Blanchard Pinto, a supervisor on Proterra’s electric bus assembly line in City of Industry, had never considered joining a union in his nine years with the company.
But Steelworkers reps convinced him they understood the need to move to a carbon-neutral economy and were serious about helping their oil industry members survive the transition. And Proterra’s leadership seemed surprisingly amenable to the union drive.Two weeks later, on Nov. 12, Pinto and his co-workers at the L.A. plant voted overwhelmingly to join the Steelworkers. “This is my first time being in a union, and I’m actually excited about it,” Pinto says.
Popple joined the company in 2014 after working as an early executive in the finance department at Tesla — whose head, Elon Musk, has taken an— and as a partner at the blue-chip venture capital fund Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Proterra has raised $525 million since being founded in 2004, with Kleiner Perkins and other venture capital funds investing along the way.
Plus, Popple sees upside in having a union workforce. “Because of the position that a lot of the labor unions have taken from an environmental perspective, I found that we were more aligned than opposed,” Popple says. “If you can have environmental advocacy groups and labor advocacy groups aligned, I think you end up getting more done from a policy perspective.”
In recent years, nonprofit groups in Los Angeles have pushed for community benefits agreements, like the one that Proterra agreed to sign, to be linked to government contracts. His group and the Steelworkers approached Proterra in 2016, when it first announced plans to open its City of Industry factory, to open the relationship that ended with last week’s unionization vote.
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