INNOVATION TO DRIVE SUCCESS
Autoworkers need high-tech skills
Kathryn Plastino is a longtime General Motors employee, but not in the way you might expect.
Instead of years spent on the assembly line in an auto plant, Plastino has spent her 16-year career working on what is perpetually the next big innovation in personal vehicles.
Plastino, 40, graduated from Mcmaster University with a degree in electrical engineering. She thought a career at Hydro One was in her future — it would have been a natural fit, and one of the only things she considered at the time. Then she saw GM at a recruitment event.
“Being a car enthusiast is not where I came from,” she said, but Plastino was galvanized by the company’s early work on hybrid electric vehicles.
Plastino works at GM’S Canadian Technical Centre in Markham, a stone’s throw from downtown Toronto and some of the country’s leading universities.
Now with a master’s of science degree in engineering from Purdue University, she leads a team that develops the company’s on-board diagnostic tools.
Her career has taken her around the world — from India and Japan to Ingersoll, home of GM’S Chevrolet Equinox. She is, in many ways, the future of the auto industry.
“I haven’t seen the tapering of innovation,” said Plastino, reflecting on her years in auto.
“There is always a new problem to solve and there seems to be no end in sight.”
In Canada’s auto belt — the swath of cities and towns along Highway 401 from Windsor to Toronto — times are changing.
Automobiles are more complex than ever. Soon, there will be little your vehicle can’t do.
Forget just transportation, not only will the car of the future play your music, answer your calls and show you a map, it may also begin to drive itself. It might even fly.
People like Plastino are on the edge of making that happen.
But even with all their new hightech twists, the cars still need to be built.
Auto and auto-parts manufacturing employs about 160,000 Canadians.
But more sophisticated robots are popping up along the assembly lines, and the workers alongside them will need more training and education to keep pace with their new automated colleagues.
To get there will take a huge investment in jobs and skills training on all sides — from governments, schools and automakers.
Auto jobs have long held prestige.
They were the “good jobs” that could give a family access to a comfortable, middle-class life. Auto jobs formed the basis of communities across Southwestern Ontario, where the Canadian industry remains largely concentrated.
Plants are closing, in part because building cars is cheaper in Mexico and the southern United States. GM’S Oshawa plant is to close by the end of this year, laying off about 2,500 employees.
“It is not just the 2,500 jobs lost, but the jobs in the plants that feed into GM Oshawa and the knock-on effect in the local community,” said auto researcher John Holmes.
Forty-five minutes down the 401 from GM Oshawa, once Canada’s largest auto plant, stands a nondescript building housing some of the brightest minds in engineering and software development.
GM’S Canadian Technical Centre, housed in a former American Express call centre, opened in 2018 as the home base for engineers and developers working on innovations expected to revolutionize driving for the next generation and beyond.
On a recent visit, the mostly open-concept offices buzzed with activity while large doors blocked the labs where tightly guarded autonomous car technology is being developed.
The 150,000-square-foot building is bright and airy. Whiteboards dominate many of the walls, covered in untidy print and equations that are nearly undecipherable. Amenities include cafes, a gym and a sweeping atrium with skyhigh ceilings where employees can gather to chat and socialize.
It feels cooler than you might expect for the research arm of one of the world’s largest auto makers.
Here, engineers and developers work on everything from infotainment to e-bike technology recently rolled out in Europe. They also work on technology for self-driving cars, including Super Cruise, GM’S signature innovation that essentially lets cars drive themselves on the highway.
The centre is a small but significant foothold for Canada in automotive research and development, a landscape dominated by work in the United States.
Technical centre director Sarah Leblanc oversees GM’S research in Markham and other test and research locations in the area.
Choosing Markham as a base was a strategic choice for GM, she said.
“It is indisputable that the software skills sets are unlike anywhere else in the world,” Leblanc said.
Markham gives GM access to some of Canada’s leading universities — Mcmaster in Hamilton and the University of Toronto, to name two — and the talent coming out of those schools. Close to downtown Toronto, it’s also a choice location for much of the young talent GM aims to recruit.
The feel of a startup was purposefully cultivated, Leblanc said, and is another tool they use to attract and hang onto talented employees, many of whom could take their skills to any job.
“They are not interested in the traditional corporate atmosphere. That doesn’t interest them and they don’t succeed in an environment like that,” Leblanc said. “They want the culture of a startup and the freshness and openness.”
Their workforce isn’t interested in the traditional, and they believe there’s always another problem to solve. It’s a workforce that’s young and diverse — many are new to Canada, Leblanc said — and socially motivated. They believe in GM chief executive Mary Barra and her lofty vision for zero crashes, zero emissions and zero congestion.
"They look at the world differently,” she said. “They question things.”
Take Philip Asante. He graduated from Carleton University in Ottawa in 2012 with a degree in aerospace engineering, but came to GM from a stint working in aviation in the Netherlands,
Asante, 30, said he made the leap from aviation to automotive because he wanted to innovate, something that happens sparingly and slowly in the highly regulated world of aviation.
“Working in aviation is far more restrictive,” Asante said.
The auto sector, and specifically GM, ticked the boxes of where he would like to work.
“Because of the nature of the competition, it is a bit more aggressive with new technologies. It is quite a few years ahead of the aerospace sector,” Asante said. “As a result, I get to work with really interesting new technologies."
He likes automotive because he gets to work on something new, and said he identifies with making roads and cars safer.
Asante is the lead engineer on a team working on GM’S active safety and autonomous technology — the work is confidential, he said with a laugh, but “really fun.”
Once they’ve cracked self-driving cars — and he has no doubt it will happen — Asante said they’ll shift their attention to the driver experience and what differentiates GM from other companies. That work is also a secret.
High-tech workers are gaining ground in auto, but experts say people will still always be needed to put those cars, no matter how high-tech, together.
Those are the jobs that have been coveted, said Joe Graves, union leader for Unifor Local 88 at GM’S Cami assembly plant in Ingersoll. His union now includes his son, who followed him into the industry after finishing his post-secondary education.
“There is a huge second generation of employees in the Cami plant,” said Graves, 61.
“It has given me a good income over the 30 years I have been there. It has provided for my children and wife, and I hope the same happens for my child.”
Graves has been with GM since the company and Japanese automaker Suzuki began Cami as a joint venture in the late 1980s. He’s weathered the industry’s ups and downs, including the 2008 recession and a 2017 strike at Cami.
Auto jobs are still those “good jobs” of days past, Graves said, even with the challenges — an attenuated pay scale that means workers have to stick with it for 10 years before reaching their full earning potential of $35 an hour, and gruelling physical labour.
“The younger people are there for the financial gains down the road,” he said.
Graves said the workers he sees coming into the plant today often have little in the way of hands-on factory experience, as they might have when he started. Instead, they have more school education. Many have a bachelor’s degree or have been to college. Often, they’ve done apprenticeships or worked in the plant through the summer.
And unlike the doomed GM Oshawa plant, many of whose workers were at the top of the wage scale, Graves said about 40 per cent of GM’S Cami workers started only in the last 10 years.
They’re young, but close enough to the top of the pay scale that they can see the light at the end of the tunnel, he said.
“We have a lot of well-educated young people in there with BAS and apprenticeships,” Graves said. “A lot don’t plan to stay, but they do.”
Post-secondary education and the skills they learn there will serve assembly workers well in the future, said Brendan Sweeney.
Sweeney, formerly of Mcmaster’s auto research centre and now with the Trillium Centre for Advanced Manufacturing in London, said workers of the future won’t have as much direct contact with cars as workers do today.
And though the average age of an auto assembly worker today is 48, the use of automation doesn’t sound a death knell for older workers trying to keep up.
“There will be more interface between employees and highly automated machinery,” Sweeney said.
Think fewer hands on your eventual car, and more hands on the machines building that vehicle.
Graves has witnessed the move to robots himself, and sees other parts of the assembly process that could be vulnerable too. There are fewer workers in welding now than there used to be. Before, you would walk along the welding line and see a person every few feet.
These days, you could walk for several minutes along the welding line before finding another person.
Paint shops, full of fumes that can be unsafe for workers, are poised to go the same way.
Workers will need different skills when that happens, like increased comfort with computers, Graves said, but he acknowledges GM does a good job with training for employees.
When GM introduces a new machine, workers are trained both in courses and on the job. Team leaders are trained once a year, too. A lot of that training focuses on the computer skills needed to work with their new machines.
Are robots coming for your job? Not likely, experts say.
That prospect is “not even close to reality,” said Robert Doyle, vice-president of advocacy for the Association for Advancing Automation, an industry umbrella group for robotics.
Doyle said it’s more that robots are coming to do parts of the job you’re not good at. They’re good at repetitive and precise motion, while humans do best with complex manipulations and thoughtful work.
“When you think of assembly line workers, one of the reasons humans are doing those jobs is because they are really good at them,” Doyle said.
“Look at your hand and your fingers that can manipulate something. We don’t really think about it but that’s something really hard for a robot to do.”
Robots are good at the “dull, dirty or dangerous” tasks that are difficult for typical workers — the painting and welding of cars come to mind.
Doyle said while his association is often pulled into the “jobs versus robots” debate, the issue is more complex than that in the auto industry and robots aren’t necessarily replacing workers.
“The jobs change and transform; (adding robots) is task-changing,” he said. Essentially, when robots are introduced, human workers do jobs that robots can’t.
These robots — the new co-workers of many auto employees — are largely made in Asia, where Japan, China and South Korea dominate, and a handful of European countries, like Germany and Switzerland.
Auto is the largest-growing sector for robotics sales, according to the Robotics Industry Association, making up more than 80 per cent of robot sales in the first half of 2019.
The auto sector and robotics have always grown hand in hand, Doyle said. Robotics sales have a history of dipping when auto sales do. In fact, the first industrial robot was installed in a GM plant in 1962.
The two industries are almost inextricably linked, Doyle said.
Not surprisingly, robots don’t come cheap. And the cost extends to safety features and working training. Doyle’s association counted just shy of 7,500 robots — valued at a combined $438 million — ordered by North American companies in the third quarter of this year alone.
This year, the largest driver in robotics growth has been the auto industry. But while robots won’t take your job, autoworkers should be prepared for their new colleagues, Doyle said.
That means training — probably some computer programming, either in an intensive course or onthe-job education — as workers interface with machines more and more. It might also include some
In most cases, when a company brings in a (robot), they want to keep those people and put them in much more valuable tasks.
maintenance training.
“In most cases, when a company brings in a (robot), they want to keep those people and put them in much more valuable tasks,” Doyle said. “If people are willing to learn new things, they’ll be very valuable.”
To get to a future where research-based employees coexist with assembly line workers, experts say governments and employers must be prepared to reinvest in training and education.
“It is going take a willingness on their part (employees), their employer’s part, and the government’s part,” Sweeney said.
The industry is still working on the best way to train employees, whether that’s online courses or intensive personal training, but Sweeney said he’s optimistic it can be done.
“There is no reason why someone, who is both older and more experienced, why they can’t learn," he said. “You just have to do it right.”