Workers At Ohio EV Factory Vote To Unionize

Workers at the first factory built specifically to produce EVs and parts voted overwhelmingly to unionize, officials said Friday. By a 710-16 vote, workers at Ultimum Cells in Warren, Ohio, a joint venture of LG Energy and General Motors, voted to join the United Auto Workers. The victory is especially significant because so much EV manufacturing investment is happening in Southern states hostile to organized labor but generous with big corporate subsidies.

“If the companies that are being given huge subsidies to fight climate change from the federal government are using that money to pull jobs out of the industrial heartland and moving them somewhere else, it will be impossible to sustain the middle class and fight climate change,” Damon Silvers, former AFL-CIO policy director, told the Washington Post. “This is the thing that I think is missing in the environmental discourse about climate change,” Silvers added. “Fighting climate change is a political and economic fight and you’ve got to have the support of working people to win that fight.” (Washington Post $, AP, CNBC, Reuters, CNN, Bloomberg $, New York Times $, Wall Street Journal $, Jalopnik)