TOLEDO, Ohio (AP) – When General Motors boldly announced last month its goal of producing only battery-powered vehicles by 2035, it was not just an outage with more than a century of internal combustion engine production. It also blurs the future for 50,000 GM workers whose skills – and jobs – may age far sooner than they knew.
The message was clear: As a greener U.S. economy takes a closer look, GM wants a factory staff that will eventually only build vehicles without emissions.
This will not happen overnight. But the likelihood is increasing that legions of car workers who have been training and working for decades to build petroleum-powered machines will have to do quite another job in the next decade – otherwise they may not have jobs.
If the history shift from combustion to electric power takes place as GM, Ford and others are increasingly envisioned, work now involving the manufacture of pistons, fuel injectors and mufflers will be supplanted by the assembly of lithium-ion battery packs, electric motors and heavy-duty service harnesses. .
Many of the components are now built abroad. But President Joe Biden has made the development of a U.S. electric vehicle supply chain an important part of his ambitious plan to create another 1 million jobs in the automotive electric vehicle industry.
But for workers at GM and other automakers, the future could be dangerous. The more environmentally friendly plants of the future will require fewer workers, especially since electric vehicles contain 30% to 40% less moving parts than petroleum-powered vehicles. In addition, many of the good unions that lead to a good middle-class lifestyle can move to lower salaries, as car manufacturers buy EV parts from supply companies or form separate companies to build components.
The most vulnerable in the transition are the approximately 100,000 people in the United States who work at plants that make transmissions and engines for gas and diesel vehicles.
These are people like Stuart Hill, one of about 1,500 employees at GM’s Toledo Transmission plant in Ohio. At 38 years old and five years GM employee, Hill is still decades of his retirement. The future of the plant and its role in it worries him.
“It’s something in the back of my mind,” Hill said. “Are they going to shut it down?”
He and others hope Toledo will be among the sites GM will build more EV parts. If not, he would be open to moving to another factory to earn a fixed wage; Top-scale workers represented by United Auto Workers are paid about $ 31 per hour.
Yet there is hardly any assurance that car manufacturers will need so many workers in the new EV era. According to a United Auto Workers newspaper from two years ago, drivers of Ford and Volkswagen are quoted as saying that motor vehicles will reduce working hours per vehicle by 30%.
“There are just fewer parts, so it goes without saying that there will be less labor,” said Jeff Dokho, director of research at the UAW.
“We’re kind of at the beginning of the transition,” said Teddy DeWitt, an assistant professor of management at the University of Massachusetts in Boston, who studies how work develops over time. “It’s not just going to be in the vehicle compartment.”
The number of jobs lost in the transition is likely to reach thousands, although no one knows exactly. And these losses will, at least in part, consist of jobs created by a greener economy, from jobs involved in building electric vehicle parts and charging stations to jobs created by generating wind and solar power.
Indeed, the most far-reaching change in manufacturing since commercial production of combustion-powered vehicles began in 1886 will spread to farm equipment, heavy trucks and even lawn mowers, snow blades and weed makers. The oil and gas industry could also suffer, as the fading of the internal combustion engine shrinks demand for petroleum.
At the centuries-old transmission plant in Toledo, GM workers make sophisticated six-, eight-, nine- or ten-speed gearboxes. Eventually, these parts will be replaced by much simpler drivetrains for electric vehicles. Especially for workers who are low on the seniority list, GM’s plans for an ‘all-electric future’ mean that their services will eventually no longer be needed.
“It’s that moment to determine where we’re going in the future,” said Tony Totty, president of the UAW local at the Toledo plant. ‘This is a time when we in this country have to ask ourselves: What are we going to do for manufacturing? Is manufacturing dead in our country? ”
These concerns were already in the air when Biden stopped a campaign at the Toledo Union Hall in October. Totty delivered a letter urging the candidate to “not forget about the people who did the job today.”
Although fully electric vehicles now account for less than 2% of U.S. sales of new vehicles, automakers are facing intense pressure to abandon internal combustion engines as part of a global effort to combat climate change. California will ban sales of new gas-powered vehicles by 2035. European countries impose bans or strict pollution limits. Biden, as part of a push for green vehicles, has promised to build half a million charging stations and convert the federal fleet of 650,000 vehicles to battery power.
At the moment, however, American motorists have other ideas. They are still spending record amounts on larger petrol vehicles. With average pump prices of around $ 2 per liter, trucks and sport utility vehicles have replaced cars more efficiently than the country’s primary means of transportation. In January, about three-quarters of sales of new vehicles were trucks and sports utility vehicles. A decade ago, that was only half.
All of this question will keep Toledo busy for years to come. Yet there is little doubt that the transition to electricity is relentless. About 2.5 million electric vehicles were sold worldwide last year. IHS Markit expects this figure to rise by only 70% this year. In December, there were 22 fully electric models for sale in the United States; Edmunds.com expects the figure to reach 30 this year. GM alone has promised to invest $ 27 billion in 30 EV models worldwide by 2025.
The acceleration of the trend has increased anxiety, even in plants that are now flat to meet the demand for GM trucks.
“It definitely scares me,” said Tommy Wolikow, a worker at GM’s heavy-duty service building in Flint, Michigan, who worked for GM for eight years. “I think there’s a good chance I’ll not be able to retire at this plant.”
Depending on how quickly consumers embrace electric vehicles, Wolikow fears he could knock employees out of his job with more seniority. Workers have already started working for three factories that GM has designated as sites for electric vehicles, two in the Detroit area and one in Tennessee.
Meanwhile, GM says it needs its full factory staff because it took up inventory last year that was depleted by a Coronavirus-related factory shutdown.
“We need to manage our current core business smartly and strongly, because that will ultimately enable us to invest in this electrical future,” spokesman Dan Flores said. “There is no way we can speculate about the future of any individual facility.”
Not all internal combustion work will disappear during the transition. GM has excluded heavier trucks in its EV target. And some manufacturers will continue to make gas-electric hybrids, said Kristin Dziczek, vice president of the Center for Auto Research, a think tank in the industry.
It is unclear what will happen to workers at GM or other car manufacturers that could be washed out in the transition. In the past, GM has protected some workers during periods of downsizing. When it closes an assembly plant in Lordstown, Ohio in 2019, laid-off workers will have the chance to transfer to other plants. And when GM factories went bankrupt in 2009, laid-off employees received a buyout and early retirement package.
The UAW says that the transformation to electricity may be less threatening than an opportunity for growth. Dokho, for example, suggested that the Biden administration could provide incentives to build more EV parts here.
“We are optimistic about making sure there are jobs in the future, and that jobs there are protected now,” he said.
According to DeWitt, every major industrial transformation has led to both lost jobs and new jobs. He noted, for example, that when farmers migrated from the farms to cities after the Civil War, agricultural jobs became fewer. But cities are wired for electricity, and jobs have been created like electricians.
If the automakers are willing, DeWitt said, most of their workers can be trained to move from gas vehicles to electrical parts and vehicle collection.
“It seems unlikely to me that all the knowledge we have built up over the last 50 years in the workforce is suddenly completely useless,” he said.
Job protection certainly seems to be a top issue in the next round of UAW contract negotiations in 2023, and workers in particular want to retain positions with higher wages. GM and other automakers now view battery manufacturing as a lower-paying parts delivery feature.
The carmaker is building a battery factory in Lordstown in a business with South Korean LG Chem. Mary Barra, chief executive, said workers there would be paid less than those at vehicle plants, to keep costs closer to competing carmakers.
The contract negotiation in 2023 could be even more controversial than two years ago, when a 40-day UAW strike cost GM $ 3.6 billion.
Indeed, the settlement between GM and the union may come sooner than expected, said Karl Brauer, executive publisher at the CarExpert.com website. According to him, motor vehicles usually operate five to seven years before the sale of vehicles.
“You could argue that by 2028 they will no longer be developing vehicles with internal combustion engines,” he said. “Which is starting to sound a lot closer than 2035.”
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Krisher reports from Detroit.