Who works at a gigafactory?
Volkswagen confirmed the worst-kept secret in Canadian business this week with the long-awaited announcement that St. Thomas, Ont., would be the site of its first North American battery plant. The news breathed fresh excitement into a town that Ford abandoned more than a decade ago, leaving 1,200 workers at loose ends.
The German automaker provided few details about what it would spend on the plant, what incentives Ottawa and the province offered it, or the number of people it planned to employ. Speculation about the plant’s economic impact has nonetheless been frenzied, with the London Free Press estimating it could employ over 2,000 people and the Windsor Star’s sources saying the workforce could grow to 3,000 or even 5,000.
Despite the lack of details from VW and the federal and provincial governments, here are some numbers we do have:
20%-20%-60%: Brendan Sweeney, managing director of the Trillium Network for Advanced Manufacturing, said the staff of a battery plant is expected to be about 20 per cent engineers, 20 per cent scientists or technologists (like chemists or college-level tech and science degrees,) and about 60 per cent manufacturing workers.
24,200, or 4%: The share of the population of London and the surrounding counties that already works in automotive manufacturing, with 14 per cent working in manufacturing as a whole as of 2019, thanks to General Motors’s Ingersoll plant, Toyota’s Woodstock plant, and three Magna plants. The military-vehicle maker General Dynamics also has a London plant.
56%: Vehicle-manufacturing workers in the region that had no more than a high school diploma as of 2016, compared with 42 per cent of the total workforce there.
22%: The share of women working in vehicle manufacturing in the London area as of 2019, which the Canadian Skills Training & Employment Coalition said was “well below average.”
US$20–US$23/hour: The entry-level wages for part-time associates in Tesla’s Nevada Gigafactory. That hasn’t budged much since it opened in 2014, when engineers and senior staff made US$41.83 an hour.
$14.5B: The value (converted from euros) of government incentives that VW hopes to receive, mostly from the U.S., for prioritizing its North American plant over other gigafactories. The Canadian government has refused to reveal the amount it is furnishing so far, but said it will become public eventually.
$262.1B: The amount VW said this week it would spend on software and EVs in the next five years.
The opportunity:
Since very few chemical engineers work at existing assembly plants, Sweeney said “there will need to be a bit of a focus on some of the chemistry types that the plants need. They might need to start training some people or really recruiting hard from Western and Fanshawe or encouraging people with a chemistry background to move to the St. Thomas-London area.”
He said courting more women and mothers re-entering the workforce is one tactic that has worked well for GM in its Oshawa plant.
Raed Kadri, the head of the Ontario Vehicle Innovation Network (OVIN), said he’s working with many automotive companies that are starting even earlier, engaging students down in the K-12 system.
The OVIN released a report in January looking at the top in-demand skills for battery production, and found electrical and mechanical engineers were among the most highly valued. Physics and computer-science graduate-level degrees were also in demand, and specialized software skills like Java, Python, MATLAB, C++, C and AUTOSAR.
Sweeney said that Canada has a unique opportunity with VW, the first major European manufacturer to settle here, that could spread the word to suppliers in its hometown of Wolfsburg as it prepares to open the plant in 2027.
“Toyota has emerged and persisted over the past couple of years as the largest automaker in Canada, largely because they were impressed,” he said. “Now we’ve got that first real anchor investment from Volkswagen. Let’s impress them. Let’s put on a show. “
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