Posts tagged Lordstown
Electric Vehicle Factories Are Overwhelmingly Nonunion. The UAW Strike Could Change That.
September 20, 2023 // Nonunion companies are also getting in on the EV facility boomlet. Tesla plans to expand to a lithium refinery in Texas and produce battery cells, packs, and modules in California and Texas. Other companies investing in battery plants include BMW (South Carolina), Honda (Ohio), Hyundai (Georgia), Mercedes-Benz (Alabama), Toyota (North Carolina), Volkswagen (Ontario, Canada), and Volvo (South Carolina). The construction boom continues in nonunion plants. A variety of battery manufacturers are building new facilities, too. These include the Japanese company AESC (Tennessee, Kentucky, and South Carolina), the Chinese-owned Gotion (Michigan), South Korea’s LG Energy Solution (Arizona and Michigan) the start-up Our Next Energy (Michigan), Japanese-owned Panasonic (Kansas), South Korean SK Battery America (Georgia), and Redwood Materials, a recycling company (Nevada and South Carolina).
UAW Election Results Delayed to “Challenged” Ballots
March 7, 2023 // The outcome will be decided by 1,608 “challenged ballots.” The court-appointed monitor is determining whether the challenged ballots come from eligible voters. In many cases, the voters never included the number of their Local Union on the ballot. In other cases, the elections officer appointed by the monitor was unable to determine if the voter appeared on a list of a local union’s list of active or retired members, observers said. “The independent monitor is continuing to conduct the vote count process. No outcome has been determined,” the Curry Solidarity Team said in a Facebook post. “This is a process that make take a while,” Members United noted. So far, the elections officer has counted 137,591 votes and Fain, boosted by the fallout from a scandal, is leading by 645 votes, according to the unofficial results compiled by the monitor, who was appointed in the wake of the recent scandal during which a dozen union officials were sent to prison.
GM Battery Plant Could End UAW’s Organizing Drought
November 10, 2022 // The $2.3 billion Ultium Cells plant in Northeast Ohio is critical to GM’s battery-electric-vehicle offensive, which is in danger of falling behind schedule because the automaker cannot get enough batteries to power its growing fleet of BEVs. A majority of Ultium workers have signed cards authorizing the UAW to represent them, union President Ray Curry says. The UAW has filed a petition with the Cleveland office of the National Labor Relations Board calling for an election establishing the union as the workers’ bargaining agent. Ultium Cells rejected the UAW’s request for voluntary recognition and said it would prefer a recognition election. So far there is no sign Ultium Cells and its management team, which includes several former GM employees, is preparing to run an anti-UAW campaign in the plant, Russo says.