The full report can be found in the link below.
The Painful Necessity of Automation - Zayd Alameddine.pdf
With its geographical advantage, neighboring the second largest automotive market, the United States, the Halton region in Southern Ontario, beside beautiful Lake Ontario as seen below, leads the Canadian auto-manufacturing industry.
Figure 1: Geographical Location of Halton Compared to North America
The landscape of Halton’s auto-manufacturing industry has changed significantly in the past decade. These changes can be attributed to the increase in international trade, which has ultimately reduced the demand for Halton manufactured products. Ontario’s extremely high product costs has caused parts made in Halton to cost considerably more than if the same part was to be made in Mexico where the minimum wage is approximately eight dollars less than Ontario’s minimum wage.
This situation makes Halton-made products extremely unappealing to consumers and is further complicated by the emergence of automation in this sector, as nearly 35, 000 skill trade jobs involved in the Halton automotive industry are now at risk.
To understand the full impact of advancing technology within this industry, a mixed-methods case study will be done on one of the most crucial the lines of automation in Halton known as the “ASF” line as seen in Figure 2.
Figure 2: The ASF line
This includes All Tool Manufacturing, Volestalpine Rotec Summo Corp (Summo), and the Ford plant. Information will be taken via short survey and interviews as well as statistical information from governmental sources.
The trends found will likely lead to discovering what retraining processes are in place and the changes within these companies to allow them to compete internationally.
A hypothesis can be made that these results will lead to a general trend of increasing unemployment and a heavier emphasis on automated processes within companies in the Halton region.
This change will negatively impact skill trade workers in this sector and ultimately the economy. In this paper I will first be analyzing the current state of the automotive industry in North America, specifically America, and drawing a parallel to the state of the Halton industry.
Then I will be discussing my methodology, which will explain how my data will be collected. The data will then be analyzed for trends and patterns. Finally, my conclusion will summarize my findings and illustrate the correlation between the data collected and my hypothesis.