How GM Oshawa scored a victory for gender equality

After five months on the job, Heather MacLeod is still eagerly counting the number of heavy-duty pickups she works on each day.

A former RCMP officer, MacLeod, 48, knew it was time for a change when COVID-19 forced her to start working from home. So she left the force after 15 years.

And although she never expected to be building trucks for a living, MacLeod is fully dialed in to her new position on the chassis line at General Motors’ Oshawa Assembly Plant.

“I have done a desk job before, and I’m just not content to sit around,” she said. “Walking into the assembly line for the first time, all the power tools that drop down from the sky, it’s just fascinating.”

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MacLeod is one in a large cohort of female hires at the plant, which restarted Nov. 8 after it appeared to have closed for good in 2019. GM Canada used the fresh start to upend industry norms, building a 1,200-person workforce of which roughly half are women.

“I’m sure the automotive industry used to be a very male-dominated industry,” MacLeod said. “But if you walk around on our line, on our team, I think there’s more women than men, and we’ve got all age groups as well.

“You’ve got people just starting out. You’ve got people that are on their second or third career, like I am.”

Restarting the assembly line presented an opportunity to make the shop floor a more diverse and inclusive place, said Christopher Thomson, human resources and labour relations director for the Oshawa plant.

“It’s certainly not an opportunity you get very often — certainly not in automotive,” Thomson said.

GM announced the $1.3-billion retooling of Oshawa in the fall of 2020. Almost from the outset, Thomson said, the team was working toward gender party. Although plant hiring decisions rest solely with the automaker, the company did confer with Unifor, which supported the effort to bring hundreds more women into the unionized workplace.

“Automotive manufacturing has typically been male-dominated in the perception,” Thomson said. “So, one of the ways you can shift that paradigm is how you present the opportunities.”

This started with advertising and social media, where the recruitment team “very deliberately” used images and video testimonials from female GM employees, he said.

MORE THAN 13,000 RESUMES

As news of the plant reopening rippled out from Oshawa, the hiring team was flooded with applications.

For the approximately 1,200 production positions, GM received more than 13,000 resumes, Thomson said. He pointed to the pandemic wreaking havoc on sectors such as retail and food service, along with GM's reputation, as reasons for the huge applicant pool. The automaker also starts new production hires at $23.67 an hour. The provincial minimum wage is $15 an hour.

Muriel Matthews, 27, was among those looking to step out of the service sector.

Previously working six days a week at a deli, Matthews’ new position at GM lets her spend more time with her eight-yearold daughter, she said. Matthews started at the plant in August and now leads a team of six on the paint line.

Having grown up in Oshawa, she had always envisioned working at GM and had feared that the closure in 2019 would mean she would never get the chance. That changed last year as the company ramped up hiring efforts for the plant’s impending pickup production mandate.

“It was like a collective, like a whole community, everybody [saying]. ‘GM’s opening!’ ” Matthews said.

She brushed aside her few qualms about stepping into an unknown factory environment. “I figured, you know what, it’s 2021 — at the time — we’ve got to have made some kind of progress,” she said.

‘YOU GOT THIS’

Matthews had no manufacturing experience when she walked into GM’s assessment, which tested applicants’ skills building vehicle doors. The assessor’s reassurance put her at ease.

“She was fabulous, and she just made me relaxed right away,” Matthews said. “She’s like, ‘You got this,’ and she showed me, and we did it and I felt so good after.”

Thomson said GM designed the door-building simulation to eliminate gender bias, employing an equal number of male and female assessors and testing the process to ensure gender did not influence passing rates.

Over three months last spring, GM put about 5,000 applicants through door building. Using the scores as a rough basis for hiring decisions, it began onboarding for production assignments in August and trained new staff through the fall.

Because manufacturing experience was not a requirement, Thomson said, management was prepared for a different approach to training.

“The learning curve is going to look a little bit different when you bring in less-experienced team members, but we think in order to achieve the diversity goal and create this vision we had for what the workplace culture would look like, that that’s a sacrifice we were more than willing to make.”

Having more women in the plant also required rethinking how space was divided. Washroom and shower room distribution, originally skewed toward a larger male workforce, needed to be reworked. Compared with the even split today, Thomson said, the plant in its 2019 incarnation was about 18-per-cent to 20-per-cent women. That breakdown is still prevalent in many automotive manufacturing environments.

‘A WELCOMING FACTOR’

Auto manufacturing can still be a lonely place for women, said Jennifer Green, a 10-year veteran of the industry and now director of competitions at Skills Ontario, an organization focused on promoting the skilled trades as a career option for young Ontarians. “But companies showing they have supports in place can help change that.

“Being public and open with what you have, to show that, ‘Hey, we’ve got your back,’ really does have a comfort level and a welcoming factor that makes women want to go to those kinds of companies.”

Other automakers, and women considering the industry, are likely to take notice of examples such as GM’s, Green said.

“It’s a really great domino-and-chain effect, that if it can happen there, will it start to happen in other plants? Will it help to effect the community and the region around them?”

Three months into production at Oshawa of the Chevrolet Silverado HD pickup — the plant will start building the light-duty Silverado this spring — the positivity of the environment has stayed “infectious,” Thomson said.

Now, with most of the hiring completed, his team is turning its efforts to building a sustainable culture.

Both MacLeod and Matthews are eager to play a part. Pointing to the early and easy sense of camaraderie, both see themselves staying with the automaker for the long haul.

“There’s a lot of different opportunities I can see myself filling my time with,” MacLeod said.

Details about the makeup of plant-floor personnel in Oshawa have also reached the U.S. parent company. GM said it will use the lessons learned “to inform future recruiting efforts across the company.”