While speaking with Bloomberg on Wednesday, Harvard Professor, economist, Director of the National Economic Council under President Barack Obama, and Treasury Secretary under President Bill Clinton Larry Summers stated that auto worker unions have to push to get as much as they can “while they can” because the electric vehicle transition will hurt auto jobs and the automobile industry is shifting south and the “Industrial Belt part of the country is going to shrink no matter what.”
Summers said, “I fear that there’s a bit of an endgame dynamic going on here, between the fact that electric vehicles take about 40% fewer workers per automobile and the fact that a large part of the action in the automobile industry is moving to the southern part of our country, the UAW, northern part of — Industrial Belt part of the country is going to shrink no matter what. And in that situation, the incentives for the union– like the incentives at one stage for the coal miners, like the incentives at one stage for the skilled workers — are to get as absolute much as they can while they can. And that, I think, is probably the underlying economic force behind some of the aggressiveness that we’re seeing. And my guess is that this is going to be a difficult dynamic going forward for the economy.”
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