As France faces a 2035 deadline to phase out new combustion engine vehicles, workers in the industry worry their days might be numbered too.
While there is plenty of optimism in certain regions of France, in particular in the north of the country where a “Battery Valley” is emerging, workers at parts suppliers elsewhere are pessimistic.
With the sale of new vehicles with gasoline and diesel engines allowed for only the next decade in Europe, the industry that employs 200,000 people in France faces a forced march to change.
Photo: AFP
“The transition [to electric vehicles], it could have been done when Walor bought us but they didn’t invest,” said Severine Person, a quality control expert at the company’s facility in the town of Vouziers in France’s northeastern Ardennes region.
Walor SA bought the facility in 2018. Its production of connecting rods for tractors and trucks is not threatened by the shift to electric vehicles (EVs), but demand for transmission differential housings and engine manifolds is likely to see big changes.
Walor was bought out last year by a German fund that specializes in turning around struggling firms and is looking to sell the site in Vouziers and another nearby.
“Before, Citroen would distribute work to everyone in the Ardennes. They didn’t go to the other side of the world to get parts,” said Bruno Bodson, a shop steward with the French Democratic Confederation of Labor trade union.
Person and her colleagues are resigned to the factory’s likely closure given its shrinking order book.
However, the mood is different in the north, where a number of battery “gigafactories” are being built, including that of the Automotive Cells Co (ACC) in Douvrin.
The joint venture includes automakers Stellantis NV and Mercedes AG along with French oil and gas giant TotalEnergies SE.
ACC built its massive battery plant on the site of a factory that makes engines for Stellantis, whose vehicles include storied French brands Citroen and Peugeot.
The location was chosen to respond to a “social need” to retrain the factory’s employees, Stellantis said.
Staff numbers have fallen from about 5,000 in the 1980s to 700 today. At the joint venture’s battery training center, Stellantis-Douvrin employees receive 12 weeks of training on how to oversee the highly automated production lines in the battery factory.
Plateforme Automobile, a trade association which unites the firms in the sector, said that by 2026, about 17,000 jobs should be created in the gigafactories making batteries and facilities to recycle them.
While the intention is to recruit heavily from the sector, it is unclear if it would be enough to avoid many workers being left out in the cold.
The latest study conducted by the French metalworking industry, in 2021, found that the transition to EVs put 65,000 jobs in the sector at risk by 2030.
Bernard Jullien, an economist and researcher who is an expert on the French auto industry, puts the job losses from shifting from gasoline-fueled to electric engines in the auto parts sector at 40,000 over the horizon of 10 to 15 years.
That could be reduced as many workers in the industry are nearing retirement.
Ludovic Bouvier, a regional leader of the General Confederation of Labor metalworkers union, said he worries auto manufacturers and their suppliers would follow the playbook of the steel industry.
With the industry under fierce pressure to cut costs, “the announcement by Europe of the end of internal combustion engines became the opportunity for manufacturers to offshore their production,” he said.
Bouvier was mostly targeting Stellantis, which is producing its new Citroen mass-market electric hatchback in Slovakia. Renault SA is producing its R5 hatchback in France.
A recent study by two climate groups found that the lower human labor needed to manufacture electric vehicles could favor making small cars in Europe.
It is more likely that the electrification of vehicles would be accompanied by more offshoring, taking overall employment in the French auto industry down to 100,000 or even fewer, Jullien said.
‘SWASTICAR’: Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s close association with Donald Trump has prompted opponents to brand him a ‘Nazi’ and resulted in a dramatic drop in sales Demonstrators descended on Tesla Inc dealerships across the US, and in Europe and Canada on Saturday to protest company chief Elon Musk, who has amassed extraordinary power as a top adviser to US President Donald Trump. Waving signs with messages such as “Musk is stealing our money” and “Reclaim our country,” the protests largely took place peacefully following fiery episodes of vandalism on Tesla vehicles, dealerships and other facilities in recent weeks that US officials have denounced as terrorism. Hundreds rallied on Saturday outside the Tesla dealership in Manhattan. Some blasted Musk, the world’s richest man, while others demanded the shuttering of his
ADVERSARIES: The new list includes 11 entities in China and one in Taiwan, which is a local branch of Chinese cloud computing firm Inspur Group The US added dozens of entities to a trade blacklist on Tuesday, the US Department of Commerce said, in part to disrupt Beijing’s artificial intelligence (AI) and advanced computing capabilities. The action affects 80 entities from countries including China, the United Arab Emirates and Iran, with the commerce department citing their “activities contrary to US national security and foreign policy.” Those added to the “entity list” are restricted from obtaining US items and technologies without government authorization. “We will not allow adversaries to exploit American technology to bolster their own militaries and threaten American lives,” US Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick said. The entities
Minister of Finance Chuang Tsui-yun (莊翠雲) yesterday told lawmakers that she “would not speculate,” but a “response plan” has been prepared in case Taiwan is targeted by US President Donald Trump’s reciprocal tariffs, which are to be announced on Wednesday next week. The Trump administration, including US Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent, has said that much of the proposed reciprocal tariffs would focus on the 15 countries that have the highest trade surpluses with the US. Bessent has referred to those countries as the “dirty 15,” but has not named them. Last year, Taiwan’s US$73.9 billion trade surplus with the US
Prices of gasoline and diesel products at domestic gas stations are to fall NT$0.2 and NT$0.1 per liter respectively this week, even though international crude oil prices rose last week, CPC Corp, Taiwan (台灣中油) and Formosa Petrochemical Corp (台塑石化) said yesterday. International crude oil prices continued rising last week, as the US Energy Information Administration reported a larger-than-expected drop in US commercial crude oil inventories, CPC said in a statement. Based on the company’s floating oil price formula, the cost of crude oil rose 2.38 percent last week from a week earlier, it said. News that US President Donald Trump plans a “secondary