At first, Walsh said he and his workers felt heard by management. Over time, working conditions and communications continued “to deteriorate, the things we were saying weren’t really being dealt with and we decided to push towards organizing ourselves, especially after talking to a lot more of the employees and seeing what their views were. We got a lot of support and we decided to keep pushing.”

After doing some research, Walsh and his coworkers reached out the United Steelworkers, who previously represented the Republic Steel mill where Gigafactory 2 was located (his grandfather was a USW member at that very steel mill). Along with the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, both are running a joint campaign, with USW focusing on the production line and quality assurance workers while IBEW would represent the maintenance and facilities workers.

When management caught wind the organizing was still ongoing, they immediately started trying to buy the workers off and intimidate the workers out of unionizing. “I started off at $14/hour….sometime in July [2018], they told us ‘we’ve looked at everything, compared it to area, and we’re going to give you a raise just to be competitive.’ That was up from $14 to $15.50 and then later that same day, we had a captive audience meeting, where they said ‘we don’t want to tell you don’t join the union but we’re a better option than the union. Whatever the union can do, we can do just as well if not better,’” Walsh recounted. When the organizing committee went public leafletting outside the plant in December, inside management was holding mandatory meetings for plant workers on the clock.

Another issue for the workers raised was around holiday pay. “Management had the day off for [Christmas] but production workers, because we’re a 24/7 facility, we still have to come in. We weren’t getting paid any differently for it, just 8 hours of holiday pay whether you were in the building or not, actually having to work on that holiday you wouldn’t have any benefit,” Walsh explained. In response to the organizing committee going public and just before the holiday, plant managers gave workers the evening of Christmas Eve and both day and night shifts were off Christmas Day, as well more time off around the New Year.

According to Walsh, the misinformation campaign orchestrated by the plant’s managers, while obviously not insurmountable, is having some impact on that younger workforce (Walsh himself is 26) that is largely from the region. For many, this is their first job in manufacturing.

“We have a lot of people who are fairly young, just coming off their retail jobs or off their part-times that want to get into a full-time job and create a career out of it,” he explained. “There’s a lot of people like them, like myself, who are going to be there for the next few years hopefully that we can fight for it now and have the benefits throughout entire career there.”

Better paid, finally insured, stable—they are understandably cautious and protective of what could transition into a career like their parents and grandparents had before the bulk of the region’s manufacturing economy collapsed or moved operations out of the area.