Standing Up for Big Oil by Standing Up for a Union
Trump and Vance are trying to weaponize EVs against the UAW
By Todd Lassa
Big Oil does not want a future with roads full of electric vehicles any more than it wants plastic to be recycled in volume. But populist politicians do not want to be caught in bed with Big Oil, no matter how much oil companies might pay for the chance to cuddle. So let’s make anti-EV sentiment all about the striking United Auto Workers?
This strange-bedfellows situation comes from auto workers’ fears that the EV revolution will put many of them out of work and maybe all of them out of union jobs.
Ex-President Donald J. Trump sought to make political hay out of this, while subsequently producing an easy excuse for avoiding the GOP’s second primary debate next Wednesday, when he announced Tuesday he would travel instead to Detroit and meet with UAW members “putting himself at the center of a major autoworker strike,” The Hill reports.
“It’s a twofer for him. He gets to troll his opposition and go stake a claim in an important battleground state that he has been unique amongst Republicans in the last 30 or 40 years in winning,” Jason Cabel Roe, a Michigan-based GOP strategist told The Hill. “So I think it’s … a pretty savvy move on his part.”
UAW President Shawn Fain, who has proven himself a pretty savvy strategist with his targeted “stand-up” strikes against General Motors, Ford Motor Company and Stellantis (formerly ChryslerFiat), is having none of it.
“Every fiber of our union is being poured into fighting the billionaire class and an economy that enriches people like Donald Trump at the expense of workers,” he said in a social media statement, according to CNN Politics. “We can’t keep electing billionaires and millionaires that don’t have any understanding what it is like to live paycheck to paycheck and struggle to get by and expecting them to solve the problems of the working class.”
But even before Trump revealed his ploy to grab UAW rank-and-file support from President Biden, “most pro-union president ever,” Hillbilly Elegy author-turned Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) penned an op-ed for Toledo’s The Blade that called on the UAW to “force Biden to stop subsidizing the EV industry.”
“Those who have claimed there will be a ‘just transition’ to EVs should visit Northeast Ohio for a glimpse into the industry’s bleak future,” Vance writes, referring to GM’s “once-iconic Lordstown Assembly Complex, where 15,000 union workers once assembled a million cars” but now is run as a battery plant that “employs a fraction of the workers at a fraction of the wages.”
It's worse than that, because the Lordstown plant, which earned its “glory” building Chevrolet Vegas in the 1970s was sold to Lordstown Motors, an EV pickup truck manufacturer that struggled to get off the ground. GM’s last model built at Lordstown was the Chevy Cruze compact sedan, which was discontinued because the market had moved on to sport/utility vehicles.
Except … it’s not quite that bad. After it sold Lordstown to the EV truckmaker – which filed for bankruptcy last June and sued its largest shareholder, FoxConn (yes, the Taiwan-based manufacturer of the Apple iPhone) for allegedly setting it up to fail – GM constructed a brand-new factory to make Ultium cells for its new line of EVs, in Warren, Ohio, about six miles away. It employs fewer than 1,000 workers, but last December they voted 710-6 to become the first, and so far only, UAW-represented plant to make battery cells.
I remember when Republicans were not quite so pro-union, and apparently so does Brian Kemp, governor of Georgia, a state that is aggressively recruiting battery cell and battery pack makers, and EV assembly plants. Hyundai’s Metaplant and Kia West Point are under construction and will build EVs for Americans in America. The electric vehicle component of the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act has strict local sourcing requirements that would make it impractical for Hyundai and Kia to manufacture EVs in South Korea – they would not qualify for the IRA’s critical EV tax credit of up to $7,500.
Some Republicans, and Big Oil, also want American voters to think that the IRA hands the EV market over to China, but for the above reason alone, Chinese automakers will not enter the U.S. automobile market any earlier than 2030, unless they start building manufacturing plants in Canada, Mexico or the U.S.
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