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**MAY 20, 2021**

Meyerson on TAP

GM and Ford: Going Green and Anti-Union

America's two major legacy automakers-General Motors and
Ford-think they've figured out a way to comply with President
Biden's push to go all-electric, while at the same time flouting his
push to create well-paying union jobs.

GM is currently building two new battery cell factories near the sites
of two of its more storied, now shuttered factories-one in Lordstown,
Ohio (where, 50 years ago, workers struck to protest the speedup of the
assembly line), the other in Spring Hill, Tennessee (where GM used to
produce Saturns). While early battery cell technology was first devised
by American scientists, Wall Street's insistence on cheaper, offshore
production quickly located the factories abroad, chiefly in South Korea,
until eventually the R&D relocated there, too. Not surprisingly, then,
these new GM factories are joint ventures with the South Korean battery
company LG Chem.

Because GM has had nationwide contracts with the United Auto Workers
since the early 1940s, all of its U.S.-based plants have been unionized.
Now, however, GM is saying that because its new factories will be joint
ventures, it will not commit to their being union. Nor will it commit to
having workers simply choose to join or reject a union by signing
affiliation cards. Instead, it insists that workers will have to go
through an election, meaning that management-which GM could pretend is
really the management of LG Chem, not good old GM, the workers'
friend-could oppose the workers' unionization efforts. As Amazon
just demonstrated at its Bessemer, Alabama, warehouse, deep-pocketed and
coercive management opposition is almost always sufficient to intimidate
workers from choosing to go union.

Not surprisingly, the UAW is up in arms

about this decision, demanding that GM not use its move into electric
cars as an excuse to weaken its workers' bargaining power. The UAW
favors management neutrality, in which workers are free to sign or not
to sign union affiliation cards.

And today, the race to the bottom of autoworker power accelerated with
Ford's announcement

that it, too, would begin electric battery production with a joint
venture of its own with non-union SK Innovation.

American big business is being highly selective in comporting its plans
to President Biden's vision for American industrial renewal. Green

**sí**, good jobs

**no!**appears to be the watchword at Ford and GM. Perhaps Biden should
speak louder or carry a bigger stick. He has a bully pulpit and the
power to let federal contracts; he should begin to use them.

~ HAROLD MEYERSON

Follow Harold Meyerson on Twitter

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