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American Rights at Work honors United Streetcar for an outstanding labor-management partnership that creates clean energy jobs and sound community investments. United Streetcar has been moving full steam ahead since 2005 to bring streetcars and good jobs back to America. Recognizing a growing demand for U.S.-manufactured products, Oregon Iron Works formed the company to produce state-of-the-art streetcars to help ease our cities’ congestion and reduce carbon emissions. Its premiere streetcars rolled out in Portland, OR, in 2009—the first U.S.-produced modern streetcar in nearly 60 years—thanks in part to a collaborative and empowering partnership with its workers represented by the Ironworkers and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. Workers engage in shop-floor design meetings to bring their ideas in at the ground level, and the company actively solicits employee feedback on all projects and processes to make them stronger and more cost-effective. One symbol of the company’s pride in its workforce can be found on its prototype streetcar, which was signed by many of the workers who helped to build it. United Streetcar is doing more than creating good, clean energy jobs in the Portland area: it is reigniting an entire industry. Orders with United Streetcar create or save jobs at vendors across the U.S. By manufacturing at home, the company has helped open the doors for more than 200 vendors in 20 states to produce streetcar parts. Its streetcars currently comply with Buy America provisions: approximately 70 percent of components are domestically produced. The company is also retrofitting its prototype with the first American-made streetcar propulsion system to increase the domestic content to nearly 90 percent. Company president Chandra Brown describes this "in-sourcing"—bringing streetcar manufacturing jobs back to the U.S. from Eastern Europe—and sees it as key to revitalizing the nation’s economy. United Streetcar is truly a model for the new, green economy: helping expand energy efficient transit solutions, U.S. manufacturing, and good, union jobs.

 

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