Canada is learning the LG way.
When Canadian auto workers travelled to Japan in the late 1980s, they were schooled on the Toyota Way, a company playbook that not only transformed the world’s auto-assembly lines, but took over the wider corporate world. Even today, The Logic is among the companies using a kanban–esque tool: Trello.
A similar transformation is underway this week in Windsor, Ont. NextStar Energy, a joint venture between Stellantis and LG Energy Solution that is building a $5-billion EV battery plant, began hiring a 130-person Canadian launch team that will spend months training at similar plants in Poland, China and South Korea. The team—30 finance, human resources and communications staff and 100 engineers and technicians—will help bring know-how to North America from Asia, where about 80 per cent of batteries are manufactured.
“The nature of the work that our people are doing on the floor as employees is significantly different from how the auto workers have been [working] on the vehicle-assembly line,” NextStar Energy CEO Danies Lee told me this week, adding that the quickly spreading knowledge is “a key advantage of LG being the first mover to the battery industry.”
Lee said that while Toyota’s upheaval of the manufacturing sector honed operational excellence, the battery transition will be technical. It’s a nascent industry, with emerging techniques being shared from plant to plant. That means workers for Windsor’s new gigafactory will need an eye for patterns in data, and will need to learn, optimize and troubleshoot based on that, said Lee.
If that sounds familiar, it should.
Lee’s hiring spree comes as the EV industry—and the overall economy—is shifting toward what economists call non-routine and cognitive work, which requires more decision-making and abstract thinking from workers. A 2022 report by the Information and Communications Technology Council and Propulsion Québec found that over 81 per cent of Tesla’s workforce is in this type of role, compared with 43.2 per cent of General Motors’s Ontario workforce.
John McNally, program director for Clean and Resilient Growth at the Smart Prosperity Institute, researches job transitions for clean-growth industries. He spoke with Windsor workers and educators at St. Clair College, which is preparing a training course with NextStar. He said the gigafactory floor could indeed look quite different than an engine plant—for example, it may have science lab-style clean rooms and may require some software fluency.
But McNally said potential gigafactory workers shouldn’t be intimidated by computer-literacy issues. He said a manufacturing background could help workers get up to speed in as little as a week for some of the over 400 technician and 1,550 operator jobs for which NextStar will hire over the next few years. Still, McNally said, it would be useful for NextStar to share job descriptions now with both academic institutions and with organizations like Unifor, which is already retraining displaced auto workers from companies like Syncreon.
NextStar is under pressure to prove its worth in Canada, after halting the project to demand hikes to government subsidies that will now total up to $15 billion. Lee said that despite that halt, workers can depend on NextStar for the long haul, and that he wants to develop a talent ecosystem that will give people in-demand skills on which to build their careers.
“Sustainability—in terms of generating the right people with the right talent—that is a very important part,” he said.
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