After cutting 4,000 jobs, GM is hiring. But not for traditional gasoline-powered vehicles.

Jamie L. LaReau | Detroit Free Press

Late last month, General Motors gave a 2019 Chevrolet Blazer SUV to 100 college students at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Florida.

The car wasn't for a joy ride. It's to help GM find its future workforce.

The students at Embry-Riddle will compete with 11 other schools to transform a traditional powertrain engine to run on hybrid power and ultimately be self-driving.

"That is huge for us to know if people have the capabilities," said Ken Kelzer, GM's vice president of global vehicle components. "We hire people from those programs."

And GM is hiring despite slashing thousands of white-collar jobs earlier this year. The automaker is creating a new workforce that will change in size and composition as GM prepares to spend more money over the next five years to develop electric and self-driving vehicles than it will spend on internal combustion vehicles.

That means many GM jobs at every level will change, with many new jobs demanding a whole new skill set.

'No one left unscathed'

Earlier this year, GM cut about 4,000 salaried jobs in North America as part of a restructuring plan that also included production changes that idled three U.S. factories: Lordstown Assembly in Ohio and transmission plants in Warren and Baltimore. GM said the plan will result in a $4 billion to $4.5 billion savings by year-end 2020.

“We had cuts in all areas, so no one was left unscathed,” Kelzer said. “But the majority of the cuts were in the traditional internal combustion area.”

GM has been significantly realigning its workforce composition and the skills engineers it will need, said Sam Abuelsamid, principal analyst at Navigant Research in metro Detroit.

“We saw a significant reduction, especially in people working in powertrain, traditional engineering," said Abuelsamid. "It hasn’t really kicked in on the hourly side yet, but it has on the salary side, and that’s a leading indicator of what’s going on.”

Navigant Research predicts 15% of global car sales will be electric vehicles by 2030. Automakers such as GM are pursuing electric because of regulatory concerns, especially in China, the world's largest car market, which is pushing electrification, said Abuelsamid.

Abuelsamid said 15% is not a big number, but the impact on workers will be big, particularly at engine and transmission plants.

Over the next decade, each engine or transmission plant that gets replaced by an electric motor or battery plant may see up to a 75% reduction from today's manufacturing jobs or morph into new blue-collar jobs requiring different skills as electric vehicle production increases, said Abuelsamid.

“These electric vehicles will have simple, single-speed reduction gears. It’s a simple one-speed transmission rather than a 10-speed," said Abuelsamid. "The engine assembly is a fairly complex process today. But for batteries and electric motors, the assembly process is highly automated. So you’ll have a lot fewer people involved in the engine and powertrains."

That partly accounts for GM's idling two transmission plants, said Abuelsamid.

Here's how Abuelsamid sees it breaking down:

Hourly workforce: Skilled trades such as electricians and millwrights will be less affected than assembly line jobs, which will be reduced. Powertrain and engine plant jobs likely to go away.

Skilled trades such as electricians and millwrights will be less affected than assembly line jobs, which will be reduced. Powertrain and engine plant jobs likely to go away. Salaried workforce: Electrical engineering, software development, data sciences and information technology skills will be more in demand; mechanical engineering less so.

Shrinking workforce

Kelzer said GM will likely eliminate some more salaried jobs in the powertrain or internal combustion areas in the years ahead. There will be "a shift in the employment demographics," he said.

Also, GM expects to gradually reduce the total salaried workforce over the next decade because electric battery development requires fewer engineers than gasoline engine design does, Kelzer said.

"When you go electric, there are some efficiencies you can work on," said Kelzer. "And, you can use batteries across multiple architectures.”

But traditional jobs in vehicle design and functions, such as steering, wheel development and interiors, will still be needed, said Kelzer.

"The vehicle still has to stop, turn and accelerate, so there is a mechanical skill set still needed." said Kelzer. "But the folks who do the engine, transmission and fuel system are no longer needed on electric vehicles because those functions are replaced by the battery.”

'New-collar' workers

GM is dramatically expanding in some areas.

In January 2018, GM opened its latest Canadian Technical Center in Markham, Ontario, north of Toronto. It's near the University of Waterloo, from which many graduates typically head to Silicon Valley, Kelzer said. GM's plan is to cut them off at the pass and hire several hundred engineers to support the Canadian Technical Centre and two other GM campuses in Ontario. They will do software and other development work on electric and autonomous cars.

For GM's hourly workforce, producing fewer fuel-injection engines would not necessarily stall factory assembly jobs, the company said.

GM is investing $3 billion in Detroit-Hamtramck Assembly Plant to build an electric pickup, battery modules and other electric vehicles. That will create about 2,225 jobs, GM said. Detroit-Hamtramck was the only one of the four U.S. plants to survive GM's announcement in November 2018 that it would idle them.

In March, GM said it would spend $300 million to build a new electric car at its Orion Assembly Plant where it currently builds the electric Chevrolet Bolt, which is sold to consumers and used to test its GM Cruise self-driving fleet. That investment is expected to create 400 jobs, GM said.

Most recently, GM has said it plans to build a battery cell factory in Ohio's Mahoning Valley area near its former Lordstown Assembly plant. That will create 1,000 jobs, it said.

GM is investing in internal combustion plants too. As one example, GM is investing $1 billion its Spring Hill Assembly in Tennessee and Lansing Delta Township plant, which it says will create or retain 5,000 jobs between the two plants.

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Then there's the idea that increased electrification could one day spark a “new-collar" workforce.

“The new-collar workforce is a more highly educated worker than your typical blue-collar worker is now," said Marick Masters, a professor of business and adjunct professor of political science at Wayne State University. "They're on the plant floor, they’re just doing more highly technical jobs than what you would have typically defined as a blue-collar job. They’ll be reading machinery and making logistical decisions and programming.”

Even maintaining EVs will change, said Mike Ramsey, senior research director at Gartner Group.

"Cars have been developed where engineers work on a car, release it and it goes on to production and that’s it for them. That process is ending," said Ramsey. "Instead, people will be attached to the car well after the sale because the platform, and all that it’s built on, will need continual updating."

Tear down the wall

The UAW is concerned about how EV development will impact hourly production jobs. It has been part of the discussion during the 2019 contract talks. The two sides discussed how to work together to transition the workforce into the EV era, said GM spokesman Jim Cain.

“We’re not looking at it as a Berlin Wall situation with hourly workers on one side and salary on the other side," said Cain. "We are looking at it as working together in a collaborative way.”

For example, Kelzer said, electric and autonomous vehicles must be tested when they roll off the assembly line.

"So part of the dialogue is, 'How do we do that at the assembly plant and train these employees to do the end-of-the-line testing?' " said Kelzer. "I think there’s an opportunity to participate in the technology and not be left behind.”

Over the years

A shrinking and changing workforce at GM and its Detroit rivals is not new.

Over the past decade all three have shifted, shrunk and changed. Here is how GM's employee count has shifted:

In 2009, GM had 217,000 employees worldwide. Of those, 151,000 were hourly and 66,000 salaried. In the United States, GM employed 51,000 hourly and 26,000 salaried workers.

In 2018, GM had 173,000 employees worldwide with 97,000 of them hourly and 76,000 salaried. At the end of the second quarter, GM employed 97,589 people in the United States, of that 49,743 of them are hourly and 47,846 salary.

At the end of the second quarter of 2019, Ford reported it employed 85,196 people in the United States, 55,000 of whom are hourly and 30,196 salaried.

Fiat Chrysler Automobiles at the end of 2018 had 61,794 employees in the United States, 47,425 of whom were hourly and 14,369 are salaried.

"They're all operating at about the same level; there's no giant among them," said Wayne State's Masters.

GM has averaged about 50,000 hourly employees since the 2009 bankruptcy. GM's U.S. salaried head count has grown because it insourced information technology and bought GM Cruise; its self-driving car unit, and AmeriCredit, now called GM Financial. Both have grown and made new hires.

"We needed to build a captive finance company to support sales/share and finance dealers," said Cain. "We needed to insource IT in order to optimize marketing, optimize OnStar and create connected services and execute our Vision Zero strategy ... and GM Cruise is leveraged to the future."

GM's "Vision Zero" underpins its electrification and autonomous vehicle push. It means GM is working toward a future of zero crashes, zero emissions and zero congestion.

Until then, GM will continue to recruit new talent with the skills to get it to "Vision Zero." It is looking at talent from other industries such as defense and telecommunications and through competitions at engineering schools such as Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, said Kelzer.

That's now noticed at the colleges, said Patrick Currier, associate professor and associate chair at Embry-Riddle.

“This competition series is probably the single best way to get a job in the auto industry," said Currier.

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Contact Jamie L. LaReau: 313-222-2149 or jlareau@freepress.com. Follow her on Twitter @jlareauan. Read more on General Motors and sign up for our autos newsletter.