Union reaches historic agreement at EV battery plant
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The Big Story
Union reaches historic agreement at EV battery plant
Workers at the nation’s first electric vehicle (EV) battery plant to unionize have reached an agreement with management on Monday.
© AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar
If ratified by members, the new deal will double the pay of workers at the Ultium plant in Lordstown, Ohio, a joint venture between General Motors (GM) and Korea-based LG Energy Solutions where workers build standardized battery platforms that will form the core of GM SUVs, cars and trucks.
“This local agreement is the culmination of thousands of UAW members and leaders who said we’re not going to take it,” union president Shawn Fain wrote on Monday.
In addition to the pay hike, the deal will give workers new safety protections — and, leaders of the United Auto Workers (UAW) hope, create a model for future union penetration into the EV sector.
Lordstown has been a charged and evocative battle for the UAW: A community gutted by what Fain called “a race to the bottom” made possible by the push from the labor-intensive construction of internal combustion cars to the largely automated production of EVs.
In 2019, GM closed the Lordstown conventional auto plant, where workers had made about $30 an hour — only to break ground on the new Ultium plant in 2020.
But when workers began at the new battery plant, they made just $16.50 an hour — to do a job which included exposure to caustic chemicals with unknown health impacts.
“The Big Three automakers: Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis, are taking billions of dollars in government subsidies to go electric,” Fain said last year, as UAW members went on strike across the three companies. “But those benefits aren’t trickling down to UAW members.”
In 2022, just after production at the Ultium plant began, 93 percent of workers voted to join UAW.
“It was a high mark to hit — the highest I’ve ever seen,” local union president David Green told The Hill.
The former union head at the now-closed GM plant, Green had the dubious distinction of being personally attacked on social media by then-president Donald Trump when he fought to keep the plant open.
“When you see one of those factories close — it really kills the community,” Green told The Hill. The reopened Ultium plant “is now breathing life back into the community.”
But the new plant came with less money and new risks. To The Hill, Green described caustic chemicals coming into the plant in burlap sacks labeled in Korean, which members couldn’t read. “We didn’t know what it was or how to identify it.”
In 2023, the plant was cited and fined by federal regulators for exposing workers to “machine and chemical hazards.”
As part of the new deal, members get four health and safety representatives in the plant — more than a usual plant.
And in a pivotal part of the agreement, won as part of the UAW strike campaign last year, the workers will be treated as GM employees, contracted out to Ultium — rather than being an isolated Ultium-only union.
That will help workers with the “just transition to EVs,” Green said — creating a path for conventional auto workers to filter over to good EV-manufacturing jobs as sales of internal combustion engines declines. If they leave Ultium, “they can move to another facility because covered under GM national agreement.”
In particular, he said, the doubled wages would trickle to local business and governments. “Local restaurants, barbershops that have closed will start to reopen. The tax base coming back in. No mistake, $35 an hour, you’re paying 2x taxes as if $16 an hour. It’s good for the police, fire, schools.”
The pay raise, he said, is “good for our workers, absolutely. But I can’t stress enough how good it is for the community.”
“And all because we stopped that race to the bottom.”
Welcome to The Hill’s Sustainability newsletter, I’m Saul Elbein — every week we follow the latest moves in the growing battle over sustainability in the U.S. and around the world.
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Biofuel Pollution
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© AP Photo/Stephen Groves
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