Posts tagged Midwest
Across the Midwest, unions are breaking through in a way they haven’t in decades
December 20, 2023 // Union members and labor experts agree that a collective sense of job insecurity and frustration over wages and working conditions are driving activity in the region.
Electric vehicle jobs are booming in the anti-union South. UAW is worried
September 22, 2023 // “The auto industry’s move south hangs over these talks because now only a minority of workers are in unionized assembly plants,” said Stephen Silvia, a professor at American University and author of “The UAW’s Southern Gamble: Organizing Workers at Foreign-Owned Vehicle Plants.” While all of the Big Three’s plants are unionized, not a single plant in the South is unionized. Automakers’ transition to electric vehicles is accelerating these regional trends. Ford and GM are building battery plants below the Mason-Dixon Line, where states have laws that make unionization much harder than in the traditional working-class bastions of the Midwest. UAW leaders and union supporters worry the shift will lower compensation and cut out unions from the auto industry’s future, and they are seeking to address these concerns in talks with the Big Three.
Opinion: Bernie Sanders to Big 3 CEOs: “It is time for you to end your greed.”
September 19, 2023 // Bernie Sanders: "the average American worker is worse off today than he or she was 50 years ago."
Op-Ed: Sherk: Proposed EV mandate will cost thousands of jobs
July 18, 2023 // he America First Policy Institute used Bureau of Labor Statistics data to estimate how many auto-manufacturing jobs the Biden Administration’s proposed EV mandate would cost. Our model produces estimates similar to prior studies for less-aggressive EV targets. The model finds that this stricter mandate — pushing EVs to two-thirds of U.S. vehicle sales — would eliminate about 120,000 auto-manufacturing jobs. Those job losses would be concentrated in the Midwest. Michigan, Indiana, and Ohio are the heartland of U.S. automobile production. These three states account for more than two-fifths of U.S. auto workers. As Lawrence Burns, the former VP for Research and Development at General Motors, has explained, the EV-induced “employment ramifications for states like Michigan and regions like southeast Michigan and northwest Ohio are really going to be a big deal.”
The ‘most pro-union president’ ever has been a dud for workers
March 15, 2022 // President Biden repeatedly has promised to be “the most pro-union president in American history.” But there’s one key group of people standing in his way: The tens of millions of workers who want nothing to do with union membership.