I read somewhere that EVs required 40% less workers to produce. Not sure how accurate that is.
Because they have fewer parts, electric cars can be made with fewer workers than gasoline vehicles.
There’s no way to explain a place like a UAW facility, you just have to work there to understand. 14 years now I’m still not used to some of the shit that goes on.
Chrysler bumped up their offer to match Ford, but no deals have been met.
Wouldn’t surprise me if that’s correct. Think about how many parts go into a modern OHV engine alone. GM has entire plants that do nothing but build engines. Then look at how simple a brushless motor is.
The Tonawanda Engine Plant is damn near close to being empty. When I worked there we probably had a couple thousand people, down from I want to say 7,000 was their peak when it produced more engines than any other facility on earth.
They’re down to less than a 1,000 now from what I’m told, and the Plant 5 building where the LGE Ecotec was built is empty. That was a nice place to work since it was climate controlled. Air fresh as can be, 68* year round.
All they have left are the Truck Engines and I don’t know if they make C7 engines anymore, maybe for service requirements.
It wouldn’t just effect engine plants though, there are so many moving pieces in a traditional engine, multiple suppliers would be out of jobs as well, compared to just making a big ass battery.
Volume would play a role in how many people stayed on board. In Plant 1 that’s currently open, I wouldn’t want to build batteries in there, it’s an old ran down building with broken windows and barely any ventilation. When you’d like up at the lights, you could see the mist from the coolant and oil floating in the air. My breathing improved tremendously after leaving.
That’s the line my dad was an electrician on and I went through there a few times on tours.
Found this:
“The workers who are making engines and transmissions today, their jobs will be eliminated when we make a transition to electric vehicles,” UAW research director Jennifer Kelly said earlier this year. And Jim Farley, the CEO of Ford, said last year he expects electric vehicles will require 40 percent less labor to produce than traditional automobiles.
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Latest offer by Ford -
Here are the highlights, according to a release by Ford at 5:32 p.m. Tuesday:
- Product commitments for every UAW plant in America; no job loss due to EV battery plants
- Profit-sharing to include temporary employees for the first time
- Ratification bonus to include temporary employees for the first time
- Pay raise to $21 an hour or a 26% increase for temporary workers
- Conversion of all temporary employees with at least three month of continuous service to permanent status upon ratification
- General wage increase of more than 20%, which would be an immediate double-digit increase upon ratification
- Traditional cost-of-living allowances (COLA) to provide “inflation protection”
- Elimination of tiers so that all employees may reach the top wage rate
- Faster wage progression, reducing by more than half the time it takes to earn top wage so that an average new hire will “earn 6 figures by 4th year”
- Income protection for all permanent employees
- No change to health care, which currently offers $0 premiums and puts employees in the top 1% of American workers
- Increased 401(k) contributions so that the “average employee hired today can accrue $1 million-plus retirement fund with reasonable market returns”
- More time off, which means up to five weeks of vacation, an average of 17 paid holidays annually including Juneteenth, and two family days
I need this shit to end I’m exhausted. These are some massive improvements from the current contract. I wish I had their healthcare. My insurance is pretty damn good but theirs is absolutely covered.
No job losses due to EV battery plants… “Oh sorry, no it’s not because of battery plants but because we no longer need transmissions at all”
At least they’re getting Juneteenth 
Ford executives are already talking about the need to offset the higher expenses in this latest deal. The automaker has said the UAW contract would add $850 to $900 per vehicle in additional costs.
The tentative deals struck in recent days would be the richest contracts since at least the 1960s, the union said. The wage increases alone over four years total more than workers got in the past 22 years.
An hourly person will be making at least if not more than a lot of salaried workers by the end of the contract, which has a lot of eyebrows raising.
I’m not expecting anything to change for me.
Seems simple.
Hire more salary folks. That way, you will have someone do your job when you get the sniffles and call off for a week.
.
When you get back to work, it would be like you never left.
I still fail to see how these brainless repetitive jobs are worth 6 figures…. That is more than 90% of auto technicians that actually have to have skills and knowledge to fix those POS vehicles from the big 3.
No way they are brainless.
I don’t think I’ve ever met a line guy that does not say “They want me in trades, but I don’t want to”
lol
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the strikes are causing more parts delays in the supply channels again as i was told this week.
I have to say it’s not that the jobs are hard, but I couldn’t imagine doing the same task tens of millions of times over decades.
It takes a special kind of person to sit there with their thoughts for 8 hours a day and do the same task repetitively.
We don’t allow them to listen to music, radio etc. I’m sure some have those headphones that look like ear plugs but the majority just sit in silence listening to equipment.
I worked an assembly line when i was 19 and it’s the only job i was fired from. When they sat me in the office I told them I can’t do this brainless work no matter how much you pay me.
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Still shouldn’t deserve a 6 figure salary. Especially when you have teachers, police, fire fighters and military that don’t even make half that. I’m sure they will be replaced by robots sooner than later.
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That I can’t comment on, I don’t know how fair salaries are determined across any industry.
Robots are progressively taking more jobs away from humans in manufacturing.
The people that currently run assembly lines now often are handling very small parts that are thrown in bins by the thousands. For example to get a robot to do this job, you would need a very specific shipping container that the robot could pick parts out of. For reasons such as this, it may be cheaper to put a person here than a robot because specific shipping containers may contain less parts and are more expensive (this could change in the future).
Assembly workers can also inspect parts for quality issues. There are vision systems on robots being developed currently to do this but they aren’t as reliable as people currently are, I’m sure this will change. For example when a hood or door is made, there is an inner and outer skin, with sealer material applied between both skins. If too much is applied you’ll get what’s called “squeeze out”. A person can wipe this down and put it in a shipping rack. A robot cannot currently do this at the same pace. It can detect squeeze out using a vision system, but then the parts would have to get put in a separate area/container to be repaired before being shipped, whereas a person can do this on the fly.
These are just a couple example of how people are more useful than automation, but there are companies doing plenty of research to make automation able to take on these tasks.
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