Fmr. Obama Auto Task Force Head: EV Battery Jobs Can’t Have Same Union Rules as Traditional Plants or It Costs Jobs

On Friday’s broadcast of Bloomberg’s “Wall Street Week,” Steve Rattner, who ran President Obama’s task force on the auto industry, stated that if jobs in electric battery plants are unionized and have the same rules as traditional assembly plants, “then a lot of those jobs may not end up coming here, whatever number of jobs there are in the electric battery area, some of them will not come here, because it will just become too expensive to make the stuff here.”

After discussing the impacts of the electric vehicle transition on jobs, Rattner said, “And then you have these new…joint venture battery plants, should they be unionized or not be unionized? And again, I would come back with the same sort of set of trade-offs, that, if you unionize them, if you impose the same kinds of restrictions, requirements, and so forth on those plants that we do on traditional assembly plants, then a lot of those jobs may not end up coming here, whatever number of jobs there are in the electric battery area, some of them will not come here, because it will just become too expensive to make the stuff here. So, there’s got to be compromise on both sides.”

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