The New Yorker:

The President is winning over union leaders, but not necessarily rank-and-file voters.

By Eyal Press

Sometime next year, the Ford Motor Company will begin to produce electric trucks at BlueOval City, a sprawling manufacturing complex in an impoverished rural area of western Tennessee. The multibillion-dollar project, which received a federal loan through the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act that President Biden signed in 2021, has already created thousands of construction jobs that pay substantially more than locals are accustomed to earning. Landing a job at BlueOval City “changed my life,” one worker recently said. Another was able to begin the process of buying her first home, a plan she’d delayed for years.

As a report published by the Center for American Progress noted, these workers were hired under a project-labor agreement, a collective-bargaining contract that requires construction projects to pay employees union-level wages and benefits. Inserting prevailing wage standards and other worker-friendly rules into domestic-spending programs is one of the reasons that many scholars and union officials have come to view Joe Biden as the most pro-labor President since Franklin Roosevelt, a designation he has proudly embraced. And yet awareness of these policies hasn’t always filtered down to the rank and file. Employees at BlueOval City interviewed in the cap report praised Ford for investing in their region, but none thanked President Biden, whose role seemed to escape their notice. According to the report, “Workers are inclined to support everyone associated with the project yet likely to need additional education to understand the role that politicians who supported it played.”

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