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The UAW makes its first move.
In Shawn Fain’s victory speech after the United Autoworkers won significant raises and benefits from the Big Three automakers earlier this fall, the union president promised to go on to accomplish what no other UAW president had managed to do. “We’re going to organize non-union auto companies like we’ve never organized before,” he said.
On Thursday, the union made its first move: Workers at Volkswagen’s plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee went public with a union drive, announcing that more than 30% of the plant had signed union authorization cards.
After the UAW won 25% raises in its deals with GM, Ford, and Stellantis, Volkswagen gave its workers an 11% raise. In a press release, workers at the Chattanooga plant said they were striking due to pay that lagged behind their unionized peers, mistreatment by management, forced overtime, and a lack of time off. “Turnover at the plant is a serious problem,” said Josh Epperson, an equipment operator in assembly. “I have trained new people on the line and most of them are gone in a few months. They don’t have the tools and the support they need to thrive.”
The Chattanooga plant opened 15 years ago and is VW’s only factory in the U.S.; by contrast, all of the company’s workers in Germany are unionized. The U.S. plant currently produces the VW Atlas, Atlas Sport, and the company’s only electric model currently available here, the ID.4.
Workers at the U.S. plant have already attempted to unionize twice, in 2014 and 2019, both of which were narrow losses. An account of what went wrong in 2019 by Chris Brooks, a labor activist and current strategist for Shawn Fain, said that lawmakers threatened to pull incentives for the plant’s expansion and new electric vehicle line if the plant flipped.
Similar expansions are on the table again this time around. In early November, senior vice president and head of strategy at VW Group of America Reinhard Fischer announced plans to bring a new, under-$35,000 EV to the U.S. market. He said the company would either build the vehicle at the Chattanooga Plant or in Puebla, Mexico. He also said that the company was considering assembling battery packs for the vehicle in the U.S. due to subsidies in the Inflation Reduction Act.
While 30% support is low, it clears the threshold to submit a petition to the National Labor Relations Board to hold a vote on the union’s formation. Still, the Chattanooga workers are likely to hold off for more. The UAW has said that once 50% of workers at a nonunion plant sign cards, Fain will hold a rally at the plant. If the drive gets 70% support, UAW will seek recognition from the company, or otherwise submit a petition to the NLRB.
There are 13 non-union automakers operating in the U.S. Tesla, which has six factories here, could be next — Fain told Reuters that many workers at the EV giant have also expressed interest in organizing.
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We’ll give you one guess as to what’s behind the huge spike.
Georgia is going to need a lot more electricity than it once thought. Again.
In a filing last week with the state’s utility regulator, Georgia Power disclosed that its projected load growth for the next decade from “economic development projects” has gone up by over 12,000 megawatts, to 36,500 megawatts. Just for 2028 to 2029, the pipeline has more than tripled, from 6,000 megawatts to 19,990 megawatts, destined for so-called “large load” projects like new data centers and factories.
To give you an idea of just how much power Georgia businesses will demand over the next decade, the two new recently booted up nuclear reactors at Vogtle each have a capacity of around 1,000 megawatts. Of the listed projects that may come online, five will require 1,000 megawatts or more.
The culprit is largely data centers. About 3,330 megawatts’ worth of data centers have broken ground in Georgia, and just over 4,100 megawatts are pending construction, vastly outstripping commitments made by industrial customers.
“New load growth, led predominately by data centers, could triple [Georgia Power’s] size, in ten years. This is the second industrial revolution, led by artificial intelligence,” Simon Mahan, the executive director of the Southern Renewable Energy Association, wrote on X.
Georgia Power is used to upgrading load forecasts. The company had to update its three-year planning process (known as an integrated resource plan, or IRP) in October of 2023, just a year after releasing its previous three-year plan, as its five-year load growth projections had grown from 400 megawatts to 6,660 megawatts, a 17-fold increase. Regulators approved the new plan in April of this year, which included adding turbines to an existing gas-fired plant, pushing out the retirement of a coal-fired plant, and more battery storage.
The latest update, Georgia Power said in the filing, “should provide further certainty that Georgia Power’s load forecast is materializing and that the constructive outcome of the 2023 IRP Update is supportive of economic growth in Georgia.”
The signs marking projects funded by the current president’s infrastructure programs are all over the country.
Maybe you’ve seen them, the white or deep cerulean signs, often backdropped by an empty lot, roadblock, or excavation. The text on them reads PROJECT FUNDED BY President Joe Biden’s Infrastructure Law, or maybe President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, President Joe Biden’s CHIPS and Science Act, or President Joe Biden’s American Rescue Plan. They identify Superfund cleanup sites in Montana, road repairs in Acadia National Park in Maine, bridge replacements in Wisconsin, and almost anything else that received a cut of the $1.5 trillion from the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021.
Officially, the signs exist to “advance the goals of accountability and transparency of Federal spending,” although unofficially, they were likely part of a push by the administration to promote Bidenomics, an effort that began in 2023. The signs follow strict design rules (that deep cerulean is specifically hex code #164484) and prescribed wording (Cincinnati officials got dinged for breaking the rules to add Kamala Harris’ name to signs ahead of the election), although whether to post them is technically at the discretion of local partners. But all federal agencies — including the Environmental Protection Agency and the Federal Transit Authority, which of each received millions in funding — were ordered by the Office of Management and Budget to post the signs “in an easily visible location that can be directly linked to the work taking place and must be maintained in good condition throughout the construction period.”
This has caused some irritation on the right, as you might imagine. Republican Senator Ted Cruz of Texas lodged a grievance with the Office of Special Counsel alleging Biden had violated the Hatch Act by using taxpayer dollars to pay for “nothing more than campaign yard signs.” Republican Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa gave her monthly “squeal award” to Biden in June for lack of transparency over how much the signs have cost and demanded disclosure from the OMB. (Signs erected to credit President Obama’s construction projects cost an estimated $300 million adjusted for inflation, though the Biden administration, likely aiming to skirt a similar scandal, specifies that the “signs should not be produced or displayed if doing so results in unreasonable cost, expense, or recipient burden.” Ernst’s office did not reply to a request from Heatmap about whether or not she ever got the numbers she was seeking from the OMB, and the White House never returned a request from Heatmap to supply the same.)
Democrats aren’t the only politicians who sign their names to their big accomplishments, however. Donald Trump took credit for COVID-19 stimulus checks, and George W. Bush’s Internal Revenue Service sent mailers to let the American people know who they could thank for their income tax refunds. But suppose America were to elect a president who happened to be especially petty and vindictive? In that case — this is, of course, hypothetical — would it be possible for the incoming president to order the removal of signs touting his predecessor’s achievements?
I ran the question by a Department of Transportation spokesperson, who told me such things are simply not done. “There has never been a request to remove project signs from the U.S. Department of Transportation, and we hope to see signage remain in communities for the lifecycle of BIL-funded projects,” the DOT spokesperson said.
Their answer implies that while such a thing would be unprecedented, it is also theoretically possible.
It’s unclear how many such signs there are, although the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law has funded more than 66,000 projects, all of which are at least eligible for a sign. Whatever the exact number is, it’d be a big and expensive hassle to remove them all. Given that much of the IRA and BIL funding has already been allocated, as well, it seems like such a demand ought to be very low on an incoming president of the United States’ list of priorities.
At least, one would think.
The Trump administration is hoping to kill the $7,500 tax credit for electric vehicle buyers, according to a Reuters report citing two anonymous sources within the Trump transition team.
That aspiration isn’t totally unexpected — President-elect Donald Trump flirted with ending the EV tax credit throughout the campaign. But it’s nonetheless our first post-election sense of how the Trump administration plans to pursue the Republican tax package that is expected to be the centerpiece of its legislating agenda.
If the EV tax credit is repealed, it would deal a significant setback to the American auto industry’s attempts to make the transition to electric vehicles. General Motors, Ford, and other legacy automakers have invested billions of dollars to build EV factories and battery plants in order to prepare for an electric future. The Alliance for Automotive Innovation, the automaking industry’s trade group, has privately lobbied lawmakers to keep all of the Biden administration’s subsidies for EV production.
GM and Ford aren’t doing this just for the climate. They’re trying to compete with European and East Asian automakers that are transitioning to EVs — and will continue to transition, regardless of policy changes within the United States. BYD, the Chinese company that exclusively makes EVs, is on track this year to sell more cars globally than Ford. That’s the entire Ford line-up, not just EVs. China has reached its commanding position in the EV industry partly by offering EV consumers and companies more than $200 billion in subsidies, according to an analysis from the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
The rollback would also be a setback for Tesla and Rivian, the two highest-profile American EV-only companies. Yet according to the same Reuters report, Tesla supports the plan to repeal the tax credit. Elon Musk has asserted in interviews that because Tesla has more experience building EVs than any other company, it would suffer least from the subsidy’s disappearance. (As the country’s No. 1 EV seller, Tesla has also likely benefited from EV tax credits — in their current and pre-Biden forms — more than any other company.) Repeal is part of Musk’s hypothesized plan to turn Tesla into a de facto monopoly, controlling the entire American EV industry.
Rivian shares have fallen 11% today, while Tesla’s are down just 5%. Ford and GM are trading flat.
The new GOP majorities in Congress hope to extend their 2017 package of tax cuts, which mostly benefit wealthy Americans. One way to pay for those tax cuts could be to repeal the tax incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act, President Joe Biden’s landmark climate law. The news today, then, is mostly a sign that the battle lines are being drawn in the auto industry: Much of the auto industry wants to keep the full slate of EV subsidies. Tesla wants to take them down.