Electric Vehicles and the Labor Movement

Despite the constant narrative that organized labor and environmentalists are intrinsically opposed to each other, it’s not the case, nor has it ever been the case. In fact, there is a rich history of labor environmentalism and environmentalists acting in solidarity with the labor movement, as I have explored in detail in my scholarly articles, my books, and many posts here. That doesn’t erase the reality of the very real tensions between parts of the labor movement and parts of the environmental movement. Of course those exist, as I’ve written about extensively as well. But it’s a complex situation, one that is often simplified in public discussions of the issue to this supposedly intrinsic opposition. Rachel Cohen has a piece on how the push to make electric vehicles is serving to bring the two movements. I provide some commentary for it.

As the Biden administration attempts to increase incentives for the production of electric vehicles, labor unions and climate groups have teamed up to push for better wages and working conditions for autoworkers – and leave the door open for the nascent EV industry to unionize.

Last month, leaders from some of the largest environmental groups in the country sent a letter to top executives at Toyota, lambasting the automaker for appearing to support the electric vehicle revolution all while lobbying against a proposed tax credit for union-made electric cars.

The tax credit would give $4,500 to consumers who buy electric from unionized US plants – currently just Ford, General Motors and Stellantis NV would qualify – and has been hotly opposed by companies like Tesla, Honda, Hyundai and Nissan. But Toyota went a step further and began funding ads in papers like the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and trade press claiming the federal bonus would hurt non-union autoworkers. (All electric vehicles, union or not, would remain eligible for an existing $7,500 tax credit.)

Representatives from 12 groups – including the Sierra Club, the League of Conservation Voters and Evergreen Action – blasted Toyota for “greenwash[ing] its image” and called its lobbying “extensive and unacceptable”. The organizations rejected Toyota’s claim that incentivizing electric vehicles with union labor would hurt the nation’s climate targets, and said its “manipulation of the political system and undermining action on climate is not limited to the United States”.

This came on the heels of another letter from prominent climate groups, urging electric vehicle start-up Rivian to respect workers’ wishes should they decide to unionize, and permit what’s known as a card check process. Rivan, which went public last month in the biggest US IPO since Facebook, is poised toramp up vehicle production in the next year.

Ten climate groups, including Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace USA, Sunrise Movement and 350.org, signed on to the letter – and said therein that they had reached out to Rivian privately in August. After two months with no response, the groups decided to take their demand for labor peace public. The president of the United Auto Workers announced in the spring that his union was planning to organize EV workers.

This is great! We historians of labor-environmental alliances have thoughts.

While environment and labor groups have not always seen eye-to-eye, the two have a history of shared interests. Josiah Rector, an urban historian at the University of Houston who has studied the 20th century environmental movement, noted that the UAW has previously fought against toxic chemicals and pollution in auto plants.

But in the 1970s, says Rector, automakers viewed the fight for cleaner air and other environmental standards as yet another threat to their bottom line, at a time when they were already hurting from two major oil crises, intensifying deindustrialization, and the closing of manufacturing plants. Automakers began to play “environmental blackmail” against their workers, insisting that any further regulation from the government would force companies to cut even more jobs. “UAW, under threat of job blackmail, helped the companies lobby for a weaker Clean Air Act, which really strained tensions with the environmental movement,” said Rector.

Erik Loomis, a labor historian at the University of Rhode Island, also noted that the decline in industrial unions has especially hurt the unions that were more progressive to begin with – widening the gap between climate progressives and labor. “That left you with the longtime more conservative unions, and as environmentalism has become more of a rich person’s movement it also became disconnected from working-class culture,” Loomis said.

“I think the reality is climate groups have now realized that’s politically untenable and they need to build working-class coalitions if they want to get climate change legislation passed,” he adds. In other words, Loomis said, whether the modern-day solidarity is an alliance of deeply shared values or of convenience, the fact is that “neither are particularly strong enough on their own to get laws passed.”

Changes in the labor movement really do explain a lot of the struggles between the two movements over the last several decades, though not all of it. The unions that were more likely to believe that such alliances were worth pursuing were the same social democratic industrial unions coming out of the CIO. Those unions are either completely gone or a shell of what they once were. The building trades always hated this stuff, even in the 1930s when the United Brotherhood of Carpenters attacked the International Woodworkers of America for critiquing employers’ problems with deforestation, for example. Those unions aren’t what they once were either, but they have a stronger position in the American labor movement. Meanwhile, the service and public sector unions have brought a new shot of political progressivism into the movement, but they haven’t paid so much to environmentalism. SEIU has pretty strong interests in fighting for immigration rights, health care, poverty alleviation, etc. That’s very good! But they haven’t stepped into this particular gap.

Well, all you can do is keep trying. As I’ve stated for a long time, the biggest problem with green groups and labor is cozying up to capitalism. Green capitalists are still capitalists and they still hate unions. So the green groups need to put public pressure on them to recognize workers rights. It’s necessary for both the labor and environmental movements to succeed, neither of which has much political power on their own these days.