VOUZIERS: With France facing a 2035 deadline to phase out new combustion engine cars, industry workers fear their days may be numbered too.
While there is a lot of optimism in some regions of France, especially in the north of the country where the “Battery Valley” is emerging, elsewhere workers at parts suppliers are pessimistic.
With the sale of new cars with petrol and diesel engines only allowed in Europe for the next decade, the industry, which employs 200,000 people in France, faces a forced march to change.
“The transition (to electric vehicles) could have been done when Walor bought us, but they didn’t invest,” said Severine Person, a quality control expert at the company’s plant in Vouziers, in France’s northeastern Ardennes region.
Walor bought the facility in 2018. Its production of connecting rods for tractors and trucks is not at risk from the transition to EVs, but demand for differential gearboxes and engine timings is likely to see big changes.
Walor was bought out last year by a German fund that specializes in turning around struggling companies and is looking to sell the site in Vouziers and others nearby.
“Before, Citroen distributed the work to everyone in the Ardennes. They didn’t go to the other side of the world for parts,” said Bruno Bodson, trade director of the CFDT union.
Person and her colleagues are resigned to the likely closure of the factory due to a shrinking order book.
But the mood is different in the north of the country, where a number of battery “gigaworks” are being built, including that of the Automotive Cells Company (ACC) in Douvrin.
The joint venture includes carmakers Stellantis and Mercedes, along with French oil and gas giant TotalEnergies.
ACC built its massive battery plant on the site of a factory that makes engines for Stellantis, whose cars include famous French brands Citroen and Peugeot.
Stellantis said the site was chosen in response to a “societal need” to retrain factory workers. The number of employees has fallen from around 5,000 in the 1980s to 700 today.
At the joint venture’s battery training center, Stellantis-Douvrin employees will receive 12 weeks of training on how to supervise highly automated production lines at the battery factory.
According to Plateforme automobile (PFA), a trade association that brings together companies in the sector, around 17,000 jobs should be created by 2026 in gigafactories for the production of batteries and equipment for their recycling.
While the intention is to recruit a large number of employees from the sector, it is not clear whether this will be enough to keep many workers from being left behind.
The latest study by the French metal 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 automotive industry, estimates job losses due to the switch from diesel engines to electric engines in the auto parts sector at 40,000 over 10 to 15 years.
The impact could be mitigated by the fact that many workers in the industry are nearing retirement.
Ludovic Bouvier, regional leader of the CGT metalworkers’ union, fears carmakers and their suppliers will follow the steel industry’s playbook.
Since the industry is under relentless pressure to reduce costs, “Europe’s announcement of the end of internal combustion engines has become an opportunity for manufacturers to offshore their production,” he said.
Bouvier mostly focused on Stellantis, which manufactures its new Citroen mass-produced electric hatchback in Slovakia. Renault builds its R5 hatchback in France.
A recent study by two climate groups found that lower human labor needed to produce electric vehicles could favor the production of small cars in Europe. But for economist Jullien, it is more likely that the electrification of cars will be accompanied by more offshoring, reducing total employment in the French car industry to 100,000 or even less.
