On Friday’s broadcast of Bloomberg’s “Wall Street Week,” Steve Rattner, who ran President Obama’s task force on the auto industry, stated that the transition to electric vehicles is complicating negotiations between the auto industry and unions and because electric vehicles “require many fewer man-hours of labor to make” and “it does raise the question of the level and extent of auto jobs that we’re going to need in this country or anywhere else for that matter.”
Host David Westin asked, “Steve, as you lay out, there’s a dynamic in this negotiation, a lot of concern about whether they can actually bridge the gap. But this all comes against a backdrop of larger changes afoot in electric vehicles. And that’s showing up, as I understand it, already, in some of, for example, the battery plants, with some joint ventures, where I think the UAW is saying, wait a second, they should all be subject to UAW as well. How big of a problem is that as the auto industry looks — both workers and employers — look forward to a very different world with electric vehicles?”
Rattner responded, “Yeah, that’s definitely a complicating factor. Electric car plants, electric cars in general, require many fewer man-hours of labor to make…fewer moving parts and so forth. And so, in the long run, it does raise the question of the level and extent of auto jobs that we’re going to need in this country or anywhere else for that matter. It’s not all going to be done by robots, don’t get me wrong. But is there going to some cap, some lessening of the number of jobs we need?”
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