Using Industrial Policy to Promote Social Justice

Today on TAP: Can the Biden administration maximize its leverage—and speak with one voice?

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When the Commerce Department last month released its long-awaited guidelines for applicants seeking some of the department’s $53 billion that the CHIPS and Science Act authorizes, one of the required criteria was that companies seeking grants provide child care for their workers. Secretary Gina Raimondo told The New York Times in an interview, “You will not be successful unless you find a way to attract, train, put to work and retain women, and you won’t do that without child care.”

That sounded great—until you looked at the Department of Energy’s conditions for its grantees under its $7 billion programs under the bipartisan infrastructure law to promote and subsidize development and manufacturing of battery technology for electric vehicles and other post-carbon applications. DOE’s criteria require an explicit Community Benefits Plan, which counts for 20 percent of an applicant’s score.

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The plan must include four elements: Community, labor, and stakeholder engagement; a diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility plan; support for the administration’s Justice40 Initiative, which applies 40 percent of funds to historically marginalized groups; and explicit plans to invest in the workforce and promote workers’ rights.

All of these elements require goals, benchmarks, and timetables. And the Energy Department has made clear that one easy way to meet the labor goal is to have a union.

The department’s released list of the first 13 grantee companies includes their highly detailed plans. Speaking at a conference last week convened by the Hewlett Foundation, Kate Gordon, a senior DOE adviser to Secretary Granholm, made clear that these social goals rank equally with the technological goals.

As I wrote in this piece, the labor movement and other progressive groups had pressed Commerce Secretary Raimondo for just these sort of criteria in her guidelines for applicants, but to no avail. DOE is clearly the leader here, and other departments should follow. Someone at the White House should be coordinating all this and promoting a race to the top on these guidelines rather than a smorgasbord of divergent standards.

It would be a little too cynical to view Raimondo’s child care requirements as mere window dressing; they are valid in their own right and a smart use of the leverage of government funding on corporate behavior. But how about requiring both the Commerce Department’s child care requirements and the Energy Department’s broader criteria for promoting labor and community goals?

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