TOLEDO, Ohio (AP) – When General Motors boldly announced its goal last month to make only battery-powered vehicles by 2035, it didn’t just mark a break with more than a century of internal combustion engine manufacturing. It also covered the future for 50,000 GM workers whose skills – and jobs – could become obsolete much faster than they knew.
The message was clear: As a greener US economy approaches, GM wants a factory workforce that will eventually build only zero-emission vehicles.
It won’t happen overnight. But it increases the likelihood that legions of auto workers who have trained and worked for decades to build oil-powered cars will have to do quite a different job over the next decade – or they may not have jobs. the work.
If the historic shift from internal combustion to electricity goes as GM, Ford and others increasingly predict, jobs that now involve the manufacture of pistons, fuel injectors and mufflers will be replaced by the assembly of power packs. lithium-ion batteries, electric and heavy-duty service wiring.
Many of these components are now built overseas. But President Joe Biden has made the development of an electric vehicle supply chain in the United States an essential part of his ambitious plan to create another 1 million jobs in the electric vehicle industry.
However, for GM workers and other carmakers, that future could be dangerous. Future plants, more environmentally focused, will need fewer workers, mainly because electric vehicles contain 30% to 40% fewer moving parts than oil vehicles. In addition, many of the good trade union jobs that have brought a solid middle-class lifestyle could shift to lower wages as carmakers buy EV parts from supply companies or form separate companies to build components.
The most vulnerable in the transition will be the approximately 100,000 people in the United States who work in factories that produce transmissions and engines for gasoline and diesel vehicles.
There are people like Stuart Hill, one of the 1,500 workers at the Toledo GM transmission plant in Ohio. At 38 and a GM employee for five years, Hill is still decades away from retirement. The future of the plant and its role in it worries him.
“It’s something that crossed my mind,” Hill said. “Are they going to shut him down?”
He and others hope that Toledo will be among the sites where GM will build more EV parts. If not, he would be open to moving to another factory to continue earning a solid salary; the top workers represented by United Auto Workers are paid around $ 31 per hour.
However, there is no assurance that car manufacturers will need as many workers as possible in the new EV era. A United Auto Workers newspaper two years ago quoted Ford and Volkswagen executives as saying that electric vehicles will reduce working hours per vehicle by 30%.
“There are only fewer parties, so of course it’s obvious there will be less manpower,” said Jeff Dokho, research director for UAW.
“We’re about to start this transition,” said Teddy DeWitt, an assistant professor of management at the University of Massachusetts in Boston, who is studying how jobs evolve over time. “It won’t just be in the vehicle space.”
The number of jobs in the industry that will be lost in the transition will probably reach thousands, although no one knows for sure. And these losses will be made up, at least in part, of jobs created by a greener economy, from the work involved in building parts for electric vehicles and charging stations to jobs created by generating wind and solar electricity. .
Indeed, the largest change in manufacturing since the commercial production of internal combustion vehicles began in 1886 will go to agricultural equipment, heavy trucks and even lawn mowers, snow blowers and weeders. The oil and gas industries could also suffer, as the fading of the internal combustion engine reduces the demand for oil.
At the century-old transmission plant in Toledo, GM workers manufacture sophisticated six-, eight-, nine- or 10-speed gearboxes. Eventually, those parts will be replaced by much simpler single-speed transmissions for electric vehicles. Especially for senior workers, GM’s plans for a “fully electric future” mean that eventually their services will no longer be needed.
“This is the time to define where we are going in the future,” said Tony Totty, president of UAW at the Toledo plant. “It is a time when we have to ask ourselves in this country: what will we do for production? Is manufacturing dead in our country? ”
These worries were already in the air when Biden stopped the October campaign at the union hall in Toledo. Totty sent a letter begging the candidate “not to forget the people who do their job today.”
Even though all-electric vehicles now account for less than 2% of new vehicle sales in the US, carmakers are under intense pressure to abandon internal combustion engines as part of a global action to combat climate change. California will ban sales of new motor vehicles until 2035. European countries impose bans or strict pollution limits. Biden, as part of the push for green vehicles, has committed to building half a million charging stations and turning the federal fleet of 650,000 vehicles into batteries.
Nowadays, however, American drivers have other ideas. They continue to spend record amounts on larger petrol vehicles. With average pump prices of nearly $ 2 a gallon, trucks and SUVs have replaced more efficient cars as the nation’s main mode of transportation. In January, about three-quarters of new vehicle sales were trucks and SUVs. A decade ago, it was only half.
All this demand will keep Toledo in business for years. However, there is little doubt that the switch to electricity is inexorable. About 2.5 million electric vehicles were sold worldwide last year. IHS Markit expects this figure to increase by 70% this year alone. In December, 22 fully electric models were available in the United States; Edmunds.com expects this figure to reach 30 this year. GM alone is committed to investing $ 27 billion in 30 EV models worldwide by 2025.
The acceleration of the trend has increased anxiety even in plants that are now fully operational to meet the demand for GM trucks.
“It definitely scares me,” said Tommy Wolikow, a worker at GM’s truck assembly plant in Flint, Michigan, who worked for GM for eight years. “I think in the end there is a good chance I won’t be able to retire from this factory.”
Depending on the speed with which consumers embrace electric vehicles, Wolikow fears he may be removed from his post by older employees. Workers are already starting to fight for jobs at three factories that GM has designated as electric vehicle assembly sites, two in the Detroit area and one in Tennessee.
Meanwhile, GM says it needs full factory workforce as it rebuilds the inventory depleted by a coronavirus-related plant shutdown last spring.
“We need to lead our current core business smartly and strongly, because ultimately this will allow us to invest in this fully electric future,” said spokesman Dan Flores. “We cannot speculate on the future of any individual facility.”
Not all domestic combustion jobs will disappear in transition. GM has ruled out heavier trucks in its EV target. And some manufacturers will continue to produce gas-electric hybrids, said Kristin Dziczek, vice president of the Center for Auto Research, an industry think tank.
It is unclear what will happen to GM workers or other carmakers who may be excluded from the transition. In the past, GM has protected some workers during downsizing. When he closed an assembly plant in Lordstown, Ohio, in 2019, for example, laid-off workers were given the chance to move to other plants. And when GM shut down factories heading for bankruptcy in 2009, laid-off employees received purchase and early retirement packages.
The UAW says it sees the transformation into electricity as potentially less of a threat than a growth opportunity. Dokho suggested, for example, that the Biden administration could provide incentives to build more EV parts here.
“We are optimistic about ensuring that there are jobs in the future and that jobs now are protected,” he said.
Every major industrial transformation, DeWitt said, tended to lead to both job losses and new jobs. He noted, for example, that when Americans migrated from farms to cities after the Civil War, jobs in agriculture dwindled. But cities were connected to electricity and jobs were created like electricians.
If automakers are willing, DeWitt said, most of their workers could be retrained to switch from gas vehicles to electrical parts and all vehicles.
“It seems unlikely to me that all this knowledge that I have accumulated in that workforce over the last 50 years will suddenly be completely useless,” he said.
Job protection certainly seems to be a top issue in the next round of talks with UAW contracts in 2023, and workers will especially want to keep positions with higher wages. GM and other automakers now see battery manufacturing as a function of lower-paying parts.
The carmaker is building a battery factory in Lordstown, in a company with the Korean company LG Chem. CEO Mary Barra said workers there will be paid less than those at vehicle assembly plants to keep costs closer to what competing carmakers will pay.
Negotiating the 2023 contract could be even more controversial than two years ago, when a 40-day UAW strike cost GM $ 3.6 billion.
Indeed, the calculation between GM and the union may come sooner than anticipated, said Karl Brauer, executive editor at CarExpert.com. He said carmakers generally work on vehicles five to seven years before they go on sale.
“You could argue that by 2028 there will be no further development on internal combustion engine vehicles,” he said. “Which is starting to sound much closer to 2035.”
____
Krisher reported from Detroit.