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Filtering Climate Change Policy through Labor-Management Politics


Tesla is the world's largest manufacturer of electric vehicles. 

It is also the one corporate word that comes to mind when one hears the phrase "electric cars."

And it has a plant for making them in California. 

It was odd, then, that when President Biden held a press event specifically to tout his program for spurring American made EVs, there were corporate executives present, with great smiles: execs from GM, from Ford, and from the successor-corp. to Chrysler, now known as Stellantis. But nobody from Tesla. 

Heck, Ford's recent entry into this market is the Mach-E. But it doesn't make them in the US. It makes them in Mexico. Yet Ford is at the big Event and Tesla is not? 

Fortunately, Biden's press secretary, Jen Psaki, explained the reason for us.

"Well, these [GM, Ford, and Stellantis] are the three largest employers of the United Auto Workers, so I'll let you draw your own conclusions."   

So it seems safe to infer that US EV policy under President Biden has a pro-union filter. 

Does it matter? Not terribly. Ideally the adoption of electric cars would be determined by supply and demand, but nobody in any position of importance really believes that. Nor of course did they believe that during the Trump years. 

In fact, one key distinction between Trump and the other 21st century Republican President, "W," is that under W, people in importance at least pretended to believe in the market as a mechanism for making important resource allocation decisions. Under Trump, the pretense dropped away. 

My guess is that we're seeing something analogous on the Democratic side. I don't believe that anyone in any position of importance under Biden, and slightly younger than him (I respect his old-school habits of thought) really gives a tinker's dam whether Tesla's plants are union organized. But I think it is their conventional piety, and they have to pretend to care.

Hence the snub of Tesla, and Psaki's attribution thereof to the influence of the UAW on this White House. 

In the near future, there will probably a Democratic administration as openly contemptuous of their party's historical alliance with unions and advocacy of collective bargaining as Trump's administration was of ... any principles at all. 

And then we will have conquered hypocrisy. May God have mercy on our souls. 

(I'll have something more to say about Tesla and electric cars soon.) 



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Comments

  1. HenryAugust 17, 2021 at 7:55 AM

    I don't know when I last saw the expression "tinker's dam" (or "damn"), so I looked it up in the Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins and read:

    not worth a tinker's damn (dam). There are numerous old expressions, some dating back over 400 years, indicating the profanity of tinkers in general. The tinker, who takes his name from "tink," the sound of a hammer on metal, is remembered by 'to swear like a tinker' and 'not worth a tinker's curse,' among other sayings. Obviously, he threw 'damns' around so casually that they became meaningless, worthless, giving us the expression 'not worth a tinker's damn.' There have been attempts, however, to link the phrase to the little temporary 'dams' tinkers fashioned to hold solder in place when they repaired pots and pans.

    This explanation raises other questions. Were the little temporary dams worthless? And why did tinkers curse so much? Did they frequently hit their thumbs with their hammers? Enquiring minds want to know.

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    Replies
    1. ChristopherAugust 17, 2021 at 8:08 AM

      Henry, although the dams clearly do have their ephemeral passing value, they don't last long enough to be bought or sold, so they don't have market value. So the phrase might be interpreted, "not worth a tinker's dam on eBay."

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