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**MAY 4, 2021**

Meyerson on TAP

Biden's Good-Paying Union Jobs? Here's How to Get Them.

If we resurrect the term "captain of industry" for some of today's
CEOs, General Motors' Mary Barra would certainly fit the bill. And she
even more certainly exhibited industrial-strength chutzpah last week,
announcing

that GM would invest a cool billion dollars to create an
electric-vehicle factory in Mexico, just two days after President Biden
had pledged before Congress and the nation to spend billions to help the
auto industry mass-produce electric vehicles-in the United States,
with well-paid union labor.

Barra's ploy, then, raises questions about how the administration
should administer those funds if its infrastructure bill clears
Congress. Should a company that opts to build EVs in other countries for
the American market qualify for those funds? Should the bill stipulate
that those funds must only go to plants in the U.S. that provide worker
benefits and pay a certain wage? Should it allow the administration to
set the criteria for the companies that receive the funding, as it sets
criteria for companies receiving federal contracts?

My instinct-and, I presume, that of the United Auto Workers and the
entire labor movement-is that the same criteria that informed the
living-wage ordinances that were enacted in hundreds of municipalities
in the early years of this century should apply here: If the government
is spending the public's tax dollars to help industries and create
jobs, those have to be good jobs, with decent wages and benefits. And if
the administration is given discretion to administer the EV funding, it
should be able to condition it not only on auto companies' compliance
with wage and hour and benefit rules, but also on their agreeing to
staying neutral should their workers choose to seek a union.

President Biden has said repeatedly that his plans will create good,
middle-class, union jobs here in the United States. In order for his
plans to actually do that, those are the conditions they need to insist
on.

~ HAROLD MEYERSON

Follow Harold Meyerson on Twitter

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Will Biden Favor Drug Companies-or Billions of People Needing COVID
Vaccines?

As the global humanitarian crisis deepens, so far the U.S. government is
siding with Big Pharma. BY ROBERT KUTTNER

Financial Speculation Is About More Than GameStop Day Traders

The real speculation is happening at the top of the market, through
skyrocketing merger transactions and increases in the power of the
biggest companies. BY DAVID DAYEN

Strategic Compromise-or Sellout?

Gaining GOP support for the infrastructure plan BY ROBERT KUTTNER

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