They trained for the jobs. They moved from the subway tunnels to the middle of the goddamn ocean. IBEW Local 3 spent years recruiting and retraining electricians like Ryan McElroen for offshore wind — union work, family wages, the kind of work my grandfather would have recognized on sight.
Then Donald Trump issued a stop-work order.
Five projects. Empire Wind. Revolution Wind. Sunrise Wind. Vineyard Wind. Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind. Courts blocked every single one of the stop-work orders — courts said keep building. Trump sent the electricians home anyway, chaotically, with paychecks frozen mid-rotation. And when the courts kept siding against him, his administration dropped $2.7 billion in taxpayer money to cancel twelve offshore wind leases in five deals.
The pitch was ‘American workers’ and ‘American energy dominance.’ The receipt is electricians standing on a dock wondering when their next shift is. BloombergNEF dropped its forecast from 39 gigawatts by 2035 to six. Building trades are reporting 3 billion lost work hours. Zero offshore wind off New Jersey, where thousands of IBEW members were ready to work. The Climate Jobs National Resource Center built labor-environment coalitions in nine states. The Biden Inflation Reduction Act made prevailing wage and apprenticeship the legal backbone of the buildout. Trump tore it up because his fossil-fuel donor class wanted the margins back.
This is what ‘drain the swamp’ looks like when it reaches a wind farm: you kill the union jobs, you hand the work to nobody, and you put a flag pin on the wreckage. Patriot-branded assholes in this administration called it winning. IBEW members called it a layoff.
Family values, my ass. A value you blow up with a stop-work stamp and call ‘energy dominance’ is a fraud with a hard hat.
Eat shit. You knew exactly what you were doing.
Source story: US unions organize to defend offshore wind jobs from Trump policies.