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MAY 4, 2023

Meyerson on TAP

The UAW Plays Some Hardball on Electric Cars

The union's new leaders seek some administration guarantees of just
transition before backing Biden in '24.

Shawn Fain, the newly elected president of the United Auto Workers, and
his fellow insurgents who ousted the ancien régime

****in the recent elections to the union's executive board pledged a
more confrontational approach to the auto companies in the course of
their campaigns. That approach-or at least one of tougher
bargaining-has now been extended to their relations with the Biden
administration.

A story
<[link removed]>
in today's

**New York Times** reports on an internal memo that Fain sent out to
members on Tuesday. In it, he explained that the union would withhold an
early endorsement of Biden's 2024 candidacy (while also making clear
it would never support Donald Trump) over its concerns about the
administration's new climate regulations, which stipulate that by
2032, two-thirds of all new passenger cars must be all-electric. The
problem for the autoworkers is that all-electric cars have fewer parts
than gas-powered cars, and producing them requires fewer than half the
number of workers needed to turn out the gas-guzzlers.

There's no question that the legislation Biden got through Congress in
2021 and 2022 is already bolstering manufacturing, and domestic
manufacturing at that. There's also no question that his is the most
pro-labor administration in the nation's history, and that his
appointees at the National Labor Relations Board and the Department of
Labor have been working to make the right to form a union more real,
despite the substantial revocation of that right by decades of court
rulings and legislative nibbling. Absent an actual reform to the
National Labor Relations Act, however, which Democrats have sought since
the 1960s without ever coming up with enough Senate votes, there are
limits to what they can do to make those rights real again.

All that, however, is quite distinct from the problem facing the
autoworkers, which is the elimination of jobs, union and otherwise, due
to shifting factors of production. This is nothing new, of course:
Machinery, robots, and the like have already eliminated millions of jobs
in manufacturing and construction. (The shop floor of a modern steel
mill, for instance, is all but devoid of people.) What's different
here is that the elimination of jobs is effectively hastened not by
changes in the manufacturing process, but by governmental action.

The real question, then, is largely one of "just transition"-whether
the government can devise and enact policies that provide autoworkers
who lose their livelihoods in the transition to electric with a
comparable level of economic standing and security. As events would have
it, the "justest" transition I'm aware of was at least partly devised
by a then-former director of research for the UAW: economist Nat
Weinberg, who was also dubbed "Walter Reuther's brain trust." Working
for the UAW from the 1940s through the 1970s, Weinberg figured out how
to actualize Reuther's most innovative proposals, including annual
wage increases keyed not just to the cost of living but also to the
productivity advances of the Big Three automakers. He also devised the
union's "guaranteed annual wage," in which the auto companies agreed
to supplement their workers' unemployment insurance to the level of
their regular pay during those weeks every year when they shut down
production to reconfigure their assembly lines to the demands of their
new cars.

After he retired, Weinberg came to the aid of San Francisco Rep. Phil
Burton, Congress's foremost labor-leftist. Burton had introduced a
bill that would greatly expand the Redwoods National Park, which ran
parallel to the California coast north of San Francisco. The expansion,
however, would mean the permanent loss of jobs to several thousand
loggers, and thus sparked the opposition of unions whose causes Burton
had invariably championed. Burton then turned to Weinberg, who came up
with legislation
<[link removed]> that
allocated federal funding to those loggers at the same level as their
pay and benefits, for six full years (11 if they were near retirement
age). A legislative wizard, Burton then got the bill through Congress.

What the new-model UAW appears to be doing is leaning on the
administration to do more to ease its members' transition. Seems to me
like they need a new-model Nat Weinberg, too.

~ HAROLD MEYERSON

Follow Harold Meyerson on Twitter <[link removed]>

[link removed]

Teamsters Begin Major Amazon Fight
<[link removed]>

A group of unionized delivery drivers in Palmdale, California, could
open new possibilities for a legal challenge to Amazon's
subcontracting model. BY LUIS FELIZ LEON

How to Solve the Debt Ceiling Standoff? Sue Janet Yellen.
<[link removed]>
A bondholder could simply allege that America failing to pay off its
debts is unconstitutional. There's a good argument for that. BY
JONATHAN ZASLOFF

Supreme Court Justices Offer Unconvincing Dodge on Ethics
<[link removed]>
Former appeals judge J. Michael Luttig gets it right; Congress has the
power to impose rules of conduct on the high court. BY STEVEN LUBET

The Million Dollar Tweet
<[link removed]>
Venture capitalist Balaji Srinivasan made one of the worst bets in the
history of gambling. BY PROSPECT STAFF

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