Blue Oval SK battery park workers say they’ve received federal approval to hold a vote on whether to form a union after a super-majority of workers asked the National Labor Relations Board for a vote earlier this year on joining the United Auto Workers, which represents Ford employees across the U.S.
“We've been fighting this whole time, and we're not going to stop,” said production operator and union organizer Amber Levay. “The NLRB has finally gotten back to us. They did their best to push and push and push for as long of a way as they could get. But we finally got our election. We have finally heard back, next time you see me, we will be in negotiations."
The nearly $6 billion electric vehicle battery campus is part of a joint venture between Ford and South Korea’s SK On, spanning two manufacturing plants totaling more than eight million square feet in Glendale, Kentucky. Gov. Andy Beshear has championed it as the world’s largest electric vehicle battery plant and it is expected to employ 5,000 workers once operations are in full swing.
Quality inspector Amanda East, who is organizing at the plant, has worked there for just over a year. She said employees have had to fight for personal protective equipment and more safety procedures when working with dangerous chemicals and battery acid, also called electrolyte.
“We're trying to negotiate a contract so that everybody has a voice and we're all safe at work doing what we're doing,” East said. “Electrolytes in the lithium batteries are not safe, and some of the materials that we have to inspect on my other parts are not safe.”
East said the company has been aggressively anti-union, paying for anti-union Facebook ads, passing out free t-shirts telling people to vote “no,” telling employees not to wear union red to work, and giving presentations encouraging employees not to join a union.
Levay said they had a presentation on her second day of training telling employees that the company was opposed to unionizing and encouraging them to vote “no.”
“They're saying, 'Hey, by the way, you guys don't need union. No reason you guys should need a union,'” Levay said. “My experience, [that’s] absolutely not the truth.”
BlueOval SK did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Democrats join union leaders
It was a veritable who’s who of Kentucky Democrats as the national AFL-CIO bus tour rolled into Louisville over the weekend.
Governor Andy Beshear, Louisville Congressman Morgan McGarvey, Mayor Craig Greenberg, and state Representative Nima Kulkarni shared the podium with union leaders. Beshear called himself the “proud union governor of Kentucky.”
“We've proven in Kentucky you can be pro job, pro business and pro union all at the same time and succeed, and no matter what, our not so super majority in the General Assembly is thrown at us,” Beshear said.
The GOP dominated legislature has passed right to work laws, pushed through legislation to roll back worker protections to federal minimums, and repealed prevailing wage rules. All of these changes were also pushed for by the Kentucky Chamber of Commerce.
As he fired up the crowd, McGarvey, Kentucky’s sole Democratic representation in Congress, took a dig at President Donald Trump, whose policies he says have hurt workers.
“You got a better chance of finding his name in the Epstein files than you do finding him on a picket line,” McGarvey said, referring to brewing controversies over the Trump administration’s decision not to share the federal files on Jeffrey Epstein.
The bus tour, entitled “It’s Better in a Union,” is making stops across the country, with the Louisville stop closing out the southern portion of the tour. Greenberg called Louisville a “union town.”
“Here in our city, we show that the great momentum that we have, the thousands of jobs that are being created, the hundreds of millions of dollars that are being invested, the momentum can continue,” Greenberg said. “And it can go even higher because of union labor.”
Union representation in Kentucky is at its highest since 2018 while membership on the national level has declined slightly.
While all the politicians at the event expressed their support for unions and workers, state Representative Nima Kulkarni of Louisville called for support specifically for immigrant workers.
“In cities like ours, we see some local leaders folding under pressure, doing the work of ICE, turning fear into policy and calling it order. That's not leadership. That's capitulation.
Kulkarni is likely referring to Louisville Mayor Craig Greenberg who reversed city policy in response to pressure from the Trump administration. Metro Corrections will now detain people accused of being in the country illegally for up to two days.
Trump’s Attorney General Pam Bondi called Louisville an example for other cities to follow. Greenberg says he did so to avoid mass immigration raids.
Kulkarni said pitting workers against each other serves no one.
“Everyone here knows there's a different way. The labor movement has always known it,” Kulkarni said. “When we fight for each other, not just for wages, but for dignity, for safety, for the right to be seen, we build real power. Not power given to us, but power that we take together.”
State government and politics reporting is supported in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
