TOLEDO, Ohio (AP) – Last month when General Motors boldly announced its goal of making only battery-powered vehicles by 2035, it didn’t just mark a break with more than a century of making internal combustion engines. It also clouded the future for 50,000 GM workers whose skills – and jobs – could become obsolete much sooner than they knew.
The message was clear: As a greener US economy approaches, GM wants factory workers who will eventually build only zero-emission vehicles.
It won’t happen overnight. But it’s more likely that legions of auto workers who have trained and worked for decades to build machines that run on petroleum will have to do quite a different job for the next decade – otherwise, they might not have a job.
As the historic shift from internal combustion to electrical power as GM, Ford, and others envision more and more, jobs that now involve making pistons, fuel injectors and mufflers will be replaced by assembling lithium-ion batteries, electric motors and heavy-duty wiring harnesses .
Many of those components are now being built abroad. But President Joe Biden has made the development of a US electric vehicle supply chain an important part of his ambitious plan to create 1 million automotive jobs with electric vehicles.
But for employees at GM and other automakers, that future could be dangerous. The more environmentally-oriented factories of the future will require fewer workers, especially since electric vehicles have 30% to 40% fewer moving parts than petroleum-powered vehicles. In addition, many of the good union jobs that have produced a solid middle-class lifestyle could shift to lower wages, as automakers purchase EV parts from supply companies or form individual companies to build components.
Most vulnerable to the transition are the approximately 100,000 people in the United States who work in factories that make transmissions and engines for gas and diesel vehicles.
It’s people like Stuart Hill, one of roughly 1,500 workers at GM’s Toledo Transmission Plant in Ohio. Hill is 38 years old and has been a GM employee for five years, but he’s still decades into retirement. The future of the plant and its role in it worries him.
“It’s something in the back of my mind,” said Hill. “Are they going to shut it down?”
He and others hope that Toledo will be one of the sites where GM will build more EV parts. If not, he would be willing to move to another factory to keep earning a hefty wage; Top workers represented by the United Auto Workers are paid about $ 31 an hour.
Yet there is hardly any certainty that car manufacturers will need the same number of employees in the new EV era. A United Auto Workers paper two years ago quoted executives from Ford and Volkswagen as saying EVs will reduce the number of hours worked per vehicle by 30%.
“There are just fewer parts, so it goes without saying that there will be less labor,” said Jeff Dokho, UAW research director.
“We’re a bit on the cusp of that 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 be just in the vehicle space.”
The number of industrial jobs lost during the transition is likely to reach thousands, although no one knows exactly. And those losses will be offset, at least in part, by jobs created by a greener economy, from building electric car parts and charging stations to jobs created by generating electricity from wind and solar.
The most dramatic change in manufacturing since the commercial production of combustion engine vehicles began in 1886 will extend to farm equipment, heavy trucks and even lawn mowers, snow throwers and weed killers. The oil and gas industry could also suffer, as the fading of the combustion engine reduces the demand for petroleum.
At the century-old transmission plant in Toledo, GM workers make sophisticated six-, eight-, nine- or ten-speed gearboxes. Ultimately, those parts will be replaced by much simpler single-speed electric vehicle drives. Particularly for low-seniority workers, GM’s plans for a “all-electric future” mean that their services will likely no longer be needed eventually.
“Now is the time to determine where we are going in the future,” said Tony Totty, president of UAW Local at the Toledo plant. “This is a time we have to ask ourselves in this country: what are we going to do for production? Is production in our country dead? “
Those concerns were already in the air when Biden made a campaign stop in the Toledo union in October. Totty delivered a letter pleading with the candidate “not to forget that the people get the job done today.”
Although fully electric vehicles now make up less than 2% of new vehicle sales in the US, carmakers are under great pressure to abandon combustion engines as part of a global fight against climate change. California will ban the sale of new gas-powered vehicles by 2035. European countries impose banned or strict pollution limits. As part of a green vehicle drive, Biden pledged to build half a million charging stations and convert the federal fleet of 650,000 vehicles into battery power.
Right now, American drivers have other ideas. They continue to spend record amounts on larger gasoline cars. With pump prices averaging nearly $ 2 a gallon, trucks and SUVs have replaced more efficient cars as the nation’s main mode of transportation. In January, approximately three-quarters of new vehicle sales were trucks and SUVs. Ten years ago that was only half.
All that demand will keep Toledo operating for years to come. Yet there is little doubt that the transition to electricity is inexorable. Last year, approximately 2.5 million electric vehicles were sold worldwide. IHS Markit expects this figure to rise 70% this year alone. In December, 22 all-electric models were on sale in the United States; Edmunds.com expects this figure to reach 30 this year. GM alone has pledged to invest $ 27 billion in 30 EV models worldwide by 2025.
The acceleration of the trend has heightened fear even among factories that are now in full swing to meet the demand for GM trucks.
“It absolutely scares me,” said Tommy Wolikow, an employee at GM’s heavy-duty pickup plant in Flint, Michigan, who has worked for GM for eight years. “I think there is a good chance in the long run that I will not be able to retire from this plant.”
Depending on how quickly consumers are embracing electric vehicles, Wolikow fears he could be kicked out of his job by employees with more seniority. Workers are already competing for jobs at three factories that GM has designated as assembly sites for electric vehicles, two in the Detroit area and one in Tennessee.
In the meantime, GM says it will need its entire factory staff as it is rebuilding inventory depleted by a coronavirus-related factory shutdown last spring.
“We need to run our current core business smartly and strongly, because that will ultimately enable us to invest in this all-electric future,” said spokesman Dan Flores. “There is no way we can speculate about the future of an individual facility.”
Not all jobs related to internal combustion will disappear in the transition. GM has excluded heavier trucks from its EV target. And some manufacturers will continue to make gas-electric hybrids, said Kristin Dziczek, a vice president at the Center for Auto Research, an industry think tank.
It’s unclear what will happen to employees at GM or other auto makers who may be pushed into the transition. In the past, GM has protected some employees during downsizing periods. For example, when it closed an assembly plant in Lordstown, Ohio in 2019, laid-off workers were given the opportunity to move to other factories. And when GM shut down factories that went bankrupt in 2009, laid-off workers received a lump sum payment and early retirement.
The UAW says it sees the transformation to electricity as less of a threat than an opportunity for growth. For example, Dokho suggested that Biden’s administration could provide incentives to build more EV parts here.
“We are optimistic to ensure that there are jobs in the future and that jobs there are protected now,” he said.
Every major industrial transformation, DeWitt said, has tended to result in both job losses and new work. For example, he noted that when Americans migrated from farms to cities after the Civil War, there were fewer agricultural jobs. But cities were wired for electricity and jobs such as electricians were created.
If the automakers are willing, DeWitt said, most of their workers could be retrained to move from gas vehicles to electrical parts and vehicle assembly.
“It feels unlikely to me that all the knowledge we’ve built up in that workforce over the past 50 years is suddenly completely useless,” he said.
Job protection certainly appears to be a top issue in the next round of UAW contract talks in 2023, and workers will especially want to keep higher wages. GM and other automakers now view battery production as a function of providing lower-wage parts.
The car manufacturer is building a battery factory in Lordstown in collaboration with South Korean LG Chem. CEO Mary Barra has said workers there will be paid less than those at vehicle assembly plants in order to keep costs closer to what competing automakers will pay.
The contract negotiations in 2023 could be even more contentious 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 on the CarExpert.com website. Automakers, he said, generally work on vehicles five to seven years before they go on sale.
“You could argue that they will not make further development on combustion engine vehicles by 2028,” he said. “That is starting to sound much closer than 2035.”
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Krisher reported from Detroit.