electric vehicles

By Sydney Ghazarian, Nima Shirazi, and Adam Johnson - Citations Needed, September 22, 2023

By Luis Feliz Leon and Lisa Xu - Labor Notes, September 22, 2023

The clock has ticked and tocked for two of the Big 3 automakers. At noon 5,000 more members of the Auto Workers (UAW) at 38 parts distribution centers for Stellantis and General Motors walked off the job. The facilities are spread across 20 states.

They join 13,000 workers at assembly plants in Ohio, Michigan, and Missouri who have been out for a week—for a total of 18,000 Big 3 auto workers on picket lines nationwide. (See a map of all struck facilities here.)

The escalation adds a new type of facility to the mix. Parts distribution centers (PDCs) supply after-sales spare parts and accessories to dealerships, a very profitable part of the companies’ business.

Most facilities have between 50 and 150 workers, but some are much larger. According to GM, the Davison Road Processing Center in Burton, Michigan, has more than 1,200 employees and processes 9.9 million pieces per month, filling orders for domestic and international customers. GM has invested $168.5 million in the million-square-foot facility.

Why strike the parts distribution centers? “There are several reasons,” Fain told Labor Notes. “One of our issues is ending tiers. They’re a big example of that. Their wages were capped at $25 some years back, during the greatest times in the history of these companies, and that’s gotta change.

By Luis Leon, Union Jake and Adam Keller - Valley Labor Report, September 22, 2023

By Dan, Union Jake and Adam Keller - Valley Labor Report, September 22, 2023

By Steve Hanley - Clean Technica, September 21, 2023

Hamilton Nolan purports to be a writer whose topics are labor, politics, and power. According to his website, he has over 8,000 subscribers. Frankly, I have never heard of him and I’m quite sure he has never heard of me either. In an op-ed for The Guardian on September 21, 2023, he says that Tesla “is now US labor’s most important target. If Musk doesn’t like that, he’s welcome to settle it with an auto worker by cage match.”

Shawn Fain vs. Elon Musk. Now, there’s an image you can’t unsee! For your own consideration and general amusement, go ahead and read the full story before moving on to my takeaway on it.

The Takeaway

I have made my own pro-union proclivities abundantly clear (the evils of Jimmie Hoffa notwithstanding). On the other hand, I am also one of those “cult-like investors” Hamilton speaks of, so I am of two minds about his screed op-ed. To me, it comes down to this: Should American workers be able to lead a solidly middle-class lifestyle or are they wage slaves who must work two or sometimes three jobs while living in their mother’s garage?

The weaponized capitalist system has given us a class of wealthy plutocrats who, thanks to the ignorance of John Roberts, can plow endless amounts of money into supporting political candidates who will promise to cut taxes on the rich. It has also given us globalization, a system that outsources jobs to the lowest wage areas of the world where people labor in slave-like conditions to fill the shelves at Walmart with cheap imported goods.

There are so many moving pieces to globalization, not the least of which are the enormous carbon emissions created when millions of containers are sent across oceans to be distributed by millions of tractor trailers. Since there is no international price on carbon, that cost never gets added to the sales price of those goods, which is a gross distortion of the economic system and creates a “Heads we win, tails you lose” situation.

By Kyle Davidson - Michigan Advance, September 21, 2023

As Democratic lawmakers continue pushing on policy to transition Michigan to clean energy sources, members of the state Senate Labor Committee heard testimony Thursday on a bill to ensure workers are not left behind in a switch to renewables. 

Senate Bill 519, introduced by State Sen. Sam Singh (D-East Lansing), would create a community and worker economic transition office within the Department of Labor and Economic Opportunity (LEO). The office would seek to aid workers and communities whose jobs are impacted in the transition from fossil fuel energy to renewable sources. 

As Michigan begins to move away from coal, energy utilities have done a good job of helping workers through the transition to new technology and avoiding large layoffs, Singh said. However, concerns about the future of Michigan’s energy transition remain.

“I think we’re always concerned whenever you’re making a transition that you should have a system in place that makes sure that we are protecting workers,” Singh said.

By Martha Grevatt, Auston Gore, Nick Livick, and Max Alvarez - Working People, September 21, 2023

By Darnell, Union Jake and Adam Keller - Valley Labor Report, September 21, 2023

By Luke Savage - Jacobin, September 20, 2023

From the moment it was declared, the United Auto Workers’ (UAW) strike has presented Republican politicians with something of a dilemma. The immediate reason is that public opinion is firmly and overwhelmingly behind the union and its demands. More broadly, the GOP has in recent years gone to great pains to rebrand itself as a party of the working class. That’s always been nonsense, of course, and the rhetorical gymnastics offered by leading conservative politicians over the past few days is an excellent case in point.

Quick out of the gate was Missouri senator Josh Hawley, who remarked, “Auto workers deserve a raise — and they deserve to have their jobs protected from Joe Biden’s stupid climate mandates that are destroying the US auto industry and making China rich.” As media critic Adam Johnson pointed out, Hawley’s superficially pro-worker statement contained a number of revealing evasions and omissions. Most obviously, it referred to autoworkers without actually mentioning their union. And while Hawley did endorse an unspecified raise, that position is by no means in tension with the current posture of management at the Big Three automakers — all of whom have offered raises significantly below what the union has demanded.

Particularly emblematic, and equally disingenuous, was Hawley’s attempt to represent the strike as a regrettable by-product of the Biden administration’s (rather moderate) green policies while invoking geopolitical rivalry with China. Donald Trump, for his part, has triangulated in much the same way: issuing statements vaguely supportive of “autoworkers” while openly attacking the UAW and misrepresenting the dispute as a case of liberal green quackery run amok. Florida governor Ron DeSantis and North Dakota governor Doug Burgum both offered variations on the same themes, with the former blaming “Biden’s push for electric vehicles” and the latter commenting, “The union workers are going, wow, we’re gonna switch to all EVs, we’re going to have less jobs, we’re gonna switch to all EVs, you know, we’re shipping our future and you are going to be dependent on China for our transportation needs.”

Statements like these all express the rather challenging predicament of right-wing politicians keen to brandish their workerist credentials without actually supporting the aspirations of workers themselves. Needless to say, the act is unconvincing.

By Sharon Graham and Ryan Fletcher - UNITE, September 20, 2023

Unite general secretary Sharon Graham said: “Kicking the can down the road on petrol car sales is no substitute for a proper industrial strategy setting out a just transition to net zero. Instead, we get ever more uncertainty for workers, industry and consumers from a government that deals in piecemeal policies delivered on the hoof.

“If Rishi Sunak was truly motivated to deliver for working people and communities, he would be putting forward a serious plan to bring down costs and boost critical industries, such as automotive and energy, as well as safeguarding jobs in exposed sectors.

“For automotive this strategy should include repurposing combustion supply chain businesses and reskilling workers for electrification as well as clarifying the status of hybrid cars after the ban. It should also contain a programme for installing charging points across the entire road network, cutting costs by bringing energy into public hands and investment in critical industry infrastructure and tech, such as green hydrogen and gigafactories.”