In the waning hours of the legislative session, Democrats pushed through new labor requirements widely viewed as retaliation against Tesla, the electric car maker embroiled in a union-organizing campaign at its Fremont plant.
Labor unions got lawmakers to insert two sentences into a cap-and-trade funding bill requiring automakers to be certified “as fair and responsible in the the treatment of their workers” before their customers can obtain up to $2,500 from California’s clean vehicle rebate program.
At the time, Democrats openly wrestled with the concern that the United Automobile Workers, which is trying to maintain its role as the auto industry makes big bets on electric vehicles—was expanding its unionization campaign from the factory floor to the Senate floor. Sen. Steve Glazer of Orinda said the state should not “hold our environmental projects hostage to a fight with one progressive employer.” Sen. Connie Leyva of Chino countered that California shouldn’t want companies to succeed at the expense of workers.
Now, with regulators starting to draft the new rules, a lingering question remains. How far will California—the first state in the nation to approve $15 minimum wage and a state that has set an ambitious goal to put 1.5 million zero emissions vehicles on the road by 2025—go in order to graft its blue values onto the green sector?
“In politics, your oldest friends are your best friends,” said Dan Schnur, former head of California’s campaign watchdog agency and now a professor at the University of Southern California. “The tech people may have come to Sacramento with a lot of money and with an agenda that dovetails with the governor and legislators’ policy priorities, but they’re still the new guys on the block. Labor’s been there for a long, long time.”
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