Economy

There’s virtually no chance policymakers will make a move either way on interest rates when the Fed concludes its two-day meeting Wednesday.
What investors will watch, instead, are the signals that come from Chair Jerome Powell and the rest of the Federal Open Market Committee about where they’re leaning for the future.

US Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell holds a press conference in Washington, DC, on September 20, 2023. 
Mandel Ngan | AFP | Getty Images

The Federal Reserve meeting will most likely conclude Wednesday with the central bank not doing a whole lot of anything — just the way the market wants things for now.
There’s virtually no chance policymakers will make a move either way on interest rates. Recent data has bought Fed officials time to decide their next step. Inflation, while decelerating, is still too high, and the economy is growing at a solid pace despite the highest benchmark interest rates since the early part of the century.

What investors will watch, instead, are the signals that come from Chair Jerome Powell and the rest of the Federal Open Market Committee about where they’re leaning for the future.
“There’s no likelihood that the Fed will do anything here. It wouldn’t make sense at this meeting. But, what is the messaging?” said Josh Emanuel, chief investment strategist at Wilshire. “My sense is that Powell is going to want to be very measured and careful about sounding too hawkish. He’s managed to thread the needle here very well.”
Despite the chair’s efforts to walk a line between holding tough against inflation while being attuned to the impact higher interest rates have on the economy, markets have been sensitive.
Though looking stronger this week, stocks have been reeling through the past two months, while Treasury yields have been hovering around 16-year highs — dating back to the early days of the financial crisis.
With much of those fears have centered around how much higher rates could go, and how long the Fed will keep them elevated, Powell’s post-meeting news conference, as well as the FOMC statement, could move markets.

“The last thing Powell wants to do here is make a mistake and come across as too hawkish, because the implication of that as you could see a risk-off environment. You’ve already started to see a little bit of a technical breakdown in equities,” Emmanuel said. “And you have a market that is very, very short Treasurys.”

Heavy news cycle

In fact, markets will have a dual focus Wednesday. Earlier in the day, the Treasury Department will provide more information on its funding needs in the near future, in what could be a pivotal moment for investors with a keen focus on how the government manages its $33.7 trillion debt. Also on tap Wednesday: the Labor Department’s report on job openings in September, and ADP’s estimate on private payroll growth.
That all happens two days before the Labor Department issues its nonfarm payrolls report for October, and comes on the heels of a report showing better-than-expected economic growth in the third quarter but a likely slowdown ahead.
“The Fed will likely hold rates steady despite accelerating GDP and employment,” Bank of America credit strategists said in a client note. “The Fed has adopted a more cautious tone due to the [Treasury] long-end rate rise, arguing rates markets have done some of its tightening. At the press conference, Chair Powell will likely reiterate that the Fed is ‘proceeding carefully.'”
The bank added that it expects Powell’s post-meeting statement so “largely mirror” remarks he made in New York earlier in October. In that speech, Powell said he considered inflation to be still too high and cautioned that the Fed, while being able to move carefully, was attuned to possible upside risk to inflation.

Options ahead

David Doyle, head of economics at Macquarie Asset Management, said Powell’s comments “may be more market moving” than the FOMC statement, adding that markets will be watching for the chairman’s views on the movement in Treasury yields. He also noted that the Fed by now will have seen the quarterly senior loan officer survey that gauges how tight lending conditions are at banks.
For its part, the market is pricing zero chance of a rate hike at this meeting and just a 29% probability of an increase in December, according to the CME Group’s FedWatch measure of futures pricing. Traders see the first cut possibly coming in June.
However, some market participants think the Fed’s hands could be forced into another hike as inflation hangs tough.
The Fed likely “will not signal that it is done tightening policy just yet,” said Matthew Ryan, head of market strategy at Ebury.
“We still see another U.S. rate increase as unlikely in the current cycle,” he said. “As a compromise, we think that the Fed will stress that rate cuts are not on the cards anytime soon, with easing to begin no sooner than the second half of 2024.” More

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The Employment Cost Index, which Federal Reserve officials watch closely as a gauge of pay trends, has come down since last year.A measure of pay and benefits that officials at the Federal Reserve have been watching closely as they try to gauge the heat of the labor market grew at a moderate pace over the summer.The Employment Cost Index, a quarterly measure from the Labor Department that tracks changes in wages and benefits, climbed 1.1 percent in the third quarter of 2023 versus the prior three months. That was slightly faster than the 1 percent that economists expected and up from the previous 1 percent reading.That pace of growth does mark a deceleration from a series of rapid quarterly gains in 2022. And on an annual basis, wage gains continue to slow: The employment cost measure rose by 4.3 percent on a yearly basis, down from the 4.5 percent reading in the previous report.Still, the index averaged 2.2 percent yearly gains in the decade leading up to the pandemic, underscoring that today’s pace remains unusually quick. And it is notable that wage gains continue to come in strong at a time when economists had expected them to be returning to a more normal pace. The trend could present a challenge for officials at the Federal Reserve.Rapid wage gains are good news for households, but they can spell trouble for Fed policymakers. Central bankers often worry that it will be hard to fully snuff out inflation if pay gains are climbing quickly. Companies that are paying workers higher wages are likely to try to charge more to cover their costs.Fed officials are meeting this week to discuss what to do next with interest rates, and are widely expected to hold borrowing costs steady at the conclusion of their two-day meeting on Wednesday. Economists did not expect that to change in the wake of Tuesday’s wage data.“It’s more about waiting for the labor market to continue to normalize,” said Oscar Muñoz, chief U.S. macro strategist at TD Securities. “It is taking longer, but I think that the Fed can be patient.”Fed officials have already raised interest rates to a range of 5.25 to 5.5 percent, up from near-zero in March 2022, in their bid to slow inflation.Those higher rates make it more expensive to borrow money to buy a house, purchase a car or expand a business. As companies hire less voraciously and demand wanes, wage growth should slow and companies should find it more difficult to raise prices without losing customers. That chain reaction is expected to put a lid on inflation.But the labor market’s cool-down has been an unexpectedly bumpy one. Job gains have slowed somewhat, but they remain much faster than many economists had expected after so much Fed action.That has left Fed officials closely watching wages.If pay growth continues to calm even as companies hire at a solid clip, it would suggest that the continued job gains are being driven by an improving supply of applicants — and that the labor market is still slowly coming back into balance.The logic is simple: If the job market were running hot, companies would be paying more and more as they tried to poach needed employees from one another. That would keep pay gains climbing swiftly. If it is cooling toward a more normal level of tightness, economists would expect wage gains to pull back.So far, policymakers have been interpreting labor market data to mean that balance is in fact returning. That’s partly because another closely watched measure of wage growth, the average hourly earnings index, has been showing steady moderation.That gauge is useful because it comes out every month, but it is also susceptible to data quirks. It tends to move around as the composition of the work force shifts. If a lot of low-wage workers gain jobs, for instance, the hourly earnings measure can drift lower.Given that, Fed officials closely monitor the Employment Cost Index, which avoids some of the data pitfalls that afflict other wage measures.“Wage growth is slowing down, but not as much as other data sources have suggested,” Cory Stahle, economist at Indeed Hiring Lab, wrote in an analysis after the report. He added that “pay growth will likely keep slowing going forward, but the labor market continues to display notable resilience.” More

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.What did Hamas hope to achieve by its attack on Israel of October 7? The answer was surely to set the region aflame. More narrowly, it was to provoke the response we see, with inevitable consequences for Israel’s global reputation and the prospects for peace in the region. The strategy, in other words, is to make martyrs of the people of Gaza in a greater cause. Alas, it is working.The way this unfolds will have implications for human lives, the regional balance of power and perhaps even global peace. But it also has implications for the global economy, which has been battered by a series of shocks over the past four years: Covid-19, the post-Covid inflation, the Russia-Ukraine war and now this. How big a shock then will this latest horror prove to be?You are seeing a snapshot of an interactive graphic. This is most likely due to being offline or JavaScript being disabled in your browser.This is more than a matter of dollars and cents. According to a “special focus” chapter of the World Bank’s most recent Commodity Markets Outlook, on the “Potential Near-Term Implications of the Conflict in the Middle East”, the number of people suffering from severe food insecurity jumped by more than 200mn between 2019 and 2021. The Russia-Ukraine war must have made this considerably worse, though the facts are not yet available. This is partly because of its direct effect on food prices and partly because of higher energy prices. Another big jump in energy prices would make this worse. So, how big might the implications be? This depends on the answer to two further questions. How severely and how far might the war and its political ramifications spread? In addition, what might be the consequences for the global economy, largely (but not exclusively) via energy markets?You are seeing a snapshot of an interactive graphic. This is most likely due to being offline or JavaScript being disabled in your browser.Fortunately, Gideon Rachman has recently addressed the first question. He reminds us that the first world war began as a conflict between Austria and Serbia, both allies of greater powers. In this case, Israel might be viewed as a proxy for the US and Hamas and Hizbollah as proxies for Iran (which might turn out to be a proxy for Russia or even China). A chain of disastrous events might, he notes, spread to the Gulf itself. It could even lead to conflict among superpowers. Moreover, we can add, the region’s regimes might be destabilised by popular anger over failure to help Gaza. It is worth remembering that the hugely damaging 1973 oil embargo was not a direct outcome of war, but a political response of Arab oil producers.If the war were to spread, would it matter? Yes, definitely. The region is far and away the world’s most important energy-producer: according to the 2023 Statistical Review of World Energy, it contains 48 per cent of global proved reserves and produced 33 per cent of the world’s oil in 2022. Moreover, according to the US Energy Information Administration, a fifth of world oil supply passed through the Strait of Hormuz, at the bottom of the Gulf, in 2018. This is the chokepoint of global energy supplies.You are seeing a snapshot of an interactive graphic. This is most likely due to being offline or JavaScript being disabled in your browser.The World Bank also notes that past energy shocks have been significantly costly. Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 raised average oil prices three months afterwards by 105 per cent, the Arab oil embargo of 1973-74 raised them by 52 per cent and the Iranian revolution of 1978 raised them by 48 per cent.So far, however, the effects on oil prices of the Hamas attacks on Israel and the war in Gaza have been modest. In real terms, oil prices in September were close to their mean since 1970. In all, there is little dramatic to be seen so far. In addition, adds the report, oil has become less important and oil markets less vulnerable since the 1970s: oil intensity of global output has declined by close to 60 per cent since then; sources of supply have also diversified; strategic reserves are bigger; and the creation of the International Energy Agency has improved co-ordination.You are seeing a snapshot of an interactive graphic. This is most likely due to being offline or JavaScript being disabled in your browser.Nevertheless, oil remains a vital transportation fuel. Liquid natural gas from the Gulf is also an important part of global supplies of natural gas. Big disruptions to these supplies would have a powerful impact on energy prices, global output and the overall price level, notably in foodstuffs.The bank envisages scenarios with small, medium and big disruptions to supplies: the first would, it assumes, reduce supply by up to 2mn barrels a day (about 2 per cent of world supply), the second would reduce it by 3-5mn barrels a day and the last would reduce it by 6-8mn barrels a day. Corresponding oil prices are estimated at $93-$102, $109-$121 and $141-157, respectively. The last would bring real prices towards their historic peaks. If the Strait were to be closed, the outcomes would be far worse. We are still in the fossil fuel era. A conflict in the world’s biggest oil-supplying region could be very damaging.You are seeing a snapshot of an interactive graphic. This is most likely due to being offline or JavaScript being disabled in your browser.The best way to think about this is to emphasise the uncertainty. The great probability is that the conflict will be contained. If so, the economic effects will stay insignificant. But it is possible that it will spread and so become far more serious. Civil unrest might also force governments in the region to consider embargoes. Hamas might wish the region to be aflame. But that is certainly not going to be in the interests of the billions of people who want to get on with their lives as best they can. It is up to policymakers in the region and outside to avoid the sorts of mistakes that have proved devastating in the past.You are seeing a snapshot of an interactive graphic. This is most likely due to being offline or JavaScript being disabled in your browser.Right now, the big question is what Israel is going to do. I understand the outrage Israelis feel over the brutal assault and their determination to eliminate Hamas. But is that feasible by any military means? What is their political end game? What, if any, is the strategy for reaching an accommodation with the Palestinians? Above all, how wise will it turn out to behave just as Hamas so evidently [email protected] warFollow Martin Wolf with myFT and on X (formerly Twitter)  More

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Toyota is pouring a further $8bn into its battery manufacturing plant in North Carolina, in the largest such investment by a foreign carmaker since the US passed the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022.The newly announced funding would take the Japanese group’s investment in the plant — one of its largest outside Japan — to about $13.9bn by 2030. It would also add about 3,000 jobs to the site it calls the “epicentre of lithium-ion battery production in North America”, bringing the total to more than 5,000.The IRA, championed by the Biden administration, included $370bn in subsidies to build a US supply chain for green industries such as electric vehicle and battery manufacturing and swiftly decarbonise the US economy.Toyota’s investment also rivals those made by domestic car companies; in 2021, Ford announced an $11.4bn investment in EVs and batteries in Tennessee and Kentucky.“Today’s announcement reinforces Toyota’s commitment to electrification and carbon reduction, bringing jobs and future economic growth to the region,” Sean Suggs, president of Toyota North Carolina, said in a statement.North Carolina offered at least $900mn in incentives for the Toyota plant, which ranks among the largest projects in the state’s history. Its relationship with Toyota began in 2017 when the Japanese carmaker was looking to build an internal combustion engine plant and ultimately chose Alabama. “Toyota today has made a big investment that establishes North Carolina as a leader in the EV race for the future,” Rahm Emanuel, the US ambassador to Japan, told the Financial Times.The IRA has already prompted an investment spree by Japanese manufacturers with Panasonic, Toyota, Honda, Bridgestone and others announcing additional spending plans in the US.Japanese manufacturers had committed nearly $20bn in clean tech manufacturing in the first year after the IRA was signed into law, according to an FT analysis. Toyota’s announcement reflects the larger trend of car companies turning towards southern US states for their electrification plans.You are seeing a snapshot of an interactive graphic. This is most likely due to being offline or JavaScript being disabled in your browser.Toyota, the world’s largest carmaker by sales, said on Tuesday that the investment would allow for an additional eight production lines making batteries for fully electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids, bringing the total number of lines to 10.Production would be increased in a phased approach, Toyota said, with line launches planned through to 2030 to reach a total production of more than 30GWh a year.“It’s a huge transformative opportunity that is really going to change the economic trajectory, not just of the community and region, but really of North Carolina for decades to come,” said Christopher Chung, chief executive officer of the state’s economic development arm. Toyota’s announcement came hours after the United Auto Workers union suspended a historic six-week strike against Detroit’s Big Three carmakers that cost billions in earnings and marked an inflection point for unionisation at US EV plants, which are disproportionately located in states that are difficult to organise. FT Live event: Investing in America Summit7 November 2023Can foreign multinationals continue to find opportunity in the US?In-Person & Digital | Miami, PAMM | #FTInvestinginAmericaRegister hereThe US car sector is also experiencing a slowdown in demand for EVs as high interest rates and macroeconomic pressures bruise consumer interest. Big carmakers including Ford, General Motors and Tesla have paused plans to expand EV production in recent weeks.Toyota is investing heavily in battery technology as it tries to make up ground on its rivals. ​​It wants to have electrified options available for every Toyota and Lexus model globally by 2025 and has laid out plans to sell 3.5mn battery-powered vehicles every year from 2030.It is also pouring resources into next-generation battery technology. Earlier this month the FT reported Toyota’s claims that it was close to being able to manufacture solid-state batteries at the same rate as existing batteries for EVs, marking a milestone in the global race to commercialise the technology.Additional reporting by Leo Lewis in Tokyo More

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.The US is to remove preferential trading access under the African Growth and Opportunity Act from Uganda, the Central African Republic, Gabon and Niger for human rights violations and for failure to make democratic progress. President Joe Biden said Uganda, which this year passed punitive anti-gay laws including the death penalty for people engaging in certain same-sex acts, had committed “gross violations of internationally recognised human rights”. Niger and Gabon, whose governments were overthrown in coups this year, fell foul of Agoa stipulations that they should be “making continual progress towards establishing the protection of political pluralism and the rule of law”, he said. The loss of Agoa status takes effect for all four countries in January.The US this year suspended foreign aid for both Gabon and Niger. Niger’s ousted president, Mohamed Bazoum, was a close Washington ally in the war against Islamist extremism in the Sahel.Analysts say the Central African Republic probably lost its Agoa status because of its ties to the Wagner paramilitary group, designated a transnational criminal organisation by the US treasury and accused of committing atrocities, although Biden did not mention the Russian group explicitly.Wagner, which provides personal security for CAR’s president and participates in combat missions against rebel groups, has been granted gold and diamond mines in the mineral-rich country as well as timber concessions. But following the death in August of its founder, Yevgeny Prigozhin and recent attempts at a rapprochement between Bangui, Paris and Washington, the Wagner military and business presence in the impoverished country had shrunk considerably, said businesses people based in the capital. CAR exported less than $1mn of goods to the US in 2021, with “sawn wood” and “fake hair” topping the list.South Africa, whose car, textile and clothing industries benefit significantly from tariff-free access to the US, will maintain its Agoa benefits. South Africa is the biggest US trading partner in Africa with exports to the US worth $15bn in 2022.Washington and Pretoria overcame tensions this year over a perceived drift by President Cyril Ramaphosa’s ruling African National Congress towards Russia. The continent’s most industrialised economy’s access to Agoa was threatened in May when the US ambassador to Pretoria accused South Africa of smuggling arms to Russia through a US-sanctioned ship docked in Cape Town.Ramaphosa’s government lobbied US officials and lawmakers to let South Africa remain in Agoa and mounted an investigation that concluded that arms had not been found on the Lady R, a Russian transport vessel.In a sign of rapprochement, US trade representative Katherine Tai will travel to Johannesburg this week for an Agoa forum hosted by Ramaphosa.The US introduced Agoa in 2000 as a way of stimulating African exports through preferential access for some 1,800 designated goods. Some countries, including South Africa, Lesotho and Kenya, have benefited greatly from tariff-free access, though others have failed to develop industries with goods to sell to the US in significant quantity. Ethiopia, which built a textile industry partly on the back of Agoa access, was struck off last year after a civil war in which atrocities were documented. Addis Ababa said more than 12,000 people lost their jobs because of the removal of preferential access to US markets. It has lobbied hard to be reinstated. Susan Muhwezi, senior adviser to the Ugandan president on trade, said Uganda was not aware of the reasons for it being removed from Agoa, “apart from hearing what was in the statement — gross violations of human rights”. She added: “I trust that they definitely know that to cancel a trade preference is not a very welcomed thing. It costs jobs, people have invested, people are benefiting . . . Probably their interpretation of human rights could be different.”Under Biden the US has sought more pragmatic engagement with African governments, few of which are fully democratic and a number of which have fallen to military dictatorships in recent years. But Agoa legislation is linked to specific criteria including adherence to certain standards of human rights and perceived progress towards democracy. The Biden’s administration has increased diplomatic engagement with Africa, with visits by several top officials including vice-president Kamala Harris and treasury secretary Janet Yellen. The US president is expected to visit at least one country on the continent in December. More

Experts said the union’s new contracts could set precedents that give labor advantages when bargaining contracts and organizing workers.Laying out a tentative contract agreement to end a six-week wave of walkouts at Ford Motor, the United Automobile Workers president made an unusual pitch to other labor unions.“We invite unions around the country to align your contract expirations with our own,” the U.A.W. leader, Shawn Fain, said Sunday night.“If we’re going to truly take on the billionaire class and rebuild the economy so that it starts to work for the benefit of the many and not the few,” Mr. Fain added, “then it’s important that we not only strike, but that we strike together.”While it remains to be seen whether other unions follow the U.A.W.’s lead, Mr. Fain’s invitation highlights the sweeping ambition of the union’s strategy during the recent strike, the first to target all three Detroit automakers simultaneously.Beyond seeking the largest wage and benefit increases in decades — and a reversal of the concessions the union made during the companies’ downturn, such as lower wage tiers for newer workers — Mr. Fain repeatedly spoke of fighting for “the entire working class.”Labor experts said the proposals that union negotiators agreed to with Ford, General Motors and Stellantis, the parent of Jeep, Ram and Chrysler, had produced gains that could in fact reverberate well beyond the workers that the union represented.“It is a historic and transformative victory by the U.A.W.,” said Nelson Lichtenstein, a labor historian at the University of California, Santa Barbara.Dr. Lichtenstein said that winning substantial gains through a strike in a critical industry demonstrated the benefits of work stoppages after decades in which workers had been taught to regard strikes warily.“Fain says: ‘Hey, strikes work, solidarity works; we’re more unified now than before the strike,’” he added. “I think that’s a powerful argument unions can take elsewhere.”To make the economy “work for the benefit of the many and not the few,” Shawn Fain, the U.A.W. president said, “then it’s important that we not only strike, but that we strike together.”Brittany Greeson for The New York TimesEven before the strike ended, unions at other companies appeared to be doing just that.In an interview in late September, David Pryzbylski, a lawyer who represents employers, said union officials in two separate contract negotiations had invoked the U.A.W. when discussing the possibility of a strike. “Outside the U.A.W., it’s putting wind in their sails,” Mr. Pryzbylski said. “They may be blustering, but I am seeing it already trickle down.”A recent report by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce raised concerns that an emboldened labor movement was increasing strike activity and “causing collateral damage to a host of local businesses and communities” by harming the economic ecosystem that depended on automakers and other employers.The element of strategy that the U.A.W. brought to its strike may also prove instructive to other workers and unions. Rather than ask all employees to strike at once, the union started small, with one key plant at each of the Big Three, then ramped up as it sought to bring additional pressure. The U.A.W. refrained from expanding the strike when it felt a company was bargaining productively, and it expanded to a highly valuable plant when it felt a company was dragging its feet — in both cases, to create an incentive for the companies to engage with the union.The approach may not translate perfectly to other industries, such as retail and hospitality, that are harder to disrupt with the loss of a small number of locations. But Peter Olney, a former organizing director with the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, said the strategy was more widely applicable than it might appear at first glance.He cited the possibility of organizing and striking at coffee bean roasting plants and distribution centers for a company like Starbucks, where workers at hundreds of retail stores in the United States have organized over the past few years. “They have 9,000 locations, there’s a lot of redundancy and replication,” Mr. Olney said, referring to company-owned stores in the United States. “But there are some choke points in that system, too.”And it is difficult for service-sector industries to send operations offshore in response to labor unrest, because proximity to customers is critical. By contrast, the U.A.W. may have to contend with the risk that companies shift production to Mexico as labor costs increase.“That’s where the international solidarity aspect of it comes in — the need to build up a cross-border network with Mexico,” Mr. Olney said. Last year, workers at a large G.M. plant in the country voted out a union accused of colluding with management in favor of an independent union.In some ways, the recent U.A.W. effort builds on the gains made by unions involved in other high-profile standoffs. To resolve a nearly five-month strike with Hollywood writers in September, major studios agreed to a set of restrictions on the use of artificial intelligence. The agreement was a break with employers’ typical insistence that management should have control over technology and investment decisions.In its new contract with the union, Ford Motor agreed to let current U.A.W. members transfer to battery and electric vehicles plants the company was building in Michigan and Tennessee.Nic Antaya for The New York TimesThe tentative U.A.W. contracts award the union more influence over such decision-making as well — for example, by allowing workers to strike against the entire company over the threat of a plant shutdown before their contract has expired. The union also successfully pressed Stellantis to reopen an Illinois plant that the company had closed.Mr. Pryzbylski, the management-side lawyer, said that while such strike provisions and plant reopenings are not unheard of, they are uncommon.Dr. Lichtenstein said securing these gains in such a high-profile context could prompt employees at other companies to demand a say in decisions that their employers had typically characterized as management prerogatives. “It restores a kind of social and political character to investment decisions,” he said. “It’s something the left has wanted for over a century.”In other cases, the U.A.W. managed to extract concessions at plants where it doesn’t yet represent workers — another unusual win that could be mimicked by fellow unions. Ford agreed that U.A.W. members would be allowed to transfer into battery and electric vehicles plants under construction in Michigan and Tennessee, and that these plants would fall under the union’s national contract if the workers unionized there. According to the U.A.W., that would happen without the need to hold a union election at either site.Madeline Janis, co-executive director of Jobs to Move America, a group that seeks to create good jobs in clean technology industries, called these arrangements a “huge historic, unprecedented deal” for helping to ensure that the E.V. transition benefited workers.U.A.W. officials say that adding new members is critical to the union’s survival, and that the Big Three contracts will provide a major boost to these efforts because organizers can point to large concrete benefits of unionizing.“We’re not going to win a contract victory this big in the future if we’re not able to start organizing, especially in the E.V. sector,” said Mike Miller, a U.A.W. regional director in the Western United States. “It has to involve Tesla, Volkswagen and Hyundai.”But some experts said the momentum of the recent contracts could help organizing campaigns that were even further afield. “It’s not just personal vehicle manufacturing — it’s the fleets of delivery vans, big electric buses and trains,” said Erica Smiley, executive director of Jobs With Justice, which helps workers seeking to unionize and bargain collectively.Ms. Smiley noted that many of these companies, just like electric vehicle manufacturers, had received public subsidies, creating an opportunity for organizers to appeal to politicians for help raising pay and improving benefits so that they more closely resembled what the U.A.W. just won.“The administration is investing in these industries,” she added. “The question is how to use this to raise the floor.” More

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