It was just a few years ago that electric vehicles posed an existential threat to the powerful United Auto Workers union.
While the UAW supported then-President Joe Biden’s effort move away from gas-powered vehicles to clean-burning, battery-powered EVs, union leaders feared the transition could wipe out tens of thousands of factory jobs.
That’s because EVs have fewer parts than contained in a gas-powered car. A UAW white paper projected that more than 30,000 jobs were at risk in engine and transmission plants no longer needed in an EV future.
The UAW represents about 150,000 workers at Ford, General Motors and Stellantis.
Then came President Donald Trump, who eliminated incentives for consumers to buy EVs in a move to boost the use of fossil fuels. Trump, who took office last year, also is in the process of canceling the Biden administration’s stringent exhaust emission targets.
Automakers have quickly shifted to reverse and are spending billions of dollars to go back to producing more gas-powered vehicles. Just last month, GM announced it would spend $830 million to expand capacity at its engine, transmission and related parts plants, including factories in Romulus and Saginaw.
That’s a big relief to the UAW, but its next existential crisis looms on the horizon. UAW President Shawn Fain is warning that rapidly expanding artificial intelligence could result in auto plants operating largely without human workers unless the government enacts regulations to protect them.
Fain joined U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders and other labor leaders last month to sound an alarm about AI’s risks to workers. Fain compared the threat to that of the North American Free Trade Agreement, which he blamed for killing millions of manufacturing jobs.
“We’ve lived through the experience of millions of people, millions of jobs being destroyed on false promises of shared prosperity,” Fain said. “It was called NAFTA.”
Fain’s fear that AI could all but eliminate UAW auto plant jobs is not unfounded. Automakers and major suppliers have for decades wanted to largely eradicate factory jobs. AI might just be the technology to pull it off.
General Motors installed the world’s first industrial robot, called Unimate, at a parts plant in New Jersey in 1961. It was such a curiosity that Johnny Carson hosted it on the “Tonight Show,” where Unimate knocked a golf ball into a cup, poured a beer and conducted the “Tonight Show” band.
Two decades later, GM CEO Roger Smith greatly accelerated the automaker’s drive to automate its operations. Smith spent a reported $90 billion to install robots and other automation in its new assembly plants.
But the implementation was chaotic. Robots at the Hamtramck assembly plant painted each other instead of the cars. And relations between the UAW and GM, already tense over Smith’s moves to overhaul the automaker, soured.
That didn’t stop Smith’s automation dreams. GM turned a Saginaw axle plant into “lights-out” (a term credited to Smith) factory in late 1980s as a test bed for future automation. The only humans in the plant oversaw the robots and computers.
AI-enabled robots that didn’t exist in Smith’s day promise to send a lot more factory workers packing. Seating supplier Lear Corp. is opening a 440,000 square-foot, highly-automated “dark” factory in Oakland County to supply GM’s Orion Township assembly plant.
Hyundai’s massive, new $7.6 billion assembly plant in Georgia already is populated with hundreds of faceless industrial robots—about one for every two workers.
The Korean automaker announced last month that it plans to install AI-enabled humanoid robots (think C-P3O from “Star Wars”) in the plant by 2028. And Tesla has deployed its Optimus humanoid robot in its factories to learn how to do humans’ jobs.
Automakers say these robots will help human workers become more productive and take on some of the most dangerous factory jobs. But Fain isn’t buying it.
Fain has joined U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders in calling for federal safeguards and contractual protections for AI. Otherwise, “in 10 years the idea of a manufacturing job will no longer exist,” Sanders said.
The UAW president said workers must have a say in how AI is implemented on the factory floor. And he has long pushed for a 32-hour workweek with no loss of pay, a demand the UAW is likely to push in upcoming contract negotiations as AI filters through manufacturing plants.
Some in the auto industry have regarded a shorter workweek as absurd. But guess what? One of the nation’s top AI leaders agrees with Fain.
Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, said last month companies should cut their workweeks to 32 hours with no loss of pay to reward workers for AI’s productivity gains.
The maker of the hugely popular ChatGPT, an AI chatbot, proposed the shorter workweek as part of a 13-page blueprint for policymakers to address the coming AI disruption.
OpenAI also is proposing the creation of a “public wealth fund” that would invest in AI companies and businesses using it. Returns from the fund would be distributed directly to citizens.
The company also is advocating for a robot tax to shift more of the financial burden to AI companies that are expected to reap huge profits in the adoption of the new technology.
And who knows? Maybe those humanoid robots will become UAW members. Anything seems possible in this highly unpredictable environment.
