“New Battery Belt is Changing the South”by Ben Carroll, Labor Notes, Aug. 2025
The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) passed in 2022 is sending
millions in government seed money and corporate welfare to EV battery manufacturing plants, some in Southern
states like North Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee and South Carolina. The IRA consists of grants and tax credits,
while state governments are contributing infrastructure improvements, tax
breaks and workforce training, all totally about $60B. Two-thirds of EV jobs may be eventually
located there, as VW and BMW are already ramping up EV production in two South
Carolina factories according to Carroll.
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| Labor Notes Convention, 2024 |
This so-called ‘battery belt’ includes revived lithium
mining in North Carolina; a planned 8,500 worker Hyundai battery plant outside
Savannah, GA; a mega-site in North Carolina for Toyota employing 5,100 workers
and two ‘Blue Oval” EV production sites in Memphis and in Kentucky employing
11,000 more workers. You will note the
size of these facilities is actually conducive to union organizing, as the
capitalists have been trying to shrink production facilities for years to
prevent this.
The context is the nationalist U.S. trade war against China, as
the U.S. government is attempting to block their EV and battery industries from
penetrating the U.S. The other context is the vicious anti-unionism of
right-to-work-for-less states in the South.
The capitalists and their southern Republican politician allies have denounced
unionism as “threatening the values we
live by…” (What is that value, poverty?) The governor of South
Carolina, a descendent of slave-owners, said he would “…fight unions to the gates of hell.” (Satan would do no less.) This is how ‘industrial policy’ works in the U.S., a fractured, profitable and unequal version of what real economic planning should look like. By promoting the 'battery belt' Biden has borrowed a play from AOC/Sander's 'Green New Deal,' a 'deal' which is now functioning as a prompt to 'green' capitalism and the expansion of a profitable sector. It should be noted that most EV production is
still located in Michigan but Carroll says that will change.
Southern workers, led by a restive black and Latino proletariat, have
unionized a Blue Bird e-bus manufacturer in Georgia; the New Flyer e-bus manufacturer
in Alabama; the massive VW plant in Chattanooga and Daimler truck plants in 3
southern states, all led by different unions – UAW, CWA-IUE and the USW.
Carroll is a member of the Southern Workers Assembly
headquartered in Durham, which is seeking to seed union organizers in various
plants. He recommends recognizing ‘choke
points’ in the production chain, as these companies have local supply chains
and vertical integration which make them more vulnerable. All this is bearing fruit to the long-ago 1950s claim of the AFL-CIO to ‘Organize the
South.’ As I’ve noted before, this
increase in manufacturing in the South will proletarianize larger and larger
groups of formerly small town and rural workers, and will lead to the South
being a new key battleground in the labor and socialist movements.
Note: Minneapolis just celebrated the 90th
Anniversary of the 1934 Teamster’s Strike, which made Minneapolis a ‘union town’
for a while. That same year the Auto-Lite
strike in Toledo and the Longshoremen’s strike in San Francisco announced an
upsurge in the labor movement across the country. Remember 1934!
Prior blog reviews on this topic, use blog search box,
upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms: “Cranky
Yankee,” “Fighting Times,” “South,” “Neo-Confederate.”
And I bought it at May Day Books, which has a good
selection of left-wing magazines, journals and newspapers.
The Cranky Yankee / July 30, 2024
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