Kristoffer Tripplaar/Sipa USA via AP Images
At an Oshkosh facility in Oshkosh, Wisconsin
As American workers rebel against low-wage-no-benefits jobs, some employers, ranging in size from Amazon and Walmart to neighborhood restaurants, have felt compelled to actually raise their wages. But not all of them.
Still, among those you’d expect to provide decent work would be companies getting public, or quasi-public, money to produce greener products.
This is one instance in which you’d be wrong.
Oshkosh, Inc.—not to be confused with OshKosh B’gosh, the kids’ clothing company—is a venerable manufacturer of trucks and military vehicles, many of which are produced in Oshkosh (Wisconsin) itself. There, workers have had their livelihoods and lives brightened by the wage and benefit standards they’ve won through their union, the United Auto Workers, since 1938. You might conclude, then, that Oshkosh’s recent selection by the U.S. Postal Service to manufacture a new generation of electric postal delivery trucks hit the sweet spot for progressives, addressing as it does the sometimes conflicting goals of combating the climate crisis and paying good union wages in the process.
And, I’m sorry to tell you, you’d be wrong again.
Turns out Oshkosh is eager to make those gasless mail trucks, all right, but not with its unionized workforce. Instead, it says it will decamp to ferociously anti-union South Carolina, which annually ranks either number one or number two on the list of least unionized states, to make those trucks. As the state that most vociferously defended slavery before the Civil War, the first state to secede following Abraham Lincoln’s election, and the state that fired the first shot in that war, South Carolina has a long history of suppressing not just Black but worker power, which continues to this day. And there, where fewer than 3 out of 100 workers are union members, Oshkosh will make its stand against granting its employees a modicum of power.
According to UAW Vice President Cindy Estrada, Oshkosh has found an abandoned warehouse in South Carolina where it plans to make the mail trucks. “A friggin’ warehouse?” she observes. “They can’t find a warehouse in Wisconsin?”
Thanks to President Biden, who has made going green at union wages one of his administration’s mantras, the Board of Postal Governors now has a Democratic majority. It might want to reflect on that mantra in rethinking the USPS decision to subsidize Oshkosh’s lowering of labor, and living, standards for the workers who will build our future.
