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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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Plus 3 more outstanding questions about this ongoing emergency.
As Los Angeles continued to battle multiple big blazes ripping through some of the most beloved (and expensive) areas of the city on Thursday, a question lingered in the background: What caused the fires in the first place?
Though fires are less common in California during this time of the year, they aren’t unheard of. In early December 2017, power lines sparked the Thomas Fire near Ventura, California, which burned through to mid-January. At the time it was the largest fire in the state since at least the 1930s. Now it’s the ninth-largest. Although that fire was in a more rural area, it ignited for many of the same reasons we’re seeing fires this week.
Read on for everything we know so far about how the fires started.
Five major fires started during the Santa Ana wind event this week:
Officials have not made any statements about the cause of any of the fires yet.
On Thursday morning, Edward Nordskog, a retired fire investigator from the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department, told me it was unlikely they had even begun looking into the root of the biggest and most destructive of the fires in the Pacific Palisades. “They don't start an investigation until it's safe to go into the area where the fire started, and it just hasn't been safe until probably today,” he said.
It can take years to determine the cause of a fire. Investigators did not pinpoint the cause of the Thomas Fire until March 2019, more than two years after it started.
But Nordskog doesn’t think it will take very long this time. It’s easier to narrow down the possibilities for an urban fire because there are typically both witnesses and surveillance footage, he told me. He said the most common causes of wildfires in Los Angeles are power lines and those started by unhoused people. They can also be caused by sparks from vehicles or equipment.
At about 27,000 acres burned, these fires are unlikely to make the charts for the largest in California history. But because they are burning in urban, densely populated, and expensive areas, they could be some of the most devastating. With an estimated 2,000 structures damaged so far, the Eaton and Palisades fires are likely to make the list for most destructive wildfire events in the state.
And they will certainly be at the top for costliest. The Palisades Fire has already been declared a likely contender for the most expensive wildfire in U.S. history. It has destroyed more than 1,000 structures in some of the most expensive zip codes in the country. Between that and the Eaton Fire, Accuweather estimates the damages could reach $57 billion.
While we don’t know the root causes of the ignitions, several factors came together to create perfect fire conditions in Southern California this week.
First, there’s the Santa Ana winds, an annual phenomenon in Southern California, when very dry, high-pressure air gets trapped in the Great Basin and begins escaping westward through mountain passes to lower-pressure areas along the coast. Most of the time, the wind in Los Angeles blows eastward from the ocean, but during a Santa Ana event, it changes direction, picking up speed as it rushes toward the sea.
Jon Keeley, a research scientist with the US Geological Survey and an adjunct professor at the University of California, Los Angeles told me that Santa Ana winds typically blow at maybe 30 to 40 miles per hour, while the winds this week hit upwards of 60 to 70 miles per hour. “More severe than is normal, but not unique,” he said. “We had similar severe winds in 2017 with the Thomas Fire.”
Second, Southern California is currently in the midst of extreme drought. Winter is typically a rainier season, but Los Angeles has seen less than half an inch of rain since July. That means that all the shrubland vegetation in the area is bone-dry. Again, Keeley said, this was not usual, but not unique. Some years are drier than others.
These fires were also not a question of fuel management, Keeley told me. “The fuels are not really the issue in these big fires. It's the extreme winds,” he said. “You can do prescription burning in chaparral and have essentially no impact on Santa Ana wind-driven fires.” As far as he can tell, based on information from CalFire, the Eaton Fire started on an urban street.
While it’s likely that climate change played a role in amplifying the drought, it’s hard to say how big a factor it was. Patrick Brown, a climate scientist at the Breakthrough Institute and adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins University, published a long post on X outlining the factors contributing to the fires, including a chart of historic rainfall during the winter in Los Angeles that shows oscillations between very wet and very dry years over the past eight decades. But climate change is expected to make dry years drier in Los Angeles. “The LA area is about 3°C warmer than it would be in preindustrial conditions, which (all else being equal) works to dry fuels and makes fires more intense,” Brown wrote.
And more of this week’s top renewable energy fights across the country.
1. Otsego County, Michigan – The Mitten State is proving just how hard it can be to build a solar project in wooded areas. Especially once Fox News gets involved.
2. Atlantic County, New Jersey – Opponents of offshore wind in Atlantic City are trying to undo an ordinance allowing construction of transmission cables that would connect the Atlantic Shores offshore wind project to the grid.
3. Benton County, Washington – Sorry Scout Clean Energy, but the Yakima Nation is coming for Horse Heaven.
Here’s what else we’re watching right now…
In Connecticut, officials have withdrawn from Vineyard Wind 2 — leading to the project being indefinitely shelved.
In Indiana, Invenergy just got a rejection from Marshall County for special use of agricultural lands.
In Kansas, residents in Dickinson County are filing legal action against county commissioners who approved Enel’s Hope Ridge wind project.
In Kentucky, a solar project was actually approved for once – this time for the East Kentucky Power Cooperative.
In North Carolina, Davidson County is getting a solar moratorium.
In Pennsylvania, the town of Unity rejected a solar project. Elsewhere in the state, the developer of the Newton 1 solar project is appealing their denial.
In South Carolina, a state appeals court has upheld the rejection of a 2,300 acre solar project proposed by Coastal Pine Solar.
In Washington State, Yakima County looks like it’ll keep its solar moratorium in place.
And more of this week’s top policy news around renewables.
1. Trump’s Big Promise – Our nation’s incoming president is now saying he’ll ban all wind projects on Day 1, an expansion of his previous promise to stop only offshore wind.
2. The Big Nuclear Lawsuit – Texas and Utah are suing to kill the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s authority to license small modular reactors.
3. Biden’s parting words – The Biden administration has finished its long-awaited guidance for the IRA’s tech-neutral electricity credit (which barely changed) and hydrogen production credit.