Buoyed by notable Southern victories in 2024, the United Auto Workers Union is on a quest to organize the electric vehicle and battery sector. UAW hopes its next prize is a sprawling campus in rural Kentucky.
Gov. Andy Beshear says the BlueOval SK plant will be the world’s largest EV battery manufacturer.
“It is nothing short of incredible,” Beshear stated during a plant tour. “This project is the largest in the history of the Commonwealth of Kentucky by far.”
A super-majority of workers at BlueOval SK has asked the National Labor Relations Board for a vote on joining the United Auto Workers, which represents Ford employees across the U.S. The nearly $6 billion electric vehicle battery campus is part of a joint venture between Ford and South Korea’s SK On, spanning two manufacturing plants totaling more than eight million square feet.
Kentucky’s new corporate neighbor is expected to employ 5,000 workers once fully in operation, but some early hires like Quality Operator Halee Hadfield said company management has ignored safety concerns.
“It’s like these people are wearing horse blinders,” Hadfield said following a meeting at a local union hall in Elizabethtown last month. “They think it’s just about pay, it’s just about insurance, but it’s not. It’s about how you treat us as people and whether or not we come to work safe.”
Even though they’re not in production yet, workers say they’re exposed to fire, electrical, and chemical hazards, sometimes without personal protective equipment. Production Operator Bill Wilmoth has experienced respiratory issues from mold.
“When we came back from Christmas break, in about an hour or so, I started noticing a burning in my throat, burning in my eyes,” Wilmoth explained. “Lunch time comes, you go outside and get fresh air, it quickly abated.”
In a statement, BlueOval SK said its safety protocols are “robust and consistent, meeting industry standards and complying with stringent federal, state, and local regulations.”
Workers cite safety concerns as their main motive to organize, but add their pay and benefits are weaker than those of workers at the two Ford assembly plants in nearby Louisville.
Shortly after employees publicly launched a union campaign in November, BlueOval SK announced higher starting wages. In a statement, the company said the raises followed a review of compensation and benefits to remain competitive with the market. If it was an attempt at fending off unionization, it may have backfired. Production Operator Alisha Miller said she didn’t receive the full amount of the raise that she was initially offered.
“Maybe not intentionally, but we all felt lied to. We actually, after that, got a few cards signed,” Miller commented. “I think, honestly, it’s only fanned the flame. There were some steadfast no’s for a very long time, and I think that was the final straw.”
Louisville native Steven Allen, a labor economist at North Carolina State University, says union elections often come when there’s great dissatisfaction at companies.
“These union elections, while we can talk about global economic forces and what not, it’s often, ‘Did someone do something that really upset the workers at that plant? Did management make a series of mistakes in running the plant?’ That could tip the scales,” Allen said.
Unlike Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee who visited the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga last year to discourage workers from organizing, Kentucky’s governor isn’t interfering on either side of the union effort.
“I am a pro-union governor. I always will be,” stated Beshear. “My hope is that the companies involved will stay neutral and let this be a true decision of the employees.”
But that’s not happening. Cody McDowell runs the Lincoln Lodge, a log cabin motel next to the Abraham Lincoln Birthplace National Historical Park in Hodgenville where many of the town’s residents have been hired at the nearby BlueOval SK plant in Glendale. He’s noticed his social media accounts flooded lately with ads from BOSK trying to counter the union effort.
“It brought up one example of a master lock factory in Wisconsin that might close and attributing that to unionization and strike efforts at that plant, just classic anti-union scare campaigns,” McDowell said.
BlueOval SK workers filed a petition last month with the National Labor Relations Board for an election. The company has requested a hearing from the NLRB, which the UAW calls a delay tactic. A hearing, in addition to the upheaval of the NLRB board by the Trump administration, is likely to push back an election date by several months.
A spokesperson for BlueOval SK said a union election is premature because most of the workers have yet to be hired.
“They, too, deserve to have their voices heard. And none of our Team Members have had the opportunity to see how our plant will operate since we have not yet begun production,” the company spokesperson Mallory Cooke said in a statement. “The UAW is trying to rush BlueOval SK into unionization before our full workforce has the opportunity to make a truly free and informed choice.”
But Hadfield, the quality operator who has worked in a union shop before, sees it differently.
“I think we started our unionization campaign right on time because we know without intervention from the hourly workers at BlueOval SK, this place is not going to get any better,” Hadfield said.
Hadfield knows the benefits of working under a contract. She left GE Appliances in Louisville to become one of the pioneers in the EV field. The first of the twin plants in Glendale is expected to begin manufacturing batteries for Ford and Lincoln vehicles this year. BlueOval SK’s second plant is indefinitely on hold due to sluggish EV demand, another argument union supporters make for organizing now.
A union push in the South
The UAW is trying to expand its foothold in the South where there’s deep-rooted resistance to unions.
Almost all Southern states have “Right to Work” laws, making it optional for workers to support or join unions. They can still enjoy the benefits of a union contract without paying dues. For the second year in a row, union membership nationwide hit an all-time low in the U.S. in 2024 at 9.9%, but more than 11% of workers in Kentucky were represented by a union.
BlueOval SK has another electric vehicle battery complex under construction in Tennessee. Hyundai opened a plant in Georgia last fall that produces electric cars and the foreign automaker will open an EV battery plant in the peach state later this year.
The UAW sees all of the plants as ripe for organizing, coming off lucrative contracts in 2023 with Ford, GM, and Stellantis.
“The agreements speak for themselves,” said Tim Smith, director of UAW region 8, which represents 17 states across the South. “Workers want a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay, and they’re not getting that now.”
The UAW is hoping to build on a victory by Volkswagen workers in Chattanooga, Tennessee in 2024. This was the first time the UAW was able to organize a plant in the South.
“I wouldn’t be using the word trend quite yet,” said Allen, the labor economist at North Carolina State University.
The UAW lost an organizing vote at two Mercedes-Benz factories in Alabama last year, but is still hopeful for a repeat of its successes in 2024. In addition to Volkswagen, workers at the Ultium plant in Spring Hill, Tennessee voted last year to unionize.
The unionization rate in Kentucky has grown the past two years, and with Ford having two organized assembly plants in nearby Louisville, the next UAW victory seems logical in Glendale.
“I’m not surprised to see this union organizing drive, and my guess is, the union will be successful when it comes up for a vote, especially if there’s already, shall we say, some misunderstandings about raises and safety,” Allen said. “That’s going to make Ford’s job that much more difficult.”
A date will be set by the for a secret-ballot election, and if a majority of workers vote in favor of the union, the next step is negotiating a contract for what will become the 10th largest manufacturing site in the world.
This story was produced by the Appalachia + Mid-South Newsroom, a collaboration between West Virginia Public Broadcasting, WPLN and WUOT in Tennessee, LPM, WEKU, WKMS and WKYU in Kentucky and NPR.
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