Ben Carroll lives in Durham, North Carolina, and is the organizing coordinator for the Southern Workers Assembly.
The AI build-out depends on gas turbines and power transformers made by a handful of workers at a handful of plants in the US South. That bottleneck is a vulnerability — and a rare opportunity for labor to exercise real power over the tech giants.
Thanks in part to investments from the Inflation Reduction Act and tariffs on China, the US South is seeing a boom in electric-vehicle manufacturing. The industry’s expansion in the mostly nonunion region presents an urgent organizing challenge for labor.
After a victory in Tennessee and a loss in Alabama, the UAW is pressing onward in its fight to organize the notoriously anti-union South. The fate of Southern workers — and all workers — depends on the movement’s willingness to think big.