Two women who joined General Motors worked for the same year but had a different future: How are electric cars changing the automobile industry?

Amanda Kalhous and Rebecca Keetch joined General Motors Canada in the same year. Over the past 15 years, they’ve survived layoffs, a government bailout and a bankruptcy. But now they are facing a more profound phenomenon, as the world automobile industry is experiencing the most dramatic wave of change since the assembly line was born.

And this time, only one person found the future in that change.

GM knows what it takes to secure the future, and it’s not people like Rebecca – factory workers at Oshawa with a community college degree and an 18-month college degree who can Replaced two belts on the engine in just 108 seconds. GM needs Amanda, an electrical engineer with two college degrees and 24 patents, to run a software design team for the next generation of cars.

Mary Barra, CEO of GM, is betting that climate change and urbanization will accelerate the transition to electric and autonomous vehicles. The number of sedans using internal combustion engines that Rebecca participated in the manufacturing process sold by GM has dropped sharply because customers have turned to SUVs and pickups. By the end of this year, GM plans to cut 14,000 workers at five factories across North America.

Although GM has the promise of relocating the workplaces to some workers in Canada affected by the plant closure plan, the new direction means that more than a century later GM will stop making cars in Oshawa.

Amanda (47) did not think that she would stick with GM for her whole life when she joined the company in 2005, but she was not affected by the turmoil because the skills acquired helped her to decide her own destiny. mine. However, Rebecca (44) is seeing a tough road ahead, in stark contrast to the stable retirement plan that she once thought of.

Every day, Amanda wakes up from 6:30, shower and go to the kitchen. Bringing breakfast and lunch prepared the night before, she drove out of the house at 7am, took her young daughter to a bus stop and took a 40-minute drive to GM’s CTC technology center in Markham, Ontario.

Only 50km from GM’s production line (where Rebecca is working) but CTC is like being on another planet. Inside the Silicon Valley style office office is a modern space with white boards and standing desks. From Amanda’s seat you can see a lot of electric cars and charging stations being tested.

Once a triathlon, Amanda recently started returning to the gym and eating protein-rich foods while dealing with a lot of hard work. Her team tests algorithms, integrates software that automatically keeps cars in the right lane and is always thinking about the features that will appear in future cars.

One of the achievements that Amanda is most proud of is that bluetooth technology that allows cars to communicate via a mobile app will not drain the battery called Keypass. Her team started testing how much a phone and a car can connect to each other at the maximum distance. Bluetooth is still the most promising technology but it consumes too much battery. Eventually Amanda came up with the idea of ​​an app that could connect to a car to turn on the lights and air conditioner when the car owner approached and most importantly, unlock the door.

Keypass is a feature of Chevrolet Bolt and Amanda’s first patent is put into practice. Unlike Rebecca, much of Amanda’s work is to create components using code instead of metal.

While about 2,000 hourly workers and full-time employees in Oshawa were fired, GM increased the number of software engineers in Canada to 300, reaching 1,000. The majority of the millennials are very young people, which Amanda says are “they are not here for stability but because it is an interesting job, helping them realize their desire to change the world”.

Amanda’s salary is also quite generous. Engineers usually start at 80,000 Canadian dollars ($ 61,000) per year, while people like Rebecca receive only 21 Canadian dollars per hour, which is less than 44,000 Canadian dollars a year. GM also regularly raises salary for high-tech engineers to retain talent, and also offers Silicon Valley-style benefits such as gyms, kitchens and professional cooks.

At its peak in 2003, the factory in Oshawa produced nearly 1 million cars a year. There were so many people working here that the city adjusted the traffic lights to coincide with the shift hours at GM. However, the American automobile industry gradually lost jobs to places with lower labor costs in Mexico.

Workers with 30 or more years of employment can choose to retire early for a sum of Canadian $ 130,000, plus pensions and benefits and a discount of Canadian $ 10,000 when buying a GM car. However, since Rebecca has only been working for 13 years, she will only receive $ 30,000 plus 6 months of health insurance and $ 6,000 of training costs. If she accepts this package, she will be unemployed in November and there is little chance of being called back to join the ranks of 300 new employees.

Rebecca’s mother, grandparents and grandmother used to work for GM, but it was never her intention when she was told that she should go to school if she didn’t want to work in the factory. It’s not that they disregard this job but because they want her to find something with a better salary and make her feel happier.

However, after graduating from high school, Rebecca ended up working in the GM line with a salary and a half higher than the minimum wage at that time.

In 2009, she was fired when the global financial crisis caused GM to go bankrupt in the US. She retrained according to a local program, but before she started, Canada provided a relief package for the GM plant. When she was called back to work, she thought it would be safer to go through several years of financial accumulation before jumping into something new. But ironically, wages are declining and are now 12% below the national average. Still single, she could manage her life, but her financial plans were unable to come true.

Like Rebecca, Amanda grew up in a middle-class family. When the US economy deteriorated after 9/11, she had 8 months of unemployment. However, she survived and realized that if there were transferable skills, it would be easy to adapt to any situation.

The 15 engineers in Amanda’s team have 9 masters degrees and 1 doctorate, and their income is in the top 10% in Canada. Nearly half are not Canadians – there are people from India, Iran, Kenya, Nigeria, Pakistan and Singapore. Interestingly, not everyone knows how to drive. If self-driving cars “take off”, they probably never need to learn to drive.

But Amanda’s work is not without threat either. Will Amanda worry that there will be fewer cars in the world because of the sharing of car-sharing services and also the need for fewer engineers as artificial intelligence continues to improve? ? “The work of 100 years ago is not the same as it is today, and certainly not 100 years later. But I believe there are always jobs that need people,” she said.