The Biden administration made affordable child care one of the centerpieces of its early policy rollouts, but it was one of the many proposals left by the wayside in the face of centrist handwringing. Enter “Plan C”: the strings attached to billions in new federal funding that will require certain manufacturers getting government subsidies to provide access to child care for their workers.
The “C” in this case stands equally for the CHIPS Act, the bipartisan law aimed at boosting America’s semiconductor manufacturing industry, and the Commerce Department, which is overseeing that law’s implementation. The $52 billion price tag of the CHIPS Act includes $39 billion in direct subsidies to new semiconductor factories to boost the production of the chips that run basically every electronic device Americans use these days.
Companies that want a piece of the first batch of those sweet, sweet subsidies will have to meet certain conditions, according to guidelines released Tuesday by the Commerce Department’s CHIPS Program Office. While companies that have applied for federal funding will recognize most of the document as relatively boilerplate, there are a few provisions that are making progressives hopeful and making libertarian free market-types scoff at what they consider big-government overreach.
That’s all hugely important both from a labor and workers’ rights perspective and, more broadly, for American industry.
As a bid to counter potential waste and a safeguard against enriching corporate executives, the Commerce Department will prioritize applications from companies that pledge to refrain from stock buybacks over the next five years. Likewise, applicants will be “required to submit detailed financial projections, with the federal government entitled to share in any ‘upside’ profits,” The New York Times reported, as a method of getting companies to make their projections “as accurate as possible, and not exaggerate any losses to try to…
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