ANN ARBOR, Mich. — The auto industry is big business in Michigan, and a major round of layoffs is revving the issue into high gear for industry workers in the critical swing state as they contemplate whether to entrust their vote — and their livelihood — to former President Donald Trump or Vice President Kamala Harris.
Stellantis, which manufactures Chrysler, Jeep and Dodge vehicles, announced last month it will lay off 2,450 workers at its Warren plant. While industry jobs in the state have been declining since 1990, Michigan auto workers told The Post that the Biden administration’s electric-vehicles mandates are to blame this time.
United Auto Workers member Isaiah Gordon, 24, works on hybrid batteries at Ford’s Rawsonville plant and said the forced transition to electric vehicles is damaging the industry.
“I’m sure all the people I work with are glad to have jobs. But the problem is in these electric-vehicle departments, you’re laying people off,” Gordon told The Post.
Fellow UAW member Chris Vitale, a technician mechanic for Chrysler, agreed, saying electric cars require considerably less labor to produce than gas-powered vehicles.
“Putting an electric motor together is like building a pinwheel or a paper airplane, there’s some level of work that’s involved with it, but the skill level really isn’t there,” Vitale told The Post.
Rep. Lisa McClain echoed that sentiment — and decried how it harms auto workers.
“Less parts mean less employees. That’s why they’re doing the layoffs. Because they can’t sell the vehicles that the government, particularly Kamala Harris, is mandating them to buy,” the Republican congresswoman told The Post.
“Listen, you wanna buy an EV car? Great,” she continued. “But the auto workers, the auto makers know that we can’t survive because the infrastructure isn’t there on EVs. Nobody wants to buy them.”
Ford slashed more than 1,000 jobs at its Rouge Electric Vehicle Center in Dearborn after drastically scaling back its production of the F-150 Lightning, an all-electric pickup truck.
“It’s the way that the government now wants to go,” Gordon said of the transition to EVs. “And they completely made the wrong decisions on it because if you look, Ford has lost a lot of money.”
But it’s not just lessening labor that’s leading to layoffs, workers say. It’s also the strict emission standards the Biden-Harris administration put in place. Nearly impossible to meet, these new EPA regulations aim to strong-arm the auto industry into producing more EVs — regardless of consumer demand.
Vitale told The Post even hybrids aren’t cutting it under the new standards.
“You look at a product like a Ford hybrid Escape, a hybrid electric vehicle, and it’s one of the smaller SUVs. It’s barely a car. And the carbon footprint of that, the grams per mile is 225. So you’ve got a vehicle there that is 55 grams per mile in excess of the standard that will be here in two model years,” the mechanic said.
Stellantis last week announced a $406 million investment into Michigan auto plants as part of a concession to the union, but Vitale remains skeptical.
“I can tell you they’ve been promising investment where I work at the tech center for years now, and I’ll just put it this way: it doesn’t appear to be happening,” he said. “They can promise one thing and change that plan tomorrow.”
Meanwhile, Vitale said, major American companies are struggling to sell off their inventory.
“It’s getting to the point that they’re leasing additional properties and parking them elsewhere. And it’s all three domestics,” he said.
Still, at last week’s presidential debate Harris doubled down on the administration’s energy policies, touting its trillion dollar investment in “a clean energy economy,” and her recent endorsement from United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain.
Both autoworkers said that there is a political divide between some members of the UAW and its staunchly Democratic union leadership.
“Unfortunately, and I say this with love, the UAW is not going to reach across the aisle,” Gordon said of the union. “They support the Democrats and the Democratic Party.”
While Vitale concedes that the UAW endorsement is valuable, he told The Post that Fain’s thumbs up isn’t the be-all and end-all for how auto workers will vote.
“There’s people that look at this more in the granular detail, like I have, and they look at the union thinking: ‘Oh my God, we can’t believe you guys want to slit our throats by endorsing these people.’”
