The United Auto Workers vs. EVs

Joe Biden may not be senile, but America’s auto-manufacturing and climate-change policies certainly are

By Holman W. Jenkins. Excerpts:

"If the United Auto Workers union succeeds in its aims, it will gobble up funds needed to sustain Mr. Biden’s government-mandated transition to electric vehicles."

"The union likes to point to the recent anomalous profits at Ford, GM and Chrysler, but the union really has its eye on what are better defined as “rents”—an economics term for the excess margins the companies have enjoyed on their domestically built pickup trucks and large SUVs thanks to a 25% import tariff in place since 1964.

In some years, these rents materialize as accounting profits; in other years they are fully absorbed by the cost of building money-losing cars mandated by Washington, most recently electric cars. Either way, more for the UAW inevitably means less to subsidize these so-called compliance vehicles."

"a second stream of “rents” has lately appeared in the form of direct federal handouts to builders and buyers of EVs."

"If battery production for EVs is allowed to take root in nonunion plants, it will accelerate the doom of the government-sanctioned UAW labor monopoly over the Big Three. That monopoly is already self-liquidating, but slowly, as U.S. auto manufacturing increasingly takes place in foreign-owned factories not subject to union control."

"The union’s largely white, working-class membership, already suspected of Trumpist sympathies, stands in the way of the EV transition"

"The strike can only have one ending, requiring even more interventions in the future to keep the UAW-staffed companies afloat. LBJ’s pickup tariff to block the import of a VW light truck was only the first. In 1979-80, Jimmy Carter bailed out Chrysler with loan guarantees. Ronald Reagan connived with the Japanese over import restrictions. The colossal 2008-09 auto bailout came with Obama and Bush fingerprints."