Biden's tough sell in Pennsylvania: green energy to union workers

investing.com:

By Jarrett Renshaw

PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) — President Joe Biden travels on Thursday to Philadelphia to pitch the promise of a green economy to union workers skeptical that the solar, wind and electric vehicle industries can deliver the same economic punch for organized labor as fossil fuel-powered refineries and power plants.

Biden is trying to reshape the U.S. economy by investing billions of taxpayer dollars in green technology, while forcing companies that want lucrative subsidies being offered to help the push do more of their manufacturing in the U.S.

He will visit the Philadelphia Shipyard to attend the steel-cutting ceremony for the Acadia, a union-built vessel that will be used to help build offshore wind farms. Biden is betting that union workers whose jobs are threatened by the energy transition will eventually find a place in the green economy, but that's a hard sell in union-friendly Philadelphia.

About a dozen union workers in the Philadelphia region Reuters spoke to questioned whether the new industries can produce a similar number of jobs at the same high wage scale.

They may have good reason to worry.

Roughly 80% of the more than 50 EV battery, solar panel and other factories announced since passage of the Inflation Reduction Act in August are in states with laws that make it harder for workers to unionize, a Reuters analysis published this year found.

Nancy Minor, 57, worked as a union operator at a Philadelphia's largest and oldest refinery for nearly three decades before it shut after a 2019 explosion. Now a refinery safety consultant, she made enough money to buy a house, raise her kids as a single mother and send them to private school.

She worries clean energy projects like solar and wind farms,