From Jacobin: Organizing the Battery Belt
Thanks to our friend Jim Pence, who published Hillbilly Report online, for sending us this. The Report's motto is as timely as ever with Donald Trump back in the White House and MAGA Republicans running the House and Senate: Never before have so few with so much promised to take away so much from so many and then laugh their asses off as the so many with so little vote for the so few with so much.
In deep-red Hardin County, Kentucky, workers are trying to unionize a new electric vehicle battery plant. If Donald Trump scraps the IRA, it may cost thousands of his supporters safe, well-paying jobs.
By AMOS BARSHAD
On a bright winter afternoon in Hardin County, Kentucky, I drive through a snowy residential neighborhood, rural enough for a bird of prey with a critter in its talons to fly above my windshield. Then, turning a corner, I come to a massive, sprawling factory actively being built.
Smokestacks pump. Bulldozers push dirt. There are actually twin factories going up, side by side. A steady stream of Korean specialists — here from their homes six thousand miles away to train local workers — throw on hard hats and light cigarettes on their way into the plant. Somber warnings posted in English and Korean forbid anyone from capturing footage inside the plant. I loiter outside the metal detectors and the rest of the beefy security apparatus snapping photos on my phone until a guard hustles out ordering me to delete them. I feel like I’ve wandered into an exclusionary zone where a top-secret military base is being hastily constructed.
This is the electric vehicle battery plant BlueOval SK, a joint venture between American car giant Ford and the South Korean electric vehicle battery company SK On. Along with its sister plant in Tennessee, this will be the largest manufacturing project Ford has ever undertaken.