As electric vehicle demand slows, workers caught in the middle face an uncertain future
This year was shaping up to be a good one for the workers at the GM Orion Assembly plant in a working-class suburb of Detroit.
This year was shaping up to be a good one for the workers at the GM Orion Assembly plant in a working-class suburb of Detroit. After winning a pay raise following last year’s United Auto Workers strike, they were slated to start production later this year on a marquee product for GM: the electric Chevy Silverado pickup truck.
But like thousands of other workers on the front lines of the electric vehicle transition, they have hit some bumps in the road. GM told the nearly 1,000 workers at the Orion plant in December that they were being laid off until late 2025 to make engineering improvements and amid cooling demand for electric vehicles. Their last paycheck was their holiday pay the week of Christmas, and many are still waiting to find out if they will be offered a job at another plant.
“It’s been a very somber moment here the last month,” said an employee at the plant who asked not to be identified because they weren’t authorized by GM to speak to the media. “We thought we finally got a little bit of a break. We were only supposed to be down for at most for a year for retooling, and now GM is revisiting the EV market. I don’t think the economy is hurting — I think the automotive industry is hurting. In my opinion, they put the carriage in front of the horse.”
While sales of electric vehicles have continued to increase, demand has slowed from the breakneck pace in 2022 and 2021, causing automakers, including industry leader Tesla, to project a slowdown in sales this year. That has U.S. automakers pulling back on some of the lofty electric vehicle ambitions they have poured billions of dollars into in recent years, leaving thousands of workers with their jobs in jeopardy.
“Ultimately it all stems from demand, and demand is just not showing up to where all these CEOs thought. So a lot of the initial targets put out by GM or Ford a couple years ago have maybe proven to be a bit too optimistic and probably too aggressive,” said Gabe Daoud, a sustainable energy senior analyst at TD Cowen. “I think everybody was expecting the entire car fleet to change overnight and go electric, but that’s obviously just impossible and impractical.”
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