For Michigan's economy, electric vehicles are promising and scary
Last fall, Tiffanie Simmons, a second-generation auto worker, endured a six-week strike at the Ford Motor plant just west of Detroit, where she builds Bronco SUVs. That delivered a 25 percent pay increase over the next four years, easing the pain of cuts she and other union workers swallowed more than a decade ago.
But as Ms. Simmons, 38, ponders the prospects for America's auto industry in the state that invented it, she worries about a new force: the shift to electric vehicles. She is dismayed that the transition is being championed by President Biden, whose pro-labor credentials are at the heart of his bid for re-election, and who recently won the support of her union, the United Automobile Workers.
The Biden administration has embraced electric vehicles as a means to generate good-paying jobs while reducing emissions. It has provided tax breaks to encourage consumers to buy electric cars, while limiting benefits to models that use American-made parts.
But car companies are fixated on the assumption that electric cars — simpler machines than their gas-powered forebears — will require fewer hands to build. They accuse Mr. Biden of endangering their livelihoods.
“I was disappointed,” Ms. Simmons said of the president. “We trust you to keep Americans employed.”
Michigan is one of six battleground states that could determine the winner of the presidential election. The auto industry has long been central to the state's economic prospects, propelling the middle class for much of the 20th century before job losses and living standards declined in recent decades.
Today, the fate of Michigan's auto industry hinges on one key variable: Is the shift to electric vehicles a new source of momentum and paychecks, or the latest reason to worry about the fate of American factory workers?
“It's still early,” said Gabriel Ehrlich, an economic forecaster at the University of Michigan. “There is a widespread but not universal feeling that electric vehicle production will require less labor. In the long term, we expect the demand for labor in automotive production to decline.”
Outrage over the prospect of job losses among auto workers — a crucial voting bloc — has reportedly prompted the Biden administration to consider relaxing its strict auto emissions standards, slowing the transition to electric vehicles. Stricter limits on emissions have been a central part of the government's efforts to force carmakers to produce more electric models.
In Michigan, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, has strengthened training programs to help workers find jobs in emerging manufacturing areas, especially in electric vehicles.
“This is where the world is going,” said Jonathan Smith, senior deputy director of the Michigan Department of Labor and Economic Opportunity, who is overseeing the creation of a state office to help workers build careers in electric cars -industry. “The question is, are we preparing Michigan?”
Former President Donald J. Trump, Mr. Biden's presumptive opponent, has gained ground among autoworkers by accusing the White House of pursuing a “job-killing EV mandate.” Many of them dismiss electric vehicles as unwanted, unaffordable and impractical given the need to charge them. They feel resentful that their jobs are being put at risk to limit carbon emissions, while some question the scientific consensus behind climate change.
“It's scary right now with the whole electric impulse,” said Nelson Westrick, 48, who works at a Ford factory in Sterling Heights, an industrial suburb north of Detroit. “This electric stuff is going to kill, just kill, thousands and thousands of jobs.”
He is the father of four children and belongs to a group called Autoworkers for Trump. His factory makes the mechanical parts that connect the transmission and wheels of a gas-powered car. If electric vehicles take over, “my entire factory would no longer exist,” he said.
Ms. Simmons said despite feeling betrayed by Mr. Biden, she would not vote for Mr. Trump, whom she dismissed as an “entertainer.” But she also sees electric vehicles as against the interests of workers.
When Henry Ford pioneered the modern assembly line, he planned to build huge numbers of cars to drive down prices so his workers could drive them home. Modern car companies scoff at electric cars as luxuries for those with three-car garages.
“There are weeks when I see my daughter two days out of seven, and I go there to build something that allows someone else to take their daughter or son to soccer practice,” Ms. Simmons said. “It's stupid to build something you can't even buy.”
Michigan's Pioneering Industry
Detroit has been an industrial center since the late 19th century, thanks to its proximity to the Great Lakes, a natural transportation system that allowed raw materials to be brought in from anywhere. Local factories made rail cars, ovens and stoves. Like Silicon Valley decades later, the city was full of tinkerers and entrepreneurs who wielded creative powers in the pursuit of wealth.
Henry Ford made his Model T the world's first mass-produced car, mastering the intricacies of the assembly line at his massive factory in Highland Park.
Michigan changed from an agricultural state to one where virtually anyone willing to lift a wrench in a factory could earn enough to buy a house and take the family on vacation – often behind the wheel of a Ford. In 1950, Michigan was the tenth richest state in personal income per capita. data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.
But in the decades that followed, Michigan became an emblem of the forces attacking middle-class American security. International trade and container shipping allowed companies to move factory production to Asia and Latin America. Union power was decimated, especially as American manufacturers moved their work to non-union factories in the South. With more automation, factories produced more goods with fewer hands.
By 2009, a financial crisis and declining sales had brought major automakers to the brink of bankruptcy. Manufacturing jobs in Michigan were down about half from a decade earlier.
And by 2021, Michigan had fallen to 37th among all states in per capita personal income. Detroit became synonymous with the effects of deindustrialization, while its urban core was pockmarked with abandonment.
Today, the Ford plant in Highland Park stands empty, its broken windows looking out onto the cracked sidewalk. A nearby shopping center, Model T Plaza, includes a lender and an outlet where people sell their plasma.
But across the street from the lifeless factory, a job center refers job seekers to community colleges that offer training for positions in electric vehicles and battery factories.
“There are a lot of possibilities,” said Malik Broadnax, 27, who began a four-month engineering program at Macomb Community College on robot programming. The tuition fees were almost entirely covered by a state subsidy.
Mr. Broadnax had worked low-paying jobs: cleaning hotel rooms, changing tires. After completing the program, he thinks he wants to start working in a factory for at least $25 an hour.
In downtown Detroit, Ford has invested nearly $1 billion in redeveloping a neighborhood known as Michigan Central, including the restoration of a beautiful but abandoned old train station. A former post office has been converted into an incubator where about 80 companies – most in the electric car industry – share production space.
Marcus Glenn was preparing to graduate from a course hosted in the building that had trained him for a job installing or maintaining EV charging stations. The Biden administration has allocated $7.5 billion for public broadcasters.
Mr. Glenn, 35, saw the training program as his gateway to the future and expressed confidence that he would soon find a job for at least $35 an hour.
“It puts me on the cusp of this field,” he said. “Everything is possible.”
An uncertain future
But how soon will the promised electric future become reality? And how long will the gas-powered auto industry last?
In the coming years, Michigan will likely see an increase in jobs as automakers will continue making gas-powered vehicles even as they add factories to produce electric models and batteries, said Dr. Ehrlich, a University of Michigan economist.
Then the picture becomes cloudy.
In one possible outcome, in which electric vehicles gradually progress and will account for 100 percent of new car sales by 2050, Dr. Ehrlich, the total number of auto manufacturing jobs in Michigan will increase slightly, to 180,000, and then decline to 150,000.
But if the transition happens faster, and if Michigan loses investments to states where unions have less influence, job losses could be greater, leaving perhaps 90,000 jobs by 2050. That could eliminate another 330,000 jobs in support services like insurance and trucking.
Dr. Ehrlich hastens to add that the trend lines look good for now.
Union leaders endorse that position and promise to organize workers in more factories. They note that their new contracts with the Big Three automakers prohibit shifting production of emerging technologies to subsidiaries where workers are not unionized.
Under the new contracts, the top pay will be higher than $40 an hour, compared to about $32 under the previous deals. Starting pay will be higher than $30 an hour, compared to $18 under previous contracts.
“Everyone is going to be in this transition,” said Laura Dickerson, regional director of the United Automobile Workers, which represents part of southeastern Michigan. “We have to embrace it because it's coming.”
But recent months have illustrated the volatility.
A Ford battery plant under construction in the city of Marshall was initially expected to create 2,500 jobs. The company recently lowered its projection to 1,700.
A Michigan startup, Our Next Energy, known as ONE, is completing a battery factory in Van Buren Township, a bedroom community between Detroit and Ann Arbor. Technicians oversee a series of machines that unwind rolls of metal foil and press them into battery cells.
Dan Pilarz, 46, had worked for General Motors for nearly two decades when he started at the ONE plant last June as a senior maintenance manager.
“My children came to me and said, 'You are destroying this environment,'” Mr. Pilarz said. “When are you going to do something about that?”
He is excited to participate in the next phase of Michigan's innovation history. He is also aware of the risks.
Our Next Energy recently laid off 137 people, or about a quarter of the company, including a handful at the Van Buren plant, under pressure from investors to cut costs.
“It's definitely a rollercoaster right now,” Mr. Pilarz said. “But someone is going to survive, and someone is going to make these vehicles. Why not me?”