The United Auto Workers strike against General Motors, Ford and Stellantis is about money. It is about cost of living increases. It is about job security for the men and women who build the cars. But the issue looming behind many of those demands, for both the companies and the workers, is the transition to electric vehicles.
“For Detroit automakers, EVs are absolutely central to the strike. They are headed into this unknown future into which they’re pouring billions of dollars,” said Micheline Maynard, a longtime auto journalist and publisher of the Substack newsletter “Intersection: Everything That Moves.”
The UAW strike has not yet reached Tennessee. And most of the state’s auto workers do not belong to a union. But Tennessee and the rest of the South is where legacy car makers are building their battery-fueled future. What is taking shape in the South, sometimes called the “battery belt,” is on the minds of union leaders. And the outcome of the UAW strike could have consequences for Tennessee workers.
How the Battery Belt was built
Elon Musk’s upstart Tesla continues to dominate the EV market, making more than half of the electric automobiles sold in the U.S. Tesla’s factories are in California, Nevada and Texas. But many other car makers, from BMW in South Carolina, Kia in Georgia and Ford in Kentucky, are either already making EVs in the South or investing in new factories to produce them.
In Tennessee, Volkswagen builds its all-electric ID.4 in Chattanooga, GM makes its Cadillac Lyriq EV in Spring Hill and the massive new BlueOval City outside Memphis will produce a new Ford EV pickup truck.
“The incentive packages were incredible that the automakers got to locate to the South,” Maynard said.
The South also has fewer unions, often because laws like “right to work” statutes make it hard to organize.
The lack of unions gave car companies more flexibility in who they could hire at their new Southern factories.
“There was no shortage of…
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