“Blue Oval City” sounds like some kind of fantastical, utopian megalopolis of the future. In reality, it is a massive car manufacturing complex that will provide several links in the EV supply chain. The joint venture, between Ford and Korean company SK Innovation, promises 6,000 good-paying jobs for residents of the small, rural communities around Stanton, Tennessee. Many expect it to also benefit surrounding towns like Covington, Brownsville and Jackson, while also reaching south into Mississippi and north into Kentucky.
But the multibillion-dollar project stirs complicated feelings for many in the working-class, largely black communities that dot the farmland and marshy bottoms of west Tennessee. They pride themselves on a slower way of life, and feel lucky to have good drinking water from a reliable aquifer. Development on such a large scale would, they fear, change the community, siphon water and electricity, and cause an influx of newcomers and development.
They are only the latest to face uncertainties with energy transition projects, which, from solar fields to wind farms, have sparked discussions about their size, industrial activity and environmental impacts. But rather than accept their fate, the constellation of towns that revolve around Stanton sit down with Ford and SK to negotiate a binding agreement that will ensure they benefit as much from Blue Oval City as the companies do.
During a series of community meetings held over the past few months, the coalition drew up a list of terms, called a community benefits agreement, to which it wants Ford/Blue Oval SK to abide. It calls for community resources such as youth facilities, road maintenance support and apprentice roads run by local union chapters. It is also seeking a binding assurance that the joint venture will properly dispose of its waste. And while Ford has announced many community programs, local residents want the automaker to give them a say in such things.
“They didn’t really come out,” Michael Adriaanse, who serves on the committee drafting the agreement, said of Ford’s efforts. “I know a lot of people who feel like it happened overnight.”
So how does such a process begin? Generally with meetings that bring stakeholders together to draw up a list of demands in a broad public conversation that the company cannot ignore.
“The argument a community can make is, ‘If you want our resources, you have to contribute back to the health and well-being of the community you’re now going to be a part of,'” says Kathleen Multigan, who leads National Labor . Leadership Initiative at Cornell University. “What we’re really trying to do is bring real democracy into the economic realm, because a lot of the work of shaping the economy happens without workers having any say in it.”
Ultimately, community benefit agreements, or GBAs, are a contract between a corporation and coalition of local organizations that gives the community leverage through binding arbitration to ensure that the obligations are met.
Historically, CBAs have been used by those affected by the entertainment and sports industries, which tend to get large municipal tax breaks and public funding. Some of the first were negotiated in Los Angeles in the early 2000s to separately address a sports arena and an entertainment district. After exhaustive negotiations, residents achieved many of their goals, including higher wages, guaranteed affordable housing and revolving loans for local businesses. CBAs have since spread nationwide, with people in Nashville negotiating a high wage floor, on-site child care and other provisions at Geodis Park, a $275 million stadium being built for the Nashville SC football team.
Now, CBAs are increasingly being used to address clean energy developments. According to the Sabine Climate Change Law Center at Columbia University, more than a dozen have been signed since 2015, many of them in the past three years. The contracts resulted in projects agreeing to give preference to local hire, and companies sharing revenue with the country in which they operate. An offshore wind facility in Maine has even endorsed rural broadband access.
Vonda McDaniel, the president of the Central Labor Council of Nashville and Middle Tennessee, helps formulate Blue Oval agreement and plan town halls. The process was lively. “We haven’t had a whole lot of wilted flowers show up at our meetings, to be honest,” she said.
One reason for that is that local residents are already seeing changes. “The community feels a little distressed; there’s heavy equipment up and down the road every day,” McDaniel said.
Farmland counties in the region known as Middle Tennessee endured rapid urbanization as auto manufacturers arrived in Spring Hill, south of Nashville. As investment increased and people began to move in, housing costs have skyrocketed. They are also starting to creep up on Stanton. McDaniel says a CBA could prevent that.
“Community benefits agreements are based on the power and leverage that communities build within themselves,” she said. “They’re not just going to give you a list of things you say you want.” In her mind, these agreements help ensure a measure of democracy in a part of the country where voter disenfranchisement, especially in rural, black communities, is high and private interests have the ear of state government.
The Blue Oval project received a $9.2 billion loan from the Department of Energy. As funding and incentives for clean energy increased under the Inflation Reduction Act and bipartisan infrastructure bills, many investments went to the Southeast and America’s popular EV “Battery Belt.” The region’s notoriously climate-unfriendly governors have thrown their doors wide open, with Tennessee Governor Bill Lee seemingly eager to yanking the car manufacturing mantle of the Great Lakes. With $900 million in it public incentives approved by the Tennessee Legislature, it is the largest single manufacturing investment in the state’s history.
Amid the green boom, many have speculated that part of the South’s draw is its generally lax environmental and safety regulations. Tennessee is a “right-to-work” state; such places usually support lower average wages. Tennessee’s preemption ordinance also prevents municipalities from setting worker standards beyond what state law requires.
This does not mean publicly supported clean energy projects in the South are doomed to a lower standard than those elsewhere. The president of the Nashville chapter of the United Auto Workers Union promised that Blue Oval City would be a “union facility.” The Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Act require those seeking federal funding to provide a “community benefits plan” which outlines how they will invest in domestic labour, local communities, and diversity, equality and inclusion initiatives. Although similar to CBAs, they are not the same. Proponents of such arrangements say CBAs are needed to ensure accountability and transparency, and to give communities direct input into projects that affect them.
Will Tucker works as the Southern Programs Manager at Jobs to Move America, a national labor advocacy nonprofit. It recently negotiated a CBA with New Flyer, an electric bus manufacturer in Anniston, Alabama, and Tucker feels confident that this approach to the transition in the South can work.
“What distinguishes a real community benefits agreement from a dressed-up community outreach program by another name is the element of negotiations with the company,” he said. While many companies will set aside funding for local sports leagues, schools and the like, Tucker sees such moves as more of a PR strategy than a way to empower the community.
If community organizations can present a united front, that pressure usually pushes the company to negotiate, although in some cases, protests and demonstrations raise the stakes. Michael Adriaanse hopes such pressure will send the Blue Oval City CBA over the finish line.
Ultimately, for a CBA to work, the company involved must sit with the community. Adriaanse said the coalition invited Ford representatives to a town hall to discuss preliminary demands, but it did not work out. McDaniel speculated that the company’s ongoing negotiations with the United Auto Workers, which recently called a strike, may have delayed some things. There is a long way to go, but Adriaanse and McDaniel hope that with a strong enough coalition, the company will not be able to evade any longer.
The coalition still plans to go with Ford early in the new year, with a full draft of the deal in hand. Even if the effort isn’t immediately successful, community members say, the relationships they’ve built with each other will only grow stronger, opening up possibilities for further organizing down the road.
