class struggle

By Union Jake and Adam Keller - Valley Labor Report, March 5, 2024

By staff - How We Fix The Climate, February 28, 2024

By Harold Meyerson - The American Prospect, February 26, 2024

In an event that’s way more groundbreaking than it should be, the United Auto Workers announced last week that it is committing $40 million to organize the workers in the nation’s non-union auto and battery factories: “particularly,” the announcement said, “in the South.”

A union appropriating that level of funding for on-the-ground organizing isn’t something we’ve seen very much, if at all, in recent decades—at least, not in industries where management views their workers as replaceable, which is how management commonly views most workers in manufacturing, retail, transportation, food services, and the like. In the playbook of American business, replaceable workers can be fired for participating in or just supporting an organizing campaign, and even though such firings are illegal, the penalties for violating that law have long been negligible. In going all in to organize the nation’s Volkswagen, Honda, Toyota, Mercedes, Tesla, and other factories, the UAW executive board had three good reasons to think their union could overcome what has been this most daunting of obstacles.

By Union Jake and Adam Keller - Valley Labor Report, February 26, 2024

By Gerardo Reyes Chavez, Daniel Costa, Lloys Frates, Ph.D, Mireya Loza, and Ximena Bustillo - The Aspen Institute, February 28, 2024

By Sarah Lazare, Union Jake, and Adam Keller - Valley Labor Report, February 22, 2024

By Union Jake and Adam Keller - Valley Labor Report, February 22, 2024

By Schuyler Mitchell and Keith Brower Brown - Labor Notes, February 22, 2024

The smell of mold hit James “Lucky” Dugan the moment he walked into the plant.

Last fall, Dugan was one of thousands of union construction workers to arrive in small-town Glendale, Kentucky, to build a vast factory for Ford and SK On, a South Korean company. The plant, when completed, will make batteries for nearly a million electric pickup trucks each year.

When Dugan walked in, huge wooden boxes containing battery-making machines, largely shipped from overseas, were laid across the mile-long factory floor. Black streaks on those wooden boxes, plus the smell, immediately raised alarm bells for workers. But for months, those concerns were met with little remedy from the contractors hired by BlueOval to oversee construction.

Dugan and scores of others now believe they are in the midst of a health crisis at the site. “We don’t get sick pay,” Dugan said. “You’re sick, you’re out of luck.”

The BlueOval SK Battery Park, billed to open in 2025, is a banner project for President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, a program of public subsidies and financing to companies moving away from fossil fuels. The Department of Energy has pledged to support the construction of three BlueOval plants in Tennessee and Kentucky with a $9.2 billion low-cost loan.

But under all the high-tech green fanfare, several construction workers, including some who wished to be anonymous, say the site has been gripped by mold and respiratory illness—medieval hazards that workers feel managers neglected in the pressure to quickly open the plant.

By Julia Conley - Common Dreams, February 21, 2024

With the electric vehicle battery industry expected to add tens of thousands of jobs in the coming years, the United Auto Workers announced Wednesday its plan to ensure the new workers will benefit from labor protections and fair wages.

The UAW's International Executive Board voted Tuesday to commit $40 million to help support and organize nonunion autoworkers and battery workers, said the union.

The decision reflects that "organizing the unorganized and fighting for a just transition for workers in the emerging EV industry are our union's top priority!" said Chris Brooks, an adviser to UAW president Shawn Fain.

By Union Jake and Adam Keller - Valley Labor Report, February 21, 2024