EV Revolution Helping Automakers Screw Unions

Lee Harris joins the program to discuss how car companies are receiving huge subsidies from the federal government yet are not passing that on to their employees.

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A lot of these electric vehicle plants are opening up in states where unionization is hard to do. yeah. so my story actually specifically looks at a plant in Illinois for this reason. It looks at the new Rivian truck facility in the electric trucks in Normal Illinois. and workers want to unionize Rivian. and there's an organizing drive. it's not clear that it's especially promising. and part of the reason is that Democrats in a couple of blue states that have gotten bigger Investments and there are several. I mean there's production in Ohio and Illinois in several parts of the Midwest, part of the reason for Democrat politicians. Even like Pritzker who's been fairly pro-union and has been unwilling to come out and go to bat for these Union drives is this Dynamic where they're scared that companies will leave for the non-union South. so it's this gotcha where if you raise worker standards too much in the north companies are out of there. which is why these kinds of negotiations should be done at a federal level. For workers, if states are competing for the cheapest Workforce, it's a race to the bottom. just to talk quickly about before you come back I just want to say there's an interesting dynamic where I think it's now pretty well known that Tesla which was of course not Elon musk's baby created you know out of the Sea Foam but what was created by Obama the Obama administration's big investment in green energy in 2008. That's now the biggest non-union U.S automaker. and I think people know that obviously there are several major non-union automakers that are going to be receiving subsidies from the inflation reduction act. What's crazy to me is that even at the big three Union automakers, Ford's delays Chrysler and GM. These new investments that they're going be getting might not create good jobs or even union jobs. so the back story there is that after the Great Recession United Auto Workers took huge concessions and they agreed that newly hired workers could be paid half the Union's salary reducing their wages from 28 an hour to just 14 an hour. they created this second tier of workers that are paid less. and that and okay you could argue that that makes some sense at the time. when unions were bargaining from a position of weakness. It was controversial at the time. what's really outrageous is that now as taxpayer dollars are pouring into these factories to bring jobs back on Shore and auto Auto Workers should be bargaining from the position of strength lower tier jobs are being created rather than fixing that problem of the past decade and bringing everyone up to the same tier. and just as a final point these three Union automakers where every new shop is supposed to be Union they've actually found a loophole to be able to add non-union shops. which is that with these new battery producers that they're creating these new battery plants they're structuring them as joint venture companies.