Nearly 1,500 Cami workers back on job after six-month layoff

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Cami workers are back on the job.

Nearly 1,500 workers returned to work Tuesday assembling electric cargo vans, with a battery shortage that shut down the Ingersoll General Motors plant for six months resolved, said Mike Van Boekel, chairperson of Unifor Local 88 that represents the workers.

“The first shift is back today and we are on rotating shifts. It is excellent, it is so good to get back to work,” Van Boekel said Tuesday.

Workers had been off the job since October due to delays in getting batteries for the BrightDrop vans assembled at Cami. GM announced the shutdown in September.

Plant assembly workers began a rotation Tuesday that will have about 400 work for two weeks, then have two weeks off as another 400 workers rotate in.

The plant also has started assembling batteries on site at its 400,000-square-foot (37,200-square-metre) battery assembly plant, where another 200 full-time employees also work, Van Boekel said.

 “It has been a long haul, everyone is very relieved,” he said.

The remaining 450 workers are skilled trades and other positions not on the rotating shifts, Van Boekel said.

GM Canada could not be reached for comment.

Cami assembles two models of GM’s EV BrightDrop cargo van. The automaker has received BrightDrop orders from Hertz, Walmart, FedEx, Verizon, Merchants Fleet, a U.S. fleet management firm, DHL Canada and others.

The plant’s restart after such a long delay illustrates the “fits and starts” that have become common in the EV manufacturing sector, as both supplies to make batteries and consumer demand are inconsistent, said Brendan Sweeney, director of the Trillium Network for Advanced Manufacturing at Western University.

“We are starting to get on the other side of supply chain issues and we have not yet hit the scale of EV manufacturing, that will take a few more years” before there’s more stability in the EV market, he said.

“The hesitation people are feeling before buying them will last a few more years. There will be a market, but it will take bucking the EV supply chain.”

The EV battery market has become important for the London region, with Volkswagen’s PowerCo subsidiary building a $7-billion EV battery plant in St. Thomas that’s expected to open in 2027 with 3,000 workers.

Stellantis has teamed with a Korean supplier to build an EV battery plant in Windsor and Stellantis’s Brampton plant and Ford’s Oakville assembly plant are retooling to build  electric vehicles.

But electric vehicle sales have cooled early in 2024. GM announced Tuesday its EV sales dropped to 16,000 in the first quarter from 20,000 in the same period in 2023. GM has said it wants to sell more than 200,000 EVs in North America this year.

GM is not alone. Tesla sales slumped 8.5 per cent in the quarter year over year.

American EV sales were a record 1.2 million units in 2023, 7.6 per cent of the overall national market, a Cox Automotive report said. That share is expected to top 12 per cent this year, lower than original forecasts.

Many automakers have announced they are slowing their transition to EV production and investing instead in hybrid technology.

Still, GM has also announced it will invest US$19 billion over the next 10 years to source critical materials for electric vehicle batteries from South Korean supplier LG Chem, the companies announced recently.  

ndebono@postmedia.com