jobs versus environment

By Chris Walker - Truthout, September 28, 2023

At least a few people who attended former President Donald Trump’s speech to auto workers on Wednesday evening were not who they purported to be, according to a report on the event, with some admitting they were neither union members nor auto workers.

According to a report written by The Detroit News’s Craig Mauger, around 400 to 500 Trump supporters attended the speech, which was given at a Drake Enterprises auto parts facility. That company is not represented by any union, including the United Auto Workers (UAW), which is currently striking against the Big Three automakers in the U.S.

Drake Enterprises only employs around 150 workers, and it’s unclear who the other attendees at the Trump speech — which was intended to be directed specifically toward auto workers — actually were. It’s likely that those present were community members rather than people employed by the company, as Clinton Township, where the facility is located, was near-evenly split between Trump and President Joe Biden in the 2020 election.

Upon being approached by The Detroit News, some individuals who attended the event admitted that the signs they held weren’t representative of their identities.

“One individual in the crowd who held a sign that said ‘union members for Trump,’ acknowledged that she wasn’t a union member when approached by a Detroit News reporter after the event,” Mauger’s report stated. “Another person with a sign that read ‘auto workers for Trump’ said he wasn’t an auto worker when asked for an interview.”

By Teddy Ostrow and Barry Eidlin - Jacobin, September 25, 2023

On Friday, September 22, United Auto Workers (UAW) president Shawn Fain announced that the union would be expanding its “stand-up strike” against the Big Three automakers to thirty-eight parts distribution centers owned by General Motors (GM) or Stellantis. The five thousand workers at those sites are joining the thirteen thousand autoworkers at three assembly plants who walked out when the strike began on September 15.

The UAW’s strategy — striking all of the Big Three at once, but escalating gradually by beginning at a few worksites and calling out more over time to ramp up pressure — is unprecedented in the union’s history. The strike represents a dramatic departure from the union’s recent history in other ways as well, with leadership actively working to involve members in the contract campaign, and President Fain declaring that the union is fighting “for the good of the entire working class.” The leadership’s new approach is due in large part to the election of Fain and other officers associated with Unite All Workers for Democracy (UAWD), a union reform caucus that earlier this year swept out the corrupt old guard that had dominated UAW for over seventy years. 

Jacobin contributor Teddy Ostrow recently sat down with Barry Eidlin, associate professor of sociology at McGill University, to talk about the stand-up strike’s precedents in the 1936–37 sit-downs, the long history of efforts to reform the UAW, and the current strike’s implications for the broader labor movement in the United States and Canada.

By Talia Baroncelli and Frank Hammer - The Analysis News, September 25, 2023

By Sydney Ghazarian, Nima Shirazi, and Adam Johnson - Citations Needed, September 22, 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 Akielly Hu and Katie Myers - Grist, September 18, 2023

At the stroke of midnight on Friday, in three automotive factories across the Rust Belt, nightshift workers left their posts and poured out onto the streets to join whistling, cheering crowds. TV news footage from the night showed picketers intermingled with cars honking in support as R&B blared from sound systems on the sidewalks in front of the factory gates. For the first time in history, the United Auto Workers union, or UAW, initiated a strike targeting all of the Big Three automakers: Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis, which owns brands like Chrysler, Jeep, and Dodge. 

The strike marks a breaking point after months of negotiations failed to result in a deal to renew the union’s contract with Big Three automakers, which expired on Friday. For now, the strike covers only 13,000 workers at a General Motors plant in Wentzville, Missouri; a Stellantis plant in Toledo, Ohio; and a Ford assembly plant in Wayne, Michigan. But the three closures could be just the beginning. UAW president Shawn Fain has warned that all 146,000 union workers are ready to strike at a moment’s notice. “If we need to go all out, we will,” said Fain Thursday night on Facebook Live. “Everything is on the table.” 

If the work stoppage goes on for more than 10 days, analysts estimate it could cost automakers over $1 billion and hurt plans to push new electric vehicles onto the market.

EVs, and what they mean for the future of union labor in the automotive sector, loom large over the picket line. Automakers say meeting the union’s demands would threaten their ability to compete with nonunionized EV producers like Tesla, adding burdensome labor costs just as they’re making expensive investments in EVs. Workers, meanwhile, worry that billions in EV investments aren’t translating into good-paying, union jobs.

By Sarah Lazare - In These Times, September 18, 2023

In recent media coverage of the United Auto Workers’ stand-up strike against the Big Three car makers — Stellantis, Ford and General Motors — a false narrative is circulating: that the walkout is in conflict with the urgent need to mitigate climate change. The basic argument is that if wages and benefits were to improve, this would make the transition to electric vehicle manufacturing unprofitable, and would therefore imperil a centerpiece of President Joe Biden’s environmental policy. 

“Union demands would force Ford to scrap its investments in electric vehicles, Jim Farley, the company’s chief executive, said in an interview on Friday,” reporter Jack Ewing wrote for the New York Times on September 16. Ewing goes on to quote Farley saying, ​“We want to actually have a conversation about a sustainable future, not one that forces us to choose between going out of business and rewarding our workers.”

In an article that ran on September 13, the day before the strike began, New York Times reporter Noam Scheiber put it similarly: ​“The companies say that even if they could raise wages for battery workers to the rate set under their national U.A.W. contract, doing so could make them uncompetitive with nonunion rivals, like Tesla.”

These reports echo the talking points of the same companies that have had a direct hand in slowing the transition to electric vehicles. All of the Big Three automakers are members of the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, a trade group, that lobbied against a proposed Biden administration rule to require that two out of three new passenger cars sold in the United States are electric vehicles by 2032. 

These companies have also played a key role in fueling climate change. Scientists at Ford and General Motors knew about the impacts of global warming as early as the 1960s, yet the companies intensified their fossil-fuel heavy business model, turning to the manufacturing of trucks and SUVs over the ensuing decades while donating ​“hundreds of thousands of dollars to groups that cast doubt on the scientific consensus on global warming,” as revealed in a 2020 investigation by E&E News. Ford, General Motors and Fiat Chrysler (now owned by Stellantis) are among ​“the strongest opponents of regulations to help countries meet the 1.5C warming limit in the Paris agreement,” according to an investigation by The Guardian published in 2019.

Yet this vital context is largely being left out of ongoing coverage and, instead, companies’ supposed concerns about the environment are being reported at face value.

By Jon Hurdle - Inside Climate News, August 23, 2023

Natural gas production in the Appalachian region of the United States has failed to produce promised increases in jobs and income since the fracking boom began there in the late 2000s, with economic stagnation likely to persist now that output of the fuel has passed its peak, according to a report issued on Tuesday.

The study from the Ohio River Valley Institute, a nonprofit research group, found that gas-producing areas of Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia lost more than 10,000 jobs from 2008 to 2021 and that their personal income growth trailed that of the three states and the U.S. as a whole. Their population dropped by more than 46,000 during the period.

Even though gross domestic product of the 22-county region surged at four times the rate of the states overall from 2008 to 2019, little of that new wealth helped local economies because natural gas investment is mostly made in capital, not labor, and because many of the industry’s workers came from distant areas like Texas or Oklahoma where oil and gas skills were more readily available, the report said.

“GDP, which is often cited as a principal barometer of economic health, failed to produce commensurate gains in local measures of prosperity and well-being, including job, income and population growth,” it said.

By Sean O'Leary - Ohio River Valley Institute, August 22, 2023

By the first quarter of 2020, EQT Corporation, the nation’s largest domestic producer of natural gas, was supplying more than 4 billion cubic feet of natural gas per day. Just a decade earlier, EQT’s output wasn’t even one-tenth as much and the company ranked an undistinguished 25th for output among US producers. But EQT had the good fortune and foresight to base all of its operations in Appalachia, which made it the greatest beneficiary of what turned out to be the world’s richest natural gas field. 

In those early days of 2010, when EQT was the scuffling little guy trying to find a place among giants, such as ExxonMobil, the company employed just 1,815 people. But, by 2020, when EQT’s production had surpassed that of ExxonMobil and all others, its employee count mushroomed to . . . 624.

Yes, EQT’s head count actually declined by nearly two-thirds between 2010 and 2020. In fairness, some of EQT’s job reduction was attributable to its spin-off of Equitrans Midstream (EQM) in 2018. But, even if you add EQM’s 2020 head count to EQT’s, combined employment at the two companies was only 1,395 in 2020, still a quarter smaller than EQT’s workforce in 2010.

EQT’s tale of skyrocketing output accompanied by a shrinking workforce helps us understand important things about the shale gas industry. It helps explain why, as the Ohio River Valley Institute documented in 2021, the Appalachian natural gas boom failed to deliver what had been expected to be hundreds of thousands of new jobs for the region. And it demonstrates that as the natural gas industry matures, it becomes less jobs-intensive and its already meager contributions to economic development and prosperity become even fewer. The dynamic is simple. As a larger share of output comes from existing wells and fewer new ones are dug and work is completed on the construction of processing plants and pipelines, fewer workers are needed. 

Consequently, if production stagnates and the only need for new wells is to replace those that retire, the economic value of the gas industry to Appalachia may diminish even further. And if the Energy Information Administration is correct in its most recent forecast for domestic natural gas production between now and 2050, that is exactly the scenario Appalachia and its natural gas industry are facing.

According to the EIA’s “Annual Energy Outlook 2023”, Appalachian natural gas production likely peaked in 2022. Although this year’s events may prove that forecast to be incorrect in the short term, the long-term trend is clear. Production is leveling off. Indeed, data show that Appalachian production began to plateau as early as 2019. And, as this report will show, economic outcomes in the 22 counties in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia that are responsible for 90% of Appalachian gas production deteriorated even further since 2019, which was the last year examined in ORVI’s original study of the Appalachian natural gas boom’s economic impacts in the counties where it is concentrated – an area christened “Frackalachia.”

Download a copy of this publication here (PDF).

By Susan Price, Rika Müller-Vahl, Jeremy Brecher, Ferron Pedro, and Luke Esoiritu
- Global Ecosocialist Network, June 18, 2023