The United Auto Workers labor union reached tentative agreements with Ford, Stellantis and General Motors to end their strikes at the largest U.S. automakers. One concern was ensuring that automakers couldn’t use electric vehicle plants to replace union jobs with nonunion jobs. Cognizant that factories making gasoline-powered cars will sooner or later be shut down, the union worked with GM to bring battery manufacturing under its contract. 

This points to the larger concern about protections for workers in fossil fuel industries during the clean energy transition. Umair Irfan, a correspondent at Vox who covers climate change and energy policy, highlighted this concern, writing that “the challenge is not just to build a cadre of clean energy workers, but to do so in a way that doesn’t leave mass unemployment, depopulated communities, or environmental damage in its wake.”

He spoke with “Marketplace” host Amy Scott about what the union’s recent win means for traditional energy workers. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

Amy Scott: So what are the UAW’s concerns about the transition to EVs and how that’s affecting workers?

Umair Irfan: The worry from their end is that the auto manufacturers are building new supply chains in new factories, without necessarily expanding the same benefits that unions have fought for to these new production lines. It’s not a given, necessarily, that a new battery plant or a new electric car assembly plant would be covered under a UAW contract. And the manufacturers were saying they wanted to use this as an opportunity to perhaps undermine or to circumvent the UAW, and the union decided to go on strike to ensure that those same protections that they had on existing plants would apply to the new ones.

Scott: And so how does the tentative agreement the union reached with manufacturers address those concerns?

Irfan: They are getting some agreements to extend union protections to these new plants. In particular, battery manufacturing. The auto companies argued that batteries are completely different, they’re a different part of the supply chain, they shouldn’t be covered. But the union was able to flex its muscle and with some of the automakers get an accordance, basically saying that those union protections would still apply to workers and EV plants. They also got some protections for workers who are in plants that are perhaps going to close down in the near future. And the union got some language in the agreement that would give those workers some leverage in terms of being able to go on strike, being able to get training and being able to get the first crack at any new jobs that are being brought to the fore.

Scott: You wrote about a working paper that studied the transition from so-called dirty or carbon-intensive jobs to green jobs, and I was struck only 1% of workers who left dirty jobs actually ended up in greener jobs. What are the barriers to that transition?

Irfan: It is not a given that those people in the traditional energy sector will make the jump towards clean energy, and there’s a number of reasons behind that. One of the big ones is just that simply the jobs are not in the same places. The places where you have oil derricks, where you have fracking wells, are not necessarily the places where you’re installing wind turbines and solar panels. It’s also a different skill set. You know, a person who’s really good at milling and boring engines and motors for conventional gasoline vehicles, that doesn’t necessarily translate to winding electric motors, or dealing with, you know, electrical components in a battery-operated vehicle the way it would in a gasoline- or diesel-powered vehicle. So the skill set doesn’t necessarily translate. So very likely somebody loses a job in a fossil fuel or dirty energy industry, they’ll very likely end up in a very similar industry because that’s where it’s easiest for them to make that jump.

Scott: What can manufacturers do, and perhaps the government do, to try to replace those jobs with cleaner jobs in the same area? Or, you know, train their existing workforce to make that transition from, you know, assembling transmissions to, what did you say, winding electric motors? I’m showing my ignorance here. I didn’t know they were wound.

Irfan: Right. You have to wind copper wire and run magnets and other kinds of things in order to build the motor. But yeah, I mean, essentially, it is a different skill set, which would require a lot of training. And so one of the big things is just to try to anticipate and plan for this. That, essentially, when you see that the dislocation is coming, to basically start making the investments in the communities and in the workers themselves to help cushion that blow. The National Academy of Sciences recently, they put out a report looking at what it would take to facilitate the transition to clean energy, and one of the things they warned about was that the U.S. safety net, the social safety net across the economy, is really fragile. It’s really weak, and it’s really inadequate. So things like better unemployment insurance, things like having low-cost training being made available to them, and even after they get new jobs, it’s not necessarily a given that those same jobs will be equivalent. So perhaps things like salary support to be able to make up the difference can help facilitate that transition. And for older workers who are near retirement age or who may not have the skills or just the will to go back to school, perhaps the government could help buy out or facilitate early retirement packages for them as well.

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