[Democrats’ new industrial manufacturing plan leaves unions
behind, fumbling a moment of relative leverage for organized labor.]
[[link removed]]

INDUSTRIAL POLICY WITHOUT INDUSTRIAL UNIONS  
[[link removed]]


 

Lee Harris
September 28, 2022
The American Prospect
[[link removed]]


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_ Democrats’ new industrial manufacturing plan leaves unions
behind, fumbling a moment of relative leverage for organized labor. _

, Illustration by Robert Meganck

 

This article appears in the October 2022
[[link removed]] issue of The American
Prospect magazine. Subscribe here
[[link removed]].

In August, as President Biden signed the CHIPS and Science Act,
pledging to build American semiconductor factories, Illinois Gov. J.B.
Pritzker posed on the White House lawn
[[link removed]], flanked
by the chief executives of vehicle companies Ford, Lion Electric, and
Rivian. Thanks to billions of dollars in federal and state
investments, Pritzker said, his constituents could expect a
manufacturing revival, and “good-paying, union jobs.”

Illinois is refashioning itself as a center for electric vehicle (EV)
production and a cluster of related industries, such as microchips.
The state just passed the Climate and Equitable Jobs Act, its flagship
industrial-policy plan, and has passed MICRO, a complement to federal
CHIPS subsidies. Pritzker is hungry for Chicago to host the upcoming
Democratic convention and take a victory lap at factory openings.

But he may have to trot out non-union autoworkers at the ribbon
cuttings.

Ford, a “Big Three” union automaker, boasts that the F-150 is a
“legendary union-built vehicle
[[link removed]],”
but battery production is being outsourced to non-union shops. Bus
producer Lion Electric is under pressure to use organized labor, but
has yet to make public commitments on allowing a union election
without interference. Electric-truck startup Rivian, which is 18
percent owned by Amazon, has been plagued by workplace injuries and
labor violations. Illinois’s attorney general recently uncovered a
scheme to renovate its downstate plant with workers brought in from
Mexico, who were cheated out of overtime pay.

_MORE FROM LEE HARRIS_ [[link removed]]

Democrats are giddy about the arrival of green industrial policy
[[link removed]]. With
last year’s bipartisan infrastructure law, CHIPS, and the new
Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), Congress has poured money into setting
off green growth. The main messaging behind this policy is that
government investment can create attractive jobs, and a new political
base, by manufacturing the clean technologies of the future.

If you squint, you could almost mistake the IRA’s robust Buy
American provisions
[[link removed]] for
worker protections. They are often mentioned in the same sentence. But
while new spending is likely to onshore manufacturing, it largely
lacks provisions ensuring that those new jobs will adhere to high-road
labor standards, let alone that they will be unionized.

Instead, the political logic of the bill is a gamble. The energy
sector is still dominated by oil and gas. To accelerate the
transition, it will be necessary to create large countervailing
industries. After decades of offshoring, the first aim for green
manufacturing is to make sure that it happens here at all. The IRA
alone could produce as many as nine million jobs
[[link removed]] over
the next decade, according to an analysis by University of
Massachusetts Amherst and the labor-environmental coalition BlueGreen
Alliance. Many of those jobs will be in old Democratic strongholds
where the party is now hemorrhaging support, like mining in Nevada and
auto production in the Midwest.

Supporters hope that once new green jobs are created, a mass labor
coalition could follow. As Nathan Iyer, an analyst at the climate
consultant RMI, told the _Prospect_ in a recent podcast
[[link removed]],
“It’s hard to have a workers-based movement, and build workers’
power, if there are no workers.”

Democrats selling green industrial policy are not following through on
the promise to make green jobs good jobs.

But if low-quality jobs are created first, it could prove hard to
level up later. Decarbonization is an early-stage industry, and
standards set now are likely to be locked in. Early signs are
worrying. The Big Three automakers are using the transition to
electric cars as an opportunity to bring on an underclass of nominally
unionized but lower-tier workers, or to skip unions at new factories
altogether.

As states and the federal government make an unprecedented wealth
transfer to the next generation of clean-energy companies, Democrats
selling green industrial policy are not following through on the
promise to make green jobs good union jobs. They may only have a short
window to get it right.

AS A 23-YEAR-OLD UNION PAINTER IN 1986, David Bentley helped stand up
Mitsubishi Motor Manufacturing in Normal, Illinois. To prevent export
restrictions
[[link removed]],
the Japanese automaker had agreed to open plants in the Midwest, in
exchange for the freedom to sell more of its small, fuel-efficient
cars in the American market.

“Mitsubishi made me,” Bentley told the _Prospect_. After painting
the original steel structure, he worked on several plant expansions.
He also started his own company, Commercial and Industrial Coatings,
which grew to become one of Mitsubishi’s top contractors. But annual
vehicle production shrank from more than 200,000 in 2002 to just
64,000 in 2014, and Mitsubishi eventually left the U.S. to focus on
the growing Asian market
[[link removed]].

Bentley was overjoyed when Rivian announced in 2017 that it would buy
the old campus. Given his extensive knowledge of the site, he expected
to be tapped for renovations. The following winter, ahead of a visit
by CEO R.J. Scaringe, Bentley heard that Rivian leadership wanted to
remove the faint “MITSUBISHI” lettering on the side of the
building, and replace it with a “RIVIAN” sign visible from the
nearby interstate highway. With his crew, Bentley said, he worked in
the cold and ice to remove the old lettering, anticipating bigger
rehabbing projects down the line. “I did it for next to free, just
to get in with them.”

But those bigger jobs never came. Bentley offered extensive site
consultation, producing samples and mock-ups, and bid on a project to
polish two million square feet of concrete, but his local team was not
chosen. Instead, he learned, Rivian was turning to outside
contractors. In 2019, he closed Commercial and Industrial Coatings,
which at its height had employed more than two dozen union workers.

It wasn’t just Bentley. Other local workers have struggled to get
hired by Rivian, despite generous public subsidies luring the company
to Normal. “We had conversations with the top brass. They did not
want us in that plant,” said Mandy Ganieany, organizing director for
Painters District Council No. 30 of the International Union of
Painters and Allied Trades (IUPAT), based in Aurora.

The city of Normal gave Rivian approximately $3 million in tax breaks
[[link removed]] between 2017 and
2022, according to a project development agreement
[[link removed]],
without requiring residents to be hired locally. (It does require that
salaries not fall beneath average local wages.) Illinois has
promised $49.5 million in state tax credits
[[link removed]] if
Rivian creates 1,000 jobs over a decade.

“They rolled out the red carpet for this company,” Ganieany said.
Yet elected officials were unhelpful as unions pushed for hiring local
workers, she said.

Not all the work has been outsourced. Local contractor P.J. Hoerr, for
example, won a remodeling deal. But Ronnie Paul of the local laborers
union said that Rivian has run into labor issues, particularly “when
they start[ed] hiring these out-of-state, out-of-country contractors
to come in here, who aren’t familiar with Illinois law.”

Expand

Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D-IL) has not yet endorsed a union organizing
effort at electric-truck startup Rivian. David Proeber/The Pantagraph
via AP

For example, Painters USA, a firm domiciled in Chicago and Dallas,
brought in workers from South Texas during the $1.2 billion renovation
of Rivian’s plant, according to one person familiar with the
company’s practices. One worker shot himself in the hand with a
paint gun, the person said, leading to an OSHA investigation. Rivian
has been the subject of numerous OSHA complaints
[[link removed]],
including a 2020 violation involving a “falling object protection”
in which it was charged a penalty of $5,969. (Painters USA did not
respond to requests for comment.)

To build assembly lines at the plant, an investigation by Illinois
Attorney General Kwame Raoul found, companies hired by Rivian “used
an elaborate subcontracting arrangement to deny overtime pay to
Mexican laborers.” Rivian initially hired MINO Equipment, a
China-based subcontractor used by several American EV
companies, including Tesla
[[link removed]].
MINO contracted the work to firms based in Florida and Spain. Those
companies further subcontracted out to Mexico-based SDS and LAM
Automation, which hired workers from Mexico for the construction jobs
in Illinois.

At least 113 Mexican workers were denied overtime, the investigation
learned, as they routinely worked between 60 and 80 hours per week.
Raoul recovered back wages and civil penalties
[[link removed]] totaling
more than $700,000.

Raoul only learned of the labor violations due to a tip from the local
electricians union, he told the _Prospect_. Precisely for that
reason, he believes workers at clean-energy plants should be
unionized. “The contractors probably didn’t seek out Illinois
workers for the scheme, likely because they knew Illinois workers
would be more apprised of the laws that protected them,” Raoul said.
“It was but for a tip from organized labor, in the interest of
protecting workers, that we unraveled this.”

Ironically, local politicians don’t share his perspective. Chris
Koos, the Democratic mayor of Normal, argued that bringing in
out-of-state and even foreign workers is a net positive. “If people
are willing to travel here to work, it’s good-paying jobs,” Koos
told the _Prospect_. “If they’re in another state, or downstate,
or Chicagoland, and they’ve got people idle, it’s good.”

Asked about the state investigation into wage theft, the mayor denied
knowing about it. When pressed, Koos said, “That was a
subcontractor, it wasn’t Rivian.” He added, “I know that things
out at that plant are going 100 miles an hour.”

IN HIS CAMPAIGN, BIDEN PROPOSED to make union neutrality, where
companies agree to not contest a union vote, a condition for employers
to receive federal funding. He also vowed to pass fines for employers
who violate labor laws
[[link removed]] when
firing employees. Neither of those provisions appears in the IRA.

Biden also wanted consumer rebates to go specifically to union-built
cars, which would have added $4,500 onto the $7,500 federal tax credit
extended by the bill. This was personally axed by Sen. Joe Manchin
(D-WV), who called the proposal “not American
[[link removed]]”
at an event at Toyota’s non-union West Virginia components plant.

Union neutrality provisions were also stripped out
[[link removed]] of
CHIPS and the bipartisan infrastructure law (BIL). In each case, there
were hurdles to including pro-union language: IRA was a reconciliation
bill, restricted to spending, making it tough to include standards,
and the bipartisan bills faced Republican political opposition to
labor provisions. That means agencies allocating the funding will play
a crucial role in whether federal dollars support union work.

Over the past several months, the Department of Energy has
released funding opportunity announcements
[[link removed]] on grants created by the
bipartisan infrastructure law. A _Prospect_ review of available
applications found that they do not include requirements related to
employer neutrality or right to bargain, and most do not mention
workforce protections. (An application for recycling EV batteries
[[link removed]] does
contain strong pro-union language, including inviting applicants to
include letters of commitment from unions, though it does not specify
whether that will be weighted in selection.)

When touting the pro-union bona fides of the IRA, Democrats mostly
point to one win: prevailing-wage laws and apprenticeship programs
[[link removed]].
That’s an important victory for some workers, though it applies
narrowly to jobs in the construction sector.

Agencies allocating the funding for Biden’s public investment bills
will play a crucial role in whether federal dollars support union
work.

Prevailing-wage requirements discourage cutthroat bidding by
contractors. Under the Davis-Bacon Act of 1931, federal contractors
must pay prevailing wages for construction work, matching the hourly
rate of similarly employed workers in a region. The bill prevents
tradesmen from being undercut by out-of-town builders, who are often
exploited, like the Mexican workers brought in by Rivian
subcontractors.

Typically, Davis-Bacon has only applied to federal contractors, such
as building crews for the Department of Transportation. The IRA
extends it to ordinary employers. Businesses seeking tax credits for
installing electric-vehicle charging infrastructure, or making
buildings more energy-efficient, will receive five times the credit if
they meet prevailing-wage requirements and hire registered
apprentices.

Mike Monroe of NABTU, the building trades division of the AFL-CIO,
called this potentially transformational. “We’re all competing now
on a level playing field,” he told the _Prospect_. “We think that
that will lead to increased unionization, in conjunction with other
public policies this administration has helped push out.”

But even prevailing-wage bonuses, IRA’s biggest direct achievement
for labor, don’t apply to all manufacturing incentives. For example,
a new “Section 45X” tax credit for solar, wind, and battery parts
production is not subject to requirements for prevailing wages or
apprenticeship.

Industrial trades, meanwhile, said that the priority on builders above
other workers in federal legislation is echoed at the local level.
United Auto Workers (UAW) Vice President Cindy Estrada told
the _Prospect_ that Gov. Pritzker hasn’t done enough to push for
union labor at auto plants in Illinois. “He’s doing a lot of good
work with the building trades, making sure that plants are built
union,” she said. “But we also want to make sure, once those four
walls are up, that they’re union.”

INSIDE THE RIVIAN PLANT IN NORMAL, a union drive has taken off.
Mitsubishi workers at the factory were part of UAW, and workers are
now betting it can be organized again. Current Rivian employees told
the _Prospect_ that the plant is run in a disorderly manner that
reduces their formal protections, making their schedules unpredictable
and their jobs less safe.

Assembly line workers are sent home when the plant runs out of parts.
During those production pauses, several Rivian employees said, workers
are asked to use their paid time off, eating up much of a policy that
is officially meant to be used for sick leave or emergencies.

Unfair leave policies were a top concern for Anakin Fox, until
recently a Rivian worker in production control who brought parts to
the line for the company’s Amazon Prime vans. Fox left his job at
the plant in August, after deciding that it was too tough on his
health.

“There is a huge lack of safety in Rivian,” said another worker
who spoke on the condition of anonymity. The worker explained that
employees are expected to adapt to last-minute changes, which the
company excuses as the growing pains of a startup. “It’s basically
like a blind-faith test that your managers are going to be managing
you right.”

Scheduling and staffing issues also trouble Janet Schaar, a material
handler at Rivian, who told the _Prospect_ that managers have been
unhelpful when she has raised concerns. Schaar arrives at 6:30 a.m.
and is given half an hour for lunch at 10:45 a.m. After that, she has
three ten-minute breaks until her day ends at 7:10 p.m., when she
takes a shuttle bus to the parking lot before driving home, when it is
often too late to make dinner.

At 50, Schaar is looking for a job that can be a career. If she stays
in this position, her raises will max out in three years at $23 an
hour. Depending on the shift and overtime, she said, some workers at
the local Wendy’s make more.

“But we’re in auto manufacturing,” Schaar said. “There is a
skill set to building these vehicles, and we should get the pay to
match that.” Those frustrations, and particularly a desire for
greater control over unpredictable scheduling and time-off policies,
got Schaar interested in organizing with UAW.

It is something of an existential moment for UAW, which has not
managed to organize a single EV producer. The union has weathered
several high-profile failures
[[link removed]] at
foreign and non-union plants, compounded with a spate of internal
corruption scandals.

“Workers in auto understand their power and the moment they’re
in,” Estrada told the _Prospect_. The union says it is adopting
more radical tactics and emphasizing grassroots organizing. They might
even be willing to strike for recognition, Estrada said, an escalation
that birthed the modern union autoworker movement, after the famed
sit-down strikes of the 1930s. That would be a departure from UAW’s
more recent efforts to work through the National Labor Relations Board
process, which, she said, is “rigged against workers.”

“What you never can skip is just good organizing,” Estrada added.
“We’re working with those workers to build strong, public,
worker-based committees.”

Not all workers see that happening on the ground, however. While
working at Rivian, Fox saw the organizing committee grow from a few
dozen people to hundreds. Yet even as excitement grew, UAW emphasized
process and organizing infrastructure, rather than actions, Fox said.
“The campaign was being guided by staff, not owned by the
workers.”

Too much external emphasis on process can be a mistake, according to
some labor experts. “Success comes from grassroots organizing,”
said Art Wheaton, director of labor studies at Cornell University.
“Not just some big muckety-muck coming in from out of town.”

When actions have happened, Fox said, UAW organizers have sometimes
learned about them after the fact. Earlier this year, workers in the
body shop had been asked to work on a Saturday, and were told
last-minute that they had to work more overtime. Workers organized an
informal line strike, raising broader concerns about their
paid-time-off policy. They were successful, immediately winning
concessions from management.

“That was all the workers. People were fed up, and said, ‘OK, we
basically have 100 percent pro [support for walking off] in our area,
we’re just going to do something about it,” Fox said. Afterward,
UAW was pleased with the outcome, he added. “It’s interesting that
when they take a step back, it works, but in the actual infrastructure
of our organizing committee, when they’re very involved, it was a
little harder for us to get good work done.”

On the pace of the campaign, Schaar said, “It’s not a sprint,
it’s a marathon.”

The race at Rivian has not been helped by politicians reluctant to go
to bat for labor. Asked about a union drive, Koos, the mayor of Normal
who helped attract Rivian, told the _Prospect_, “I haven’t heard
a word.”

In the South, the right-wing political establishment has been
instrumental—and resourceful—in defeating union efforts. In 2014,
the first time UAW tried to organize a Volkswagen plant in
Chattanooga, Tennessee, former Gov. Bill Haslam threatened
to withhold $300 million in tax incentives
[[link removed]] for
a proposed expansion at the plant if the union drive succeeded. The
second time, in 2019, Gov. Bill Lee visited the plant to discourage
unionizing
[[link removed]].

Yet Democratic politicians have been hesitant to act as a
counterweight to promote union organizing, partly out of fear that
factories will go to the South. Asked whether Pritzker supports the
unionizing effort under way at Rivian, a spokesperson said, “The
Governor believes that organized labor has always been the backbone of
our state.”

Rivian trucks are made in Normal, Illinois, in a plant that used to be
a union shop owned by Mitsubishi. Mark Reinstein/Mediapunch/IPX

ORGANIZING ANY NON-UNION COMPANY is an uphill battle. But Rivian is a
particularly grueling fight because most automaking, including the
emerging EV sector, has been functionally non-union for many years.
The first pulse of investments into electric cars coincided with the
financial crisis, when nearly all auto jobs were being restructured.

Tesla, bolstered by Obama-era Department of Energy loans, is the only
non-union, U.S.-based automaker. CEO Elon Musk is particularly vocal
in his anti-worker animus, and has received little more than a slap on
the wrist. After the NLRB ordered Tesla to remove an anti-union tweet,
it remains up
[[link removed]]. A factory
ban on wearing union T-shirts was illegal, the NLRB ruled; the penalty
was to put a sign up in the break room that union shirts are allowed.

Tesla stands to benefit from the new tax credits—as do non-union
foreign automakers as they pivot assembly
[[link removed]] to
North America. Tesla had earned out of the EV consumer tax rebates
after hitting a quota of 200,000 sales. But those limits were lifted
in the IRA, without adding any pro-labor requirements.

During the Great Recession, legacy auto companies in receivership took
huge concessions for new workers. General Motors’ lower-tier job
system, known as Subsystems, is a cost-cutting invention in which the
company hires workers under the rubric of “GM Subsystem
Manufacturing LLC,” a wholly owned subsidiary of GM. This
workaround, invented to pay reduced wages to some GM workers, was born
in 2009 at GM’s Brownstown, Michigan, facility, the first
lithium-ion battery plant at a major automaker.

Employees at the Brownstown plant pay dues to UAW, but they are not
covered by the national contract. A $105.9 million grant
[[link removed]] from
the Department of Energy helped Brownstown open its doors. The idea
was to rebuild union ranks, while remaining competitive with foreign
producers. But rather than a temporary mechanism, the use of a
subsidiary with lower-tiered pay has spread as more battery plants
have opened.

In America’s shop-by-shop unionism, any new technology
introduced—even a slight tweak or innovation—offers an opportunity
for the corporation to say that the production doesn’t fall under
the auspices of the old union contract. The same is true, for example,
in Hollywood. As reality shows became more popular, networks and
production companies claimed that “unscripted” TV fell outside
old union contracts
[[link removed]].

UAW President Ray Curry has fought this tendency
[[link removed]],
arguing that “our members should be compensated at the appropriate
level” for manufacturing battery packs, at the same scale as engine
and transmission parts. But that will require new bargaining. Plus, it
takes up time that could be spent organizing new plants and battling
the slow creep of the tiered wage system.

Organizing efforts have often been lackluster. The Unite All Workers
for Democracy (UAWD) reform caucus of the union proposed a resolution
for worker-led organizing at EV, battery, and foreign-owned plants.
But it never made the floor
[[link removed]] at
August’s UAW convention in Detroit. Among the reformers’
demands: hire 100 full-time organizers
[[link removed]].
A member told the _Prospect_ that UAWD has been unable to find out
from UAW how many organizers are currently employed by the union.

Meanwhile, even after the recovery, Subsystems jobs have continued to
spread. Estrada sent a letter to union members in 2018 explaining an
agreement with GM for “outsourcing
[[link removed]]”
at plants in Lordstown, Ohio, and Lake Orion, Michigan. The jobs went
to Subsystems employees, though the letter doesn’t name Subsystems.
In 2019, GM closed the Lordstown plant, despite an array of
inducements to remain.

THE DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY IS NOW making fresh loans to non-union
plants. Lordstown is one of three sites where Ultium Cells, a joint
venture between GM and Korean electronics manufacturer LG Chem, is
building a new battery plant. Jobs at joint venture plants are
expected to pay less than top wages
[[link removed]].

The DOE’s Loan Programs Office announced a $2.5 billion loan
[[link removed]] to
Ultium through its Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing program,
which received an additional $40 billion in funding in the IRA. The
government cannot make loans contingent on unionization. But it can
use soft power, and prioritize labor standards in criteria for loans.

Ultium originally said
[[link removed]] it
would leave the question of unionizing up to the workforce in Ohio and
Tennessee. But UAW leadership did not draw up a formal neutrality
agreement
[[link removed]],
and the company reversed course. In May, UAW Vice President Terry
Dittes told local leaders that their card-check agreement proposal had
been “flat-out rejected.”

The Ultium loan is not just bad labor policy—it may be bad lending.
The legal premise of project labor agreements for construction is that
labor disputes are a risk. The Obama administration argued
[[link removed]] in
2009 that this could serve as a foothold for union neutrality in
procurement, since the government “has a proprietary interest in
ensuring that those contracts will be performed by contractors whose
work will not be interrupted by labor unrest.”

Stephen Lerner, a labor and community organizer who is currently a
fellow at Georgetown University, made a similar argument. “Why would
the government give a $2.5 billion loan to Ultium, when it has not
agreed to a process for workers to unionize?” he asked. “That’s
a risky loan, if they’re headed toward a labor dispute.” Shortly
after that interview, in early September, Lords-town employees struck
for representation
[[link removed]].

Using procurement contracts as leverage helps explain why unions have
made inroads into bus manufacturers.

But as new government funding pumps out to the auto sector, UAW has
continued making concessions. At another DOE-funded Ultium joint
venture in Spring Hill, Tennessee, UAW regional leaders and Local 1853
signed a memo of understanding with GM in June 2020 for hundreds of
jobs to be performed by Subsystems employees, _The Detroit News_ 
[[link removed]]reported
[[link removed]].
After workers learned of the secret agreement, local leadership
resigned.

Asked about signing over jobs to Subsystems workers, Mike Lewis, vice
president of Local 1853, told the _Prospect_, “I don’t like the
fact that they would be lower-tier jobs. I think everyone should be on
the same playing field, get the same money.” But pressed on the
agreement, he said, “That’s actually something for the national
party to decide. Not really on the local level.”

The upshot is that even union jobs in the emerging EV sector won’t
necessarily be good jobs, said Jonah Furman, an organizer and writer
for the publication Labor Notes. “As you let GM go to lower-tier
jobs, you don’t lose the union jobs, but you turn them into
something like meatpacking.”

UAW leadership says it is ready to meet the moment ahead of next
year’s Big Three contract negotiations. It is attempting to stand up
a National Auto Worker Committee comprised of representatives from
non-union automakers. A May meeting in Birmingham, Alabama, drew more
than 60 autoworkers from Tesla, Rivian, Honda, Volkswagen, Toyota,
Mercedes-Benz, and others.

“We need a sectoral rate in this country,” Estrada said. “During
the auto crisis we put unions, labor, management, and the
administration in the same room to figure out how to save these
companies. And the solution was, they need to go down to Toyota’s
non-union rate. The problem with us all going to Toyota’s rate to be
competitive is, they have no union.”

In interviews, several UAW workers described their exasperation with
leadership calling for sectoral bargaining. It comes too late, they
said, with the union bargaining from a position of weakness. Plus,
switching to a more European model would require political
mobilization that is unlikely, because unions are now fighting over
the scraps of what they previously organized.

“You can’t have a sectoral approach unless you’re organized
sectorally,” said Scott Houldieson, an electrician at Ford’s
Chicago Assembly Plant. “We couldn’t even get the PRO Act or
something like card check passed when we had a supermajority in the
early years of the Obama administration. So it’s baffling to think
that leadership relies on government to help them. We need to do the
hard work ourselves.”

LABOR PROVISIONS THAT COULDN’T PASS in Biden’s legislative agenda
might make it through in a mix of oversight measures, regulatory
reforms, and creative uses of executive power.

Public procurement, which creates some $2 trillion a year of economic
activity, or almost 10 percent of U.S. GDP, is a huge leverage point.
States and school districts purchase bus fleets, and every contract is
an opportunity to examine the supply chain, including by stakeholders
outside government. Teachers unions have organized
[[link removed]] for
school bus fleets to be built with union labor.

Using procurement contracts as leverage helps explain why unions have
made inroads into bus manufacturers. The United Steelworkers
organized Proterra
[[link removed]];
Sheet Metal, Air, Rail and Transportation Workers (SMART) Union
organized BYD [[link removed]];
and the Communications Workers of America has formed a union with
workers at New Flyer
[[link removed]].
Coalitions like Jobs to Move America are focused on winning community
benefit agreements in places like Illinois, where labor and
environmental groups are calling on Lion Electric to allow employees
to decide on union representation.

[OCT22 Harris 4.jpeg]

An electric-vehicle battery from Ultium Cells, a joint venture between
GM and Korean electronics manufacturer LG Chem. Ted Shaffrey/AP Photo

Meanwhile, Labor Secretary Marty Walsh has quietly undertaken the
biggest reform to prevailing-wage law since Ronald Reagan gutted
construction worker pay
[[link removed]] in
1983. Reagan’s Labor Department enacted a number of debilitating
modifications, including eliminating a rule that said a given wage was
the “prevailing” rate if more than 30 percent of workers in an
area were paid that amount—typically the union rate. A 2011
Government Accountability Office report found that wage rate surveys
were so out-of-date that in some areas, Davis-Bacon wage rates
were below federal minimum wage
[[link removed]].

DOL’s proposed rule
[[link removed]] would
restore the 30 percent rule, which stands to benefit workers in states
hostile to unions. Requiring higher labor standards is also likely to
protect undocumented workers frequently employed as cheaper labor at
construction sites. The new rule also ramps up enforcement, which will
be crucial as prevailing-wage requirements are extended beyond federal
contractors in the IRA. Obama’s 2009 infrastructure spending bill
also included Davis-Bacon requirements, but DOL’s Wage and Hour
Division struggled to enforce compliance
[[link removed]].

Other regulatory battles loom. Unions are concerned that workers in
new sectors will be misclassified as lower-skilled workers, so that
contractors can avoid paying prevailing rates for crafts that require
technical training. Clean-energy industry representatives have lobbied
the Department of Labor to create job classifications for
“installers,” which organized labor sees as an effort to carve
away a new wage category that is not subject to union rates.

“Calling someone an ‘EV installer’ means you want somebody with
minimal skills so you can pay them less,” Terry O’Sullivan,
general president of the Laborers’ International Union of North
America (LiUNA), told the _Prospect_. Union Laborers work on many
types of infrastructure projects, from wind and solar to bridges and
water treatment plants, O’Sullivan said. “Nobody calls a worker a
‘bridge installer.’ It’s not a thing. Because skilled workers
are needed across the industry.”

A WARLIKE SURGE IN SPENDING on the energy transition could propel
economy-wide growth, lifting workers in sectors outside of new green
industries. Economists like J.W. Mason of the Roosevelt
Institute argue
[[link removed]] that
as in World War II, when the biggest wage gains for workers were seen
outside the “war industries,” bargaining power from green growth
may show up in unexpected parts of the economy, like the retail and
service sector. Given that, Mason argued, “it’s a bit myopic to
focus just on the standards built into particular jobs.”

Others are wary of the analogy to a wartime boom. O’Sullivan, of the
Laborers Union, pointed out that the energy production and investment
tax credits in the IRA are available for at least the next ten years.
“Whatever the urgency of the climate crisis, I don’t think we
should compare it to a war mobilization. This is a steady and
long-term investment,” he said. “A thousand things can change in
10 to 15 years when some sectors may slow, others may emerge.”

Even with unions depleted, the sheer scale of investment in the
clean-energy sector suggests some new jobs will be unionized. Mine
workers in West Virginia, for example, have secured a deal
[[link removed]] for
laid-off coal miners to be hired by the battery manufacturer SPARKZ.
The agreement came out of a White House meeting with union leaders and
renewable-energy entrepreneurs, said Phil Smith, top lobbyist for the
United Mine Workers. Smith said that the company has agreed to
card-check neutrality.

Nevada, Arizona, and Texas, states with anti-union “right to work”
laws, will receive many of the new jobs created by the domestic mining
boom. Those battleground states represent another organizing
opportunity. (The Steelworkers, not the UMWA, organize much of the
hard-rock mining in the West.)

“On paper, organized labor did pretty good. It could have been
better—we could have gotten provisions in the PRO Act in. But
conceptually, we didn’t do too bad. What’s important now is making
sure the follow-through is done properly,” Smith told
the _Prospect_. “We’re back to basic organizing.”

Despite labor’s weakened position, several workers said that they
are heartened by the surge of spending on American industry.
Houldieson, the Ford electrician, said he is focused on next year’s
contract negotiations, where he hopes to make new electric-car
factories part of UAW’s master agreement.

“Where was the union movement in 1925? It was moribund,” he said.
“We’ve been here before. What we’re talking about is not
impossible.”

LEE HARRIS is a staff writer at The American Prospect. In 2020, she
co-founded New York Focus, an investigative news site on New York
politics. Prior to that, she was editor of the independent newspaper
at the University of Chicago.

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