In late April, a group of New York City construction workers, inspired by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's vision for a Green New Deal, voted to form one of the first unions in the solar energy industry. On Monday, their employer Bright Power fired its entire in-house construction crew and announced that those workers, in the midst of negotiations for their first contract, would be replaced with subcontractors.

"We have come to the conclusion that our resources have been spread too thin with so many different kinds of work all being done in-house," Bright Power CEO Jeffrey Perlman wrote to the company in an email reviewed by Motherboard. "It makes business sense to return to a fully subcontracted solar installation model."