“Vote yes!” Veronica Lattimore called toward a black sedan that blared its horn. She stood on the sidewalk across from the site of her former employer, Eos Energy Enterprises, a battery manufacturer housed within the old Westinghouse Electric factory.
She was there with a handful of workers belonging to the United Steelworkers who came to the Turtle Creek facility during the 3 p.m. shift change in a show of solidarity ahead of a union election Thursday.
Lattimore wore a blue jumpsuit and held the sign at the corner of the sidewalk facing the factory: “Your Voice, Your Vote!” An organizer handed out yellow papers stamped with the USW logo: “Together we can make Eos a great place to work.”
Union supporters say they are organizing for greater workplace stability and protections and a say in how green manufacturing is built in the Mon Valley. The company has said it is “pro-union,” but three union organizers were terminated earlier this year, each with pending cases before the National Labor Relations Board [NLRB] that allege unfair labor practice.
In a statement, Eos Vice President of Strategic Partnerships & Public Affairs Chad FitzGerald wrote: “We respect our employees’ right to choose or not choose to have a labor representative and believe that with the right labor partner we can achieve great things as a company … We have agreed to the terms of an election and have not interfered with any organized labor campaigns.”
One year earlier, Eos was granted a conditional commitment for a loan of almost $400 million from the U.S. Department of Energy [DOE]. The money would pay for the company to ramp up its production of industrial, grid-scale zinc-bromine batteries designed to store the electricity generated from renewable sources like solar and wind — a product increasingly in demand amid a national rush to decarbonize.
Battery manufacturing at Eos Energy’s Turtle Creek facility in February 2023.
Pennsylvania currently employs some 96,000 workers in the clean energy sector. And with record federal investments in clean energy recently signed into law, the sector is poised to rocket. Already, more than $1 billion has been invested in green projects in the Commonwealth.
PublicSource spoke with seven current and former hourly Eos employees working in various parts of the production process and one former top manager. All described an environment perhaps reflective of a not-yet-profitable energy startup courting big investments and under pressure to meet production milestones. The company is seeking to finance and rapidly scale production of a product that has never been produced at scale before, with incentives to do so as quickly as possible to avoid catastrophic global heating.
Eos workers expressed their initial excitement to join the new green economy and support for the company’s place at the heart of a production operation meant to address climate change. The workers also described a work environment rife with management turnover, and with widespread confusion about rules and policies which, they said, changed frequently.
Workers said there was no employee handbook, and at times, disciplinary action was levied inconsistently. The human resources department was not always responsive to worker complaints, workers said, and schedules and shifts were changed without adequate notice.
“We’ve been here and paved the way,” said Dante Williams, an assembly technician who lives across the Monongahela River in Duquesne. He will celebrate four years with the company in December. “Had they treated us fairly, we wouldn’t have needed a union.”
Should the vote pass, that union, Williams believes, would help to stabilize a hectic workplace and foster goodwill among workers. “It would be a better place,” he said. “I want the company to grow. I want to see it thrive.”
If the Eos workers vote to join the Steelworkers, it would allow the 850,000-member union to collectively bargain on behalf of Eos’ 160 eligible employees.
“The workers are stakeholders in this, too,” said Bernie Hall, Pennsylvania Director for the United Steelworkers. “Clearly Eos has shown a need for a union.”
“We need a standard raise,” Lattimore said. “We need structure. We can bring that structure,” added Stanley Upshaw. “I never believed in unions until now.”
A fledgling green economy
In August, inside the stone walls of what was once the Connelly Trade School in Pittsburgh’s Hill District, U.S. Rep Summer Lee, D-Swissvale, sat in front of a sprawling array of solar panels and windmills beneath the text: “Made in PGH.” The posterboard flanked Lee and other local officials, labor leaders and green energy entrepreneurs before a small audience at the Energy Innovation Center.
“Here in Western Pennsylvania, we are legacy energy communities,” said Lee, who was raised in North Braddock a few miles from Eos’ factory in Turtle Creek. She touted the Inflation Reduction Act, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, and the CHIPS and Science Act — “incredible investments that are all at levels we’ve never seen before.”
But the congresswoman underscored the importance of shared benefits for the communities that will host the companies that receive those investments.
“When a company comes to the Mon Valley,” she questioned, “will you have a commitment to creating jobs that are local? Will you have a commitment to keeping up our roads? To make sure that it’s unionized, because that is the Pittsburgh way? … That creates a trust that makes communities feel like they’re not just being trodden. That they’re not just being colonized. That they are part of it at every single step of the way.”
Lee met with Eos and visited their facilities as the company sought help to build out production in Turtle Creek. She supported their efforts to grow jobs in the Mon Valley — “a community that has been there that stuck through the different decades of disinvestment and economic collapse” — and backed Eos’ application for the DOE loan, meeting with the agency’s leadership on a regular basis in support of the company.
Last year, the representative announced Eos’ $400 million loan commitment from the agency, backed by the IRA funding. “It was an exciting story,” she said during a recent interview. “It still is.”
Eos has worked with local consultants to develop a community benefit plan which aims to solve major transportation, housing, workforce development and energy instability problems in the Mon Valley, according to Eos’ FitzGerald. The benefits plan, which is a DOE funding requirement, is nearly finalized, and seeks to address generations of deindustrializing and underinvestment.
“We are scaling our business to meet the local community’s need for safer and healthier jobs while advancing the national and industry interests in expanding the clean energy market,” FitzGerald wrote. “We believe that Eos is an example of what’s possible in America and we’ve gone to great lengths to be a positive force inside and outside our factory’s walls.”
Unionizing, Lee said, should not be viewed as an impediment, but instead a collaboration that lifts up workers and makes the company as strong as possible. “We would hope that companies would embrace, obviously, not run away from, unionization.”
Workers want a union
In January, Lee, Pittsburgh Mayor Ed Gainey, Allegheny County Executive Sara Innamorato and other elected officials met with Eos workers at USW headquarters in downtown Pittsburgh. Workers shared their desire to join the union, and the officials expressed their support of the workers’ right to organize.
The workers are new to this industry, Lee said, and they sought fair treatment and benefits and standard pay raises and opportunity for advancement.
In late June, Lee and U.S. Rep. Chris Deluzio, D-Aspinwall, wrote to the workers at Eos, commending their contributions to the region’s emerging clean energy economy. They called for a neutral process free from interference, intimidation or fear of retaliation.
Lee said she asked Eos to “take a stance of neutrality” after workers shared fears of retaliation.
“Their concern was: Are we safe? Is it safe to do this?” Lee recalled. “And of course, I think they have all been fired since.”
All three workers who met with Lee and the other local leaders at USW headquarters in January are no longer employed by Eos. Lattimore said she was terminated in March, and Latoya Hampton and Upshaw said they were fired in August. “I think they were trying to send a message,” Lattimore said.
The Steelworkers filed unfair labor practice charges against the company, alleging that the workers were fired or otherwise illegally retaliated against for their union organizing activities. Those charges, along with two more claims of unfair labor practice filed by the USW against Eos, are pending.
Eos declined to comment on the specifics of pending matters before the NLRB, but FitzGerald, the company spokesperson, said, “Eos has not taken any actions against any employees in connection with the union campaign.”
In an internal email to workers sent on Saturday, Eos CEO Joe Mastrangelo wrote that “the USW has filed a series of unwarranted unfair labor practices charges against Eos with the National Labor Relations Board. Three of those charges are intended by the USW to protect employees whose employment was terminated for violent behavior, threats or committing serious safety violations in your workplace. Our decisions to terminate those employees had no relation to union organizing.”
The USW’s Hall disagreed, casting it a “traditional union-busting technique.”
“It’s pretty clear these three workers exercising their legal right to want to join a union and were very vocal about it and very public about it,” said Hall. “It’s awfully coincidental that those three employees who took part in that roundtable are three employees who have subsequently been fired.”
The company denies the allegation.
“Eos has always been and will always be a pro-union and pro-employee company,” wrote Mastrangelo in an email to workers Saturday, which encouraged workers to vote in the Thursday election.
“The right union partner focused on mutual success can help influence governmental policies to help manufacturers like us compete against non-U.S. manufacturers that currently dominate our industry,” Mastrangelo wrote. “The right union partner can also help connect us to potential customers and drive support behind our made in America technology in critical states that see high demand for energy storage. Most importantly, the right union partner can bring valuable industry experience and critical skills training that will enable you to build a long-term career in the energy industry that could go beyond Eos.”
But Mastrangelo cast doubt that the Steelworkers could be that union, and also suggested a different role for organized labor in the context of a fledgling green economy seeking to rapidly scale.
“I only ask that you consider if the USW is the right union partner to allow each of you and Eos to reach its full potential,” Mastrangelo wrote. He questioned if the USW would offer training programs specialized for the energy market, or if the union could help Eos secure future investment. “How can the USW help Eos grow in the energy market?”
For some workers, though, the company’s reluctance to support this union drive has undermined the company’s pledge to operate as a partner with local communities. “That’s how we all feel,” said Lattimore. She’s still organizing for the USW union, despite being fired. “This is about the people that come after me,” she said. “This is about them having a voice.”
Photographs by Quinn Glabicki.
Quinn Glabicki is the environment and climate reporter at PublicSource and a Report for America corps member. He can be reached at quinn@publicsource.org and on Instagram and X @quinnglabicki.
This story was fact-checked by Amber Frantz.
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