The acting U.S. secretary of labor came to Blue Bird’s school bus factory in Fort Valley on Friday in a visit that melded support for organized labor with the high-stakes, high-dollar promotion of low-emission energy policy.
Julie Su watched as company and union representatives signed the first contract negotiated by Blue Bird with the United Steelworkers Union, a pact that will provide hefty raises to many workers, as well as safety guarantees and expanded retirement benefits.
She praised the contract, as well as company plans to build a new plant to build electric school buses.
“I told them, ‘you are an iconic company, almost 100 years old,” she later told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “What this is about is the next 100 years.”
Su had met in March with both union and company executives and challenged them to reach a deal quickly, she said. “The CEO called it ‘the Julie Su challenge.’”
A deal was announced in May.
With Su on Friday were Yvonne Brooks, president of the Georgia AFL-CIO, as well as Mark Cochran, assistant to the director for the United Steelworkers district that includes about 1,500 Blue Bird workers.
Brooks said Su’s visit helped to make the point that unions can be positive for business and the community.
“I think it sends a message of how labor and companies can work together,” Brooks said. “Everything goes better when labor and management have a relationship. In many cases they don’t realize how much they need each other.”
The steelworkers union is part of the AFL-CIO, a federation of 60 unions.
The event came a week after the Department of Energy announced it was giving Blue Bird an $80 million grant to help build a 400-worker, 600,000 square-foot factory to produce electric school buses. That grant is part of the Biden administration’s multi-billion dollar effort to fund and support the production of lower- and zero-emission vehicles.
Eleven companies are receiving money from the Department of Energy. Blue Bird is the only school bus maker among them.
In announcing the grants last week, officials tied energy policy to labor policy, and said that the spending will not just add jobs, but will also mean higher-paying union jobs.
The union at Blue Bird reached its first contract with the company in May, a pact that includes up to 40 percent raises for some workers, as well as health and safety standards and expanded retirement benefits.
Blue Bird, the nation’s premier maker of school buses, was founded in 1927. The company will match the $80 million grant with an equal amount of its own money, but it has not yet announced how it will raise or borrow those funds.
Blue Bird plans to break ground on the site of the future factory before year’s end, according to Britton Smith, the company’s president. Plans call for electric school buses to start rolling off the assembly line in late 2026, he said.
Most of the positions to be added at the new Blue Bird plant will be production jobs, and the workers in those jobs are expected to be covered by the union.
Su, the former labor commissioner for California, had been approved in 2021 by the U.S. Senate to be deputy secretary of labor. In March 2023, President Biden nominated her to the top job. However, her nomination was stymied, partly because of the opposition of West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, who has been in the coal business and has been critical of the Biden administration’s energy policy.
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