This collaborative project focuses on how greenwashing, or promoting an industrial development project as positive for a community and its workers because it is contributing to addressing climate change, can obscure its extractive labor and environmental impacts. The invisibility of those dimensions of a project, often promoted through state-corporate alliances, raises challenges for labor and environmental organizing, already challenging in the fragmented global labor processes in which Foreign Trade Zones are important nodes. We will discuss the way women’s labor and environmental concerns, particularly, are marginalized in a specific “green” FTZ industrial development project in the southeastern US. As a vehicle battery plant, the industrial development project is promoted in local and state government discourse as connecting the rural area to a progressive shift to the prevalence of electric vehicle use in the US – helping to meet national goals for reducing carbon emissions. But the un/der/stated anticipated effects, especially within an expanded temporal and spatial context, include the question of who absorbs the toxins and the labor of lithium mining necessary to the battery production process and e-waste recycling when the batteries reach the end of their working lives in electric vehicles. This paper is based on archival, participant observation, discourse analysis, comparative ethnographic and semi-structured interview research with residents of a rural community as a vehicle battery plant is under construction. The first author will discuss the growth and role of rural FTZs in the US as global/local spaces. The second author will discuss the intersectional marginalization obscured through “greenwashing” industrial development in the US. The third author will discuss underheard community concerns about their disempowerment in the face of local, regional, and international elites, as well as about environmental, labor, and social justice, including permanent loss of farmland and associated livelihoods.
