TOLEDO, Ohio (AP) – When General Motors boldly announced its goal last month to manufacture only battery-powered vehicles by 2035, it not only marked a break with more than a century of internal combustion engine manufacturing. It has also obscured the future of 50,000 GM workers whose skills – and jobs – could become obsolete long before they realized.
The message was clear: as a greener economy in the United States approaches, GM wants a factory workforce that ends up building only zero-emission vehicles.
It will not happen overnight. But it is increasingly likely that legions of auto workers who have trained and worked for decades to build oil-powered machines will have to do quite a different job in the next decade – or they may not have jobs.
If the historic shift from internal combustion to electric power is in line with GM, Ford and others increasingly imagine, work now involving the manufacture of pistons, fuel injectors and mufflers will be supplanted by the assembly of lithium-ion batteries. , electric and heavy motors – electrical service harnesses.
Many of these components are now built abroad. But President Joe Biden has made developing an electric vehicle supply chain in the United States a fundamental part of his ambitious plan to create an additional 1 million jobs in the auto industry with electric vehicles.
However, for workers at GM and other automakers, that future can be dangerous. The factories of the future that are more environmentally friendly will need fewer workers, mainly because electric vehicles contain 30% to 40% less moving parts than oil-powered vehicles. In addition, many of the good union jobs that have brought a solid middle-class lifestyle can shift to lower wages, as automakers buy EV parts from supplier companies or form separate ventures 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 make transmissions and engines for gas and diesel vehicles.
They are people like Stuart Hill, one of about 1,500 workers at GM’s Toledo 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 in the back of my mind,” said Hill. “Are they going to turn it off?”
He and others expect Toledo to be among the places where GM will build more EV parts. Otherwise, he would be open to moving to some other factory to continue earning a solid salary; first-tier workers represented by United Auto Workers are paid about $ 31 an hour.
However, there is hardly any guarantee that car manufacturers will need so many workers in the new EV era. A United Auto Workers newspaper two years ago quotes executives from Ford and Volkswagen saying that EVs will cut working hours per vehicle by 30%.
“There are only fewer parts, so of course there will be less labor,” said Jeff Dokho, director of research at UAW.
“We’re kind of at the beginning of this transition,” said Teddy DeWitt, an assistant professor of management at the University of Massachusetts in Boston, who studies 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 is likely to be in the thousands, although no one knows precisely. And those losses will be offset, at least in part, by 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.
In fact, the most far-reaching shift in manufacturing since commercial production of vehicles powered by internal combustion began in 1886 will spread to agricultural equipment, heavy trucks and even lawn mowers, snow blowers and weed destroyers. The oil and gas industries may also suffer, as the weakening of the internal combustion engine reduces demand for oil.
At the centenary transmission plant in Toledo, GM workers manufacture sophisticated six, eight, nine or ten-speed gearboxes. Eventually, these parts will be replaced by much simpler power trains for electric vehicles. Especially for low-ranking workers on the seniority list, GM’s plans for a “fully electric future” mean that, eventually, its services will probably no longer be needed.
“This is the time to define where we are going in the future,” said Tony Totty, president of the local UAW at the Toledo plant. “This is a moment that we need to ask ourselves in this country: What are we going to do for manufacturing? Is manufacturing dead in our country? “
These concerns were already in the air when Biden made a campaign stop in October at the Toledo union. Totty delivered a letter begging the candidate “don’t forget that people are doing the job today”.
While all-electric vehicles now account for less than 2% of new vehicle sales in the United States, automakers face 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 until 2035. European countries are imposing strict pollution limits or prohibitions. Biden, as part of an effort for green vehicles, promised to build half a million charging stations and convert the federal fleet of 650,000 vehicles into batteries.
At the moment, however, American drivers have other ideas. They continue to spend record amounts on larger gasoline vehicles. With average pump prices close to $ 2 a gallon, trucks and SUVs have replaced the most efficient cars as the country’s main form of transportation. In January, about three quarters of new vehicle sales came from trucks and SUVs. A decade ago, it was only half.
All of this demand will still keep Toledo on the market 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 that number to increase by 70% this year alone. In December, there were 22 fully electric models for sale in the United States; Edmunds.com expects that number to reach 30 this year. GM alone pledged to invest $ 27 billion in 30 EV models worldwide by 2025.
The acceleration of the trend has increased anxiety, even in factories that are now operating at full throttle to meet the demand for GM trucks.
“It definitely scares me,” said Tommy Wolikow, a worker at GM’s heavy-duty pickup plant in Flint, Michigan, who worked eight years for GM. “I think that, eventually, there is a good chance that I will not be able to retire from this factory.”
Depending on how quickly consumers adopt electric vehicles, Wolikow fears being expelled from his job by older employees. Workers are already starting to bid for jobs at three factories that GM has designated as electric vehicle assembly sites, two in the Detroit area and one in Tennessee.
In the meantime, GM says it needs the entire workforce at the factory, as it rebuilds the inventory depleted by a coronavirus-related factory shutdown last spring.
“We have to manage our current core business in a smart and strong way, because this will allow us to invest in this totally electric future,” said spokesman Dan Flores. “We cannot speculate on the future of any individual installation.”
Not all work related to internal combustion will disappear in the transition. GM excluded heavier trucks in its EV target. And some manufacturers will continue to manufacture gas and electricity hybrids, said Kristin Dziczek, vice president of the Center for Auto Research, an industry think tank.
It is unclear what will happen to workers at GM or other automakers that may be squeezed in the transition. In the past, GM has protected some workers in periods of downsizing. When he closed an assembly plant in Lordstown, Ohio, in 2019, for example, the redundant workers had a chance to transfer to other factories. And when GM closed factories on the brink of bankruptcy in 2009, the dismissed employees received purchase and early retirement packages.
The UAW says it sees the transformation to electricity as potentially less of a threat than an opportunity for growth. Dokho suggested, for example, that the Biden administration could offer incentives to build more EV parts here.
“We are optimistic about ensuring that there are jobs in the future and that jobs there are now protected,” he said.
All major industrial transformations, said DeWitt, tend to result in job losses and new jobs. He noted, for example, that when Americans migrated from farms to cities after the Civil War, agricultural jobs declined. But the cities received electricity and jobs as electricians were created.
If automakers want, said DeWitt, most of their workers could be retrained to move from gas vehicles to electrical parts and vehicle assembly.
“It seems unlikely to me that all the knowledge we have accumulated in this workforce over the past 50 years is suddenly completely useless,” he said.
Job protection appears to be an important issue in the next round of UAW contract negotiations in 2023, and workers will especially want to preserve higher-paying jobs. GM and other automakers now see battery manufacturing as a function of supplying lower-paying parts.
The automaker is building a battery factory in Lordstown in a venture with South Korean LG Chem. CEO Mary Barra said workers there will be paid less than carmakers, to keep costs closer to what competing automakers will pay.
Negotiating the 2023 contract could be even more contentious than it was two years ago, when a 40-day UAW strike cost GM $ 3.6 billion.
In fact, the reckoning between GM and the union may come ahead of schedule, said Karl Brauer, executive editor of CarExpert.com. Automakers, he said, generally work on vehicles five to seven years before they go on sale.
“You could argue that by 2028 they will not make any further development on vehicles with an internal combustion engine,” he said. “Which starts to sound a lot closer to 2035.”
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Krisher reported from Detroit.