The United Autoworkers union, fresh off scoring major concessions including 30 percent pay raises for members employed by GM, Ford, and Stellantis Chrysler in the Rust Belt, is now eyeing a southward expansion into non-union plants owned by Toyota, Tesla, Nissan, Volkswagen, Honda, Hyundai, and Kia in redder territory long hostile to organized labor, Axios reports.

Red State right-to-work laws banning unions from charging dues to members make it a tall order but there’s one ally in the UAW’s corner: The Big Three, who actually want the union to start shaking down Toyota, BMW, and the rest of them in order to narrow the labor cost gap with their competitors. Whether this actually means in practice that the Michigan companies will help front the no doubt massive costs associated with what will no doubt be a long and grinding fight against the likes of Elon Musk, the Korean shitbox manufacturers, Honda etc, remains to be seen.

Another factor in the UAW’s favor are the federal electric vehicle manufacturing incentives requiring operations to remain domestic, which removes a crucial escape hatch the non-union automakers might’ve otherwise had with threatening to move jobs overseas. “They can still move, but in order to qualify for most of these incentives, you have to be domestic. That’s a big deal. It gives unions and workers more leverage,” Blue-Green Alliance executive director Jason Walsh tells Axios.