The United Auto Workers (UAW) has notched a breakthrough win for southern expansion following its successful strike against Detroit’s Big Three automakers last year.

Last week, the workers at Volkswagen’s factory in Chattanooga, Tennessee, voted 73% in favor of joining the UAW, marking the union’s first victory in a renewed push to organize nonunion plants – most of which are owned by European and Asian automakers in the South.

The UAW is feeling the momentum.

“The workers at VW are the first domino to fall,” UAW President Shawn Fain told The Guardian in an interview Sunday. “They have shown it is possible. I expect more of the same to come. Workers are fed up.”

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Labor relations consultant Jason Greer, president of Greer Consulting Inc., and a former board agent with the National Labor Relations Board agrees.

“I’m impressed,” Greer told FOX Business in an interview about UAW’s latest win. “I think what we’re seeing is a UAW that’s been very smart about how to organize; they have learned how to tap into the heart of the employees.”

Greer noted that Volkswagen – whose other plants are all outside the U.S. and are already unionized – remained neutral and did not put up a fight in the UAW’s unionization bid. But he said the potential impact on the South, made up of right-to-work states, could be significant.

“When you have employees from southern states who’ve been traditionally nonunion and haven’t even really felt like there was a need for a union, all of a sudden sit around, saying, ‘Well, I’m working for 15 bucks an hour, but this newly unionized facility down the street, they just got 30 bucks an hour. Why wouldn’t I want that?’ I think it speaks to the growing sense of the ‘us versus them’ divide that has taken hold not just in the South but really across the country,” Greer said.

He added, “There’s almost this new labor movement happening, and the labor movement looks a lot different than it did in the past.”

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Mark Mix, president of the National Right to Work Committee, told FOX Business there are a couple of things that make this different and probably give it some legs, at least for the near term.

“One is that the government is now engaged in this business,” Mix said, saying that President Biden is leading an “all-hands-on-deck effort by the executive branch to give union officials dramatic new powers over workers and using basically every agency at the federal government to do so.”

He pointed to the United Steelworkers (USW) successfully unionizing a Georgia factory owned by bus maker Blue Bird last year as the first victory.

The facility, which makes electric buses, was granted enormous federal subsidies, and Mix said the Department of Energy, for instance, can pressure companies to remain neutral in a union election in order to qualify for the federal funds.

Indeed, in announcing its victory in September, the USW said in a press release that Blue Bird’s “anti-union rhetoric may have been somewhat muted by the fact that the company, which produces low-emission and electric vehicles, is slated to receive an infusion of federal funding through the Biden administration’s $1.2 trillion infrastructure law, the $280 billion CHIPS and Science Act to boost domestic production of semiconductors, and the Inflation Reduction Act, which included $370 billion for clean energy initiatives.”

“It was kind of the thumb of the government on the scale,” Mix said. “And one of the things that I think you’ll see that is a common denominator in these battles going forward … is that there’s going to be an electric battery component in all of this or some kind of electric vehicle component and all of this effort by the UAW over the next five years if Biden wins re-election.”

He said Volkswagen’s Tennessee plant makes EVs, and the UAW’s next target – the Mercedes plant in Vance, Alabama – also makes electric SUVs.

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Mix said that another reason the UAW is seeking to unionize in right-to-work states is because they have to, saying “that’s where the jobs are now.”

The Right to Work chief presented Bureau of Labor Statistics data showing that from 2013 to 2023, manufacturing jobs grew by 12.3% in right-to-work states, compared to 2.5% in “forced union” states.

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An artificial intelligence (AI) venture backed by Google is partnering with the military to use AI in responding to natural disasters.

Bellwether, a team that’s part of Google parent Alphabet’s X innovation hub, announced Wednesday that it’s working with the National Guard and the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) to address inefficiencies in the Guard’s disaster response processes. The DIU is tasked with helping the Department of Defense integrate early stage commercial technologies into its operations.

Bellwether worked with the National Guard to develop a system that uses AI and machine learning (ML) to quickly analyze aerial imagery of disaster scenes to identify damage to critical infrastructure. That can then inform National Guard teams coordinating the disaster response as they look to deploy resources most effectively after conducting damage assessments.

The National Guard currently conducts damage assessments manually as humans look over aerial images of a disaster-struck area to compare them against corresponding pictures of those locations to note infrastructure changes caused by the disaster. That process continues as the disaster progresses, and the initial response can be delayed due to the time required to review those details.

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“Right now, our analysts have to spend time sorting through images to find the ones that cover the areas most affected by natural disasters,” Col. Brian McGarry – who leads the National Guard’s operations, plans and training division – said in a statement.

“They then have to correlate those images to surrounding infrastructure, label all the relevant features, and only then can highlight the significant damage and send it forward to first responder teams.”

“Using AI and ML to do the routine tasks of georectification, identification, and labeling will greatly speed up how quickly we can get important information to the folks that need it most,” McGarry wrote. “It’s all about saving lives in our communities.”

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The Bellwether team said they spent nine months building a prototype that uses AI and machine learning to analyze aerial imagery of an area hit by a disaster in mere seconds, using Google’s geospatial assets as a reference to compare what the area looked like before the disaster.

After the images of the disaster scene are analyzed, the Bellwether tool produces a labeled map of affected areas that allows the National Guard to quickly determine how to deploy its resources in response to conditions in the disaster-affected area.

“There is so much information from so many sources about the Earth out there,” Sarah Russell, who leads Project Bellwether at X, said in a release. “Our moonshot is to systematize that information so that disaster response organizations and other entities can use it to make better decisions and plan for the future.”

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“The DIU supports our mission to build the most effective tools possible as natural disasters continue to occur with worsening severity,” Russell added. “In five years, nobody should have to wait to understand the extent of extreme weather damage and the community’s most urgent needs. It should be seen as reasonable and expected that we immediately know the state of the most important infrastructure across a landscape, and what to do next.”

Google said Bellwether’s results are so encouraging to the DIU that it’s partnering with the team on future disaster response efforts.

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Google’s X innovation hub also noted in a separate post that Bellwether is developing a wildfire prediction tool to calculate fire risk for landscapes and structures up to five years in the future.

The tool estimates the likelihood of wildfire in a location by analyzing historical data about the environment as well as risk drivers like tree species, wind qualities and the types of infrastructure in the area.

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