Green Jobs at Ford and GM Will Cost

Those “green” jobs you’ve been hearing about don’t come cheap.

Thanks to the staggering amounts of money that’s being doled out under the Inflation Reduction Act to incentivize the production of electric vehicles, America’s biggest automakers – General Motors and Ford Motor Company – are building battery factories. Those new factories, one in Spring Hill, Tennessee (GM) and the other in Marshall, Michigan (Ford), will create a total of about 4,200 new jobs. But creating those jobs will cost federal and state taxpayers nearly $22 billion. Thus, each new “green” job at the GM plant (which the company is developing with Korea’s LG) will cost taxpayers $7.7 million. Each job at the Ford plant will cost some $3.4 million.

Those are the findings of a scathing new report published a few days ago by Good Jobs First, a Washington, D.C.-based non-profit that tracks corporate welfare. The report also found that another plant, being built in Jeffersonville, Ohio by LG and Honda, will create 2,200 jobs, each of which will cost taxpayers some $4.3 million. Further, as can be seen in the graphic below, which I pulled from the report – “Power Outrage: Will Heavily Subsidized Battery Factories Generate Substandard Jobs?” – the average wage at the factories will be about $46,000 per year or about $22 per hour. That’s far less than the wages paid to top union members who work at GM’s engine and transmission plants who earn about $31 per hour.

The Good Jobs First report provides yet more evidence of the climate corporatism that is being fueled by the Inflation Reduction Act, the legislation that got through the Senate by a single vote (cast by Vice President Kamala Harris) and signed into law last year. As I reported in these pages a few days ago, the Brookings Institution estimated that the climate provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act could cost taxpayers $1.2 trillion by 2040, that’s more than three times the estimates that were published by the federal government last year. In April, in my piece, “Jamie Dimon’s Climate Corporatism,” I defined climate corporatism as the use of government power to increase the profits of big corporations at the expense of consumers in the name of climate change.

Read the rest of this piece at Robert Bryce Substack.

Robert Bryce is a Texas-based author, journalist, film producer, and podcaster. His articles have appeared in a myriad of publications including the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Forbes, Time, Austin Chronicle, and Sydney Morning Herald.

Photo: courtesy Robert Bryce Substack.