GM Laying Off Over 3,000 Workers, Including in Michigan

Well, this is definitely not the headline Michigan workers wanted to wake up to.

General Motors just laid off about 1,700 employees across Michigan and Ohio, and yeah, that's going to sing a little. According to MLive, the cuts are tied to a slowdown in the electric vehicle market.

Around 1,200 of those layoffs happened at Detroit’s EV plant, and another 550 jobs were cut at the Ultium Cells battery plant in Ohio.

See Also: Coming Soon: GM Cars That Drop You Off at Work and Run Errands?

On top of that, about fifteen hundred more workers in Ohio and Tennessee are getting hit with temporary layoffs, too. GM says it’s all part of “realigning EV capacity” because EV sales aren’t moving like they expected. Basically, the hype cooled off quickly, and now they’ve gotta hit pause and shift things around.

If you remember, demand for electric vehicles was booming earlier this year, but things changed when the federal EV tax credit of up to seven thousand five hundred dollars disappeared in September. That incentive going away really messed things up.

GM still swears the future is electric, and they’re not ditching the EV game long term. They just need to tighten things up and regroup for a minute.

I get it, business is business, but when layoffs hit this close to home in Michigan, it’s hard not to feel it. Hopefully, these workers land on their feet fast, and this slowdown turns around sooner rather than later.

Get our free mobile app

So look, I’m not anti-EV at all. I actually think they’re awesome, and I’ll probably end up with one someday. But I’m not jumping in until the charging situation catches up. I mean, I still barely see charging stations around here. Maybe it's just because I’m in Genesee County, but it feels like we’re not quite there yet. When I can pull into a random gas station or Meijer and always find a charger without hunting around like I’m on a scavenger hunt, then we’ll talk.