Kentucky Battery Plant Workers Launch Union Drive with UAW

A majority of the 1,000 auto workers at the car battery park BlueOval in Glendale, Kentucky, have signed union cards to join the United Auto Workers.

The battery park, a joint venture between Ford and South Korea’s SK On, is expected to ramp up hiring to 5,000 hourly workers by 2030. It has twin battery plants. But the second one is on hold due to low demand for electric vehicles. At the first plant, workers are testing battery module packs from facilities in Georgia, as the plant prepares to become fully operational next year.

Since he started last year, Chad Johnson has seen co-workers suffer mild heart attacks and respiratory problems, apparently from exposure to chemicals. He has seen workers carried out on stretchers with broken pelvises from tripping on exposed wiring, because they are working in what is still an active construction site.

The organizing “has moved more quickly than expected,” said Johnson, a quality control technician and a former UAW Local 3047 member at a nearby Ford supplier. “There were originally six of us. That grew to about 15. Now there’s an organizing committee of about 70.”

Workers announced their public campaign on November 20 with a video that compared their organizing to the 2023 Stand-Up Strike, when Ford UAW Local 862 members in nearby Louisville walked off the job at the Kentucky Truck Plant.

Next, the company can choose to voluntarily recognize the union. But this appears less likely than requesting a union election with the National Labor Relations Board.

“I am a pro-union governor and always will be,” said Governor Andy Beshear. “My hope is the companies that are involved will stay neutral and let this be a true decision of the employees.”

INFESTED WITH BATS

Halee Hadfield was one of the original six workers who spoke with a UAW regional director. Then she began holding meetings in her living room.

Hadfield had been a member of the Communications Workers’ industrial division, IUE-CWA, for four years at General Electric, where she built appliances. She applied at BlueOval because the company was promoting that it offered free health insurance and other perks, including cell phones and computers, plus a starting rate of $21 an hour.

The company later withdrew the offer of free health care, a sore point for workers who were drawn to the job for that reason.

A month in, Hadfield became concerned when the company sent new hires to train in a school infested with bats. “The bat colony had roosted in the elevator shaft of this decommissioned middle school,” she said, “and we didn’t really have much choice but to be exposed to their guano and their droppings, and it started to make a lot of people physically ill.”

Once they started training onsite, while the plant was still under construction, Hadfield and her co-workers really started getting to know each other and talking about their shared issues at work.

Meanwhile, the safety problems at the Blue Oval site had begun before factory workers even got here. Since construction started in 2022, the workers building the complex have been raising safety concerns, including mold and respiratory illnesses among electrical workers. The company recently quarantined a whole building and workers say it is finally tearing out the whole HVAC for mold.

SAFETY THE TOP CONCERN

But BlueOval workers cite safety concerns, especially about handling dangerous chemicals, as a main motive to organize.

Many members of the organizing committee are contrasting the conditions at BlueOval with their own past union experiences, including at Ford suppliers. Johnson, for instance, was a shop steward at Metalsa Structural Products.

“Roughly three weeks in, I just mentioned to a co-worker one day, ‘Golly, if we don’t get the UAW in here, I don't know if I can stay,’” said battery worker Bill Wilmoth.

“We started running into a myriad of safety issues. We are taken into a plant that is in construction, and we’re being asked to navigate that and never really given clear instructions on things like what happens if there’s an emergency? How do we evacuate? How do we deal with the raw material chemicals?”

One of the fears is exposure to cathode and anode powder. The hazards can include chemical leaks, electric shocks, explosions, and fires.

“Cathode and anode powder are used to make paste that is applied to different foils that we use to pull together and create our battery pouches,” Hadfield explained. “If you look at an Energizer battery, you’ll see a plus and a minus sign on opposite sides of that battery. Within that battery itself would also be tiny little bits of cathode and anode powder.”

The batteries that auto workers manufacture are made of lithium-ion electrochemical cells. Each cell has two electrodes—a positively charged cathode, containing lithium, and a negatively charged anode, typically made of graphite. The cathode usually contains nickel, manganese, and cobalt oxides.

BATTERY PRODUCTION PROCESS

Workers are required to sign non-disclosure agreements about the production process. But from various interviews across multiple battery plants and talking with experts in the field, I’ve outlined what the typical process involves.

At fully operational battery plants like Ultium Cells, the production process unfolds through machines the size of casino slot machines. They are made of metal and glass, so workers can stand sentry, watching the batteries run through a series of lifts carrying miniature trays and conveyor belts that run over the machines and feed them materials from above.

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When the machines run into any issues, that’s when workers step in, ready to troubleshoot errors, fix jams, and perform steps that need the dexterity of human hands, such as adding copper tips. They wear clean-room suits, hairnets, ear plugs, and goggles, which make them look like astronauts.

The process begins in the electrode department, where machines mix a slurry of powder made of minerals like cobalt mined by children in Democratic Republic of the Congo. Then a machine coats this slurry tube of gel in aluminum foil. These coated rolls are then pressed to specific specifications in another machine. They move along to “notch and dry,” where machines cut out tabs on the end of the rolls, separating the cathode and the anode to prevent them from sticking together and causing a fire.

The process then continues to lamination and stacking, where the battery gets put through a heater, cut again, and shaped like cylinders or pouches. The laminated cells wend their way through another machine to be gassed and de-gassed, charged and discharged to the end of the line where they get taped, packaged into a rectangular pouch, and sent off for final inspections and boxing.

‘A NASTY CHEMICAL’

By handling the slurry contained in pouches, workers can come into contact with a hazardous solvent known as n-Methylpyrrolidone (NMP) used in the production of battery cells. ​“The NMP is the worst part of the slurry. It’s a nasty chemical that is definitely not good to breathe or get on your skin,” Greg Less, technical director at the University of Michigan Battery Lab, told me last year.

“Acute exposure [to NMP] may damage unborn children, cause respiratory tract irritation, skin irritation, nausea, headache, dizziness, and diarrhea,” a UAW white paper notes about the Ultium Cells plant.

“In manufacturing the anode, the company uses a product called Lucan BT1003M,” the white paper continues. “More than 95 percent of it consists of carbon nanotubes, which can cause germ-cell mutations and cancer.”

“These products all come with pictograms on them that indicate that they are not just flammable if around open flames or excessive heat, but they’re also carcinogenic,” Hadfield said. “For people who don't know what that means, that essentially means that ingesting these raw materials long-term will give you cancer and could kill you.”

Workers said that the company promised it would put people on rotation schedules, so no one worked for longer than three years in sites with exposure to these carcinogenic chemicals. But so far the company has not made that schedule public.

“There’s a lot of different acids that we work with—basically the exact same thing a regular chemist would work with on a daily basis in full hazmat suit,” said Johnson. “A lot of these folks are not even being given proper PPE [Personal Protective Equipment]. “There’s no respirators being fitted. Nobody feels safe whatsoever over here.”

And despite all the hazards, workers say they’re being told to hurry up, as heavy machinery whirs around them and construction workers are building above their heads.

As BlueOval onboards new hires, Hadfield says organizers are doing community outreach, so people in new-hire classes find out there’s a union campaign brewing to address the safety issues they’ll soon face onsite.

ORGANIZING BATTERY PLANTS

The electric vehicle sector is growing fast, and auto companies have been using the transition as an excuse to open non-union plants. Organizing them is do-or-die for the UAW.

During the Stand-up Strike, Ford CEO Jim Farley accused UAW President Shawn Fain of “holding the deal hostage over the battery plants.” Shortly after the Big 3 contracts were settled, the UAW announced its intention to organize the whole auto sector, especially the plants making batteries and electric-vehicle plants.

The union notched a lucrative first contract in June at Ultium Cells, a joint venture between General Motors and LG Energy Solutions at a plant in Ohio. By the end of the agreement, wages will have more than doubled since the workers there joined the union in 2022. The union also won four full-time union health-and-safety reps and time-and-a-half pay after 10 hours (regular shifts at Ultium are 12 hours).

The 1,600 workers at that plant were brought under the GM national agreement as a result of the Stand-Up Strike; GM agreed to pay Ultium workers at least 75 percent of the top wages of other GM workers.

“This is the kind of agreement that makes thousands of electric vehicle battery workers want to join the UAW and fight for a better future,” Fain said. In September, GM voluntarily recognized another 1,000 auto workers, also part of the national agreement, at an Ultium plant in Spring Hill, Tennessee.

ELECTRIC VEHICLE CAPITAL

Governor Beshear christened Kentucky “the EV capital of the United States,” after it received more than $11.5 billion in electric vehicle-related investments. These investments are part of President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, a program of public subsidies and financing for companies that are moving away from fossil fuels.

The incoming Donald Trump administration has opposed the electric vehicle transition, saying it would spell “complete obliteration” for the U.S. auto sector. But according to the Financial Times, it would only obliterate Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s competition: “While Tesla is making money from its EVs, rivals’ losses on them have been narrowed by consumer tax credits worth up to $7,500 under Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act.”

Tesla makes profits from its battery-run cars and trucks. But so far, the legacy U.S. carmakers are still generating losses. That’s why consumer tax credits are a boon, reducing these losses, especially for leased EVs.

“Take away the subsidies,” Musk posted in July on X. “It will only help Tesla.” The company’s market capitalization has surged to $300 billion since the election, outpacing the combined market value of Ford, GM, and Stellantis, according to a Deutsche Bank analysis.

At BlueOval, Johnson said, there was a moment when the organizing committee worried the change in administration might doom the union drive. But the dour attitude faded quickly: “I don’t think there’s anything that could damp our resolve.”