Union jobs? Ford’s plan for EV factories raises question
NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Ford’s recent blockbuster announcement that it would build four sprawling new factories in Kentucky and Tennessee by 2025 and hire nearly 11,000 workers raised a big unanswered question: Just how good will those jobs be?
No one — not Ford, not the United Auto Workers union, not the future job holders themselves — yet knows how much the workers will be paid or whether they will vote for union membership.
Three of the plants, to be built with Ford’s South Korean corporate partner, SK Innovation, would produce batteries for 1 million electric vehicles annually. A fourth would make the next generation of electric F-Series pickup trucks, a version of America’s top-selling vehicle.
The new factories represent an $11.4 billion bet by Ford on a vision for the future in which tens of millions of drivers will shift from pollution-belching internal combustion engines to electric vehicles that emit nothing from the tailpipe.
The stakes are high for Ford’s employees as well as for the UAW, which is counting on ensuring union membership at battery factories to replace jobs that will be lost should the transition to electric vehicles happen as Ford and others envision. Union workers generally are paid, on average, 20% more than their nonunion counterparts, typically receive more generous benefits and wield a larger voice on safety and other workplace rules at their factories.
When Ford’s plans were announced Sept. 27, CEO Jim Farley stopped short of publicly supporting the UAW, saying only that union representation at the plants would be decided by the workers themselves. In Kentucky and Tennessee representation by the UAW is far from assured.
Two days after the announcement, Ford said it expected to continue a “strong, mutually beneficial” relationship with the UAW.
“We respect the UAW’s efforts to organize future hourly workers at the new facilities coming to Tennessee and Kentucky,” Ford and SK said in statements.
By stopping short of offering explicit support for union membership at its new plants, experts say, Ford may be trying to appease politicians who have been vocal opponents of union organizing.
A letter attached to Ford’s national contract with the UAW pledges that the company will remain neutral when the union tries to organize any new factories. It will agree to “card check” sign-up efforts, which let unions recruit workers to sign cards saying they want to be represented. Once 51% of workers sign on, the plant becomes union.
Generally, that’s the union’s favored way of organizing plants. But in Southern states, card check doesn’t mean automatic union factories. Kentucky and Tennessee have “rightto-work” laws, which bar companies from signing deals that force workers to pay union dues.
In opposing the UAW, Tennessee Republican Gov. Bill Lee argued that union membership would make it harder for the state to recruit other manufacturers.
UAW President Ray Curry, who attended the Tennessee ceremony, said he didn’t think Ford had chosen sites in Stanton, Tennessee, and Glendale, Kentucky, to avoid the UAW. He expressed optimism about the new factories.
“We’ve got a long-term working relationship with Ford,” Curry said. “It’s just a great opportunity to continue in that relationship.”
Todd Dunn, president of the UAW local office in Louisville, sounded hopeful, too. He said he regarded the remarks this week by Ford’s CEO Farley as cautionary in a politically charged environment.