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.