging the White House to back reversing its 2009 “endangerment” finding on air pollutants and climate change, a linchpin in the agency’s overall CO2 and climate regulatory scheme.