Told to stay home, these autoworkers wanted to help make medical products

Instead of just staying home when General Motors Co. shut down its Indiana pickup plant to protect workers from the coronavirus, Kevin Rowan volunteered to drive three hours a day for 10-hour shifts to help the automaker build hospital ventilators.

"Just watching the news every night, you've got to feel compassion for anyone that needs one and doesn't have one," he said. "It just breaks my heart when they say there isn't enough."

Rowan, normally a material flow coordinator at Fort Wayne Assembly, has used the machinery chops he gained on his childhood family farm to train about 100 voluntary workers to build a power bracket that holds an oxygen controller for the ventilators. GM has a contract with the federal government to build 30,000 of the devices at a parts plant in Kokomo, Ind., by the end of August.

He's among more than 1,000 workers helping GM make ventilators, face shields, masks and gowns while most of the company's North American plants remain dark. When the rest of their colleagues will come back remained uncertain, particularly after the UAW on April 24 opposed the early May restart timeline many automakers were aiming for. Calling back all workers at this point would be "too risky" for them, their families and the surrounding communities, UAW President Rory Gamble said.

In the meantime, Rowan and others — including some temporary workers hired specifically for medical production — continue to show up, keep their heads down and stay at least 6 feet apart. As of April 20, GM had shipped some 600,000 face masks and more than 50 ventilators.

"It's entirely different than building a truck, let me tell you," Rowan told Automotive News, a sister publication of Plastics News, by phone from the plant last week. "It's just mind-boggling to start a factory from scratch the way we've done it. I've never seen anything like it. Usually when we launch a new truck, we're working on it for a year. We're doing all this in just weeks."

Early on, Rowan felt a sense of urgency and desperation. GM's team has been building ventilators as fast as possible, but with a staggering national shortage, he was worried about the thousands of patients who wouldn't have a ventilator when they needed one.

"Every day we produce more, and it's gotten better. We've fought through problems," he said. "Everybody there is just scrambling to make things better."

GM has adjusted its operations over the past few weeks to accelerate production, said Karsten Garbe, GM's plant director for global preproduction operations and now project leader for face mask production at what had been an idled transmission plant in Warren, Mich.

For example, workers initially bagged individual masks on a conveyor, but the time it took to open and close the plastic bags slowed output. So GM bought a machine that blows the bag open automatically. The mask-cutting machine also was causing delays, so GM bought a faster one. When welding was a bottleneck, GM brought in additional welding tables. And when sanitizing took too long, the Detroit Red Wings, Chicago Blackhawks and Philadelphia Flyers loaned the automaker machines they use to sanitize hockey jerseys.

These changes helped GM increase output from 50,000 per day to more than 70,000, Garbe said.

For face mask and ventilator production, most of the process is done by hand, without the robots automakers use to accelerate vehicle assembly.

GM wanted to source the necessary parts and ramp up mask production within a week, and automating production would require more development, validation and debugging time, Garbe said. Ventilators require minuscule components and a high level of precision that would take a long time to automate.

"Every ventilator that's not out in some medical professional's hand is a risk that someone might not make it through their rehabilitation, recovery," Gerald Johnson, GM's executive vice president of global manufacturing, said. "That's why it was important for us to lean on our workforce and our operators and do it manually to do it quickly and get the ventilators and safety masks out into the hands of those who need it."

The Kokomo team started by dissecting a ventilator to learn how to put it back together. Some of the parts, such as the meter valve, require a magnifying glass, and the quality of smaller parts is later examined under a microscope.

"It takes a half-hour — if you're skilled enough to do it — to build [a meter valve]. Then it takes an hour to test it," Rowan said. "It's very, very high-skilled-driven. It's not like you could just throw anybody on there. It takes hours to train somebody, then it takes hours to get good at it."

With the protective gear GM requires its workers to wear for the volunteer assignments, some said they felt safer at the plant than at home. Workers wear face masks, hair nets, gowns and safety glasses. When they show up each day, they fill out a health questionnaire and have their temperature taken. The precautions have given Michelle Clark full confidence in GM's commitment to safety.

"I have a lot of family that are nurses and social workers, and they need this," said Clark, a material handler at GM's Flint Assembly plant now making masks at Warren Transmission, where she worked for two decades before it closed. "Instead of sitting at home, why not come help?"

She hopes for a similar health and safety protocol for her more than 5,000 co-workers in Flint, whenever she reports back to her usual job.

"I'd rather be safe. I have a family," Clark said. "I don't want to bring it home to my family. With this, they did a really good job."

The majority of workers just want to help, Garbe said. "It's really that simple. I know that Ford is doing this as well, and we love it. Everybody is doing something, and it's all better than nothing. It doesn't really matter who is doing more or less. We are in it together, and we're going to get through this together. I think that's really the spirit of the whole team over here."