Businesses are raising wages to compete for workers. Rivian starts off manufacturing workers at $20 an hour, more than most other similar employers nearby.
“You always hear, ‘We just lost another one to Rivian,’” says Bill Montes, a vice president at staffing firm Talent Management Professionals. “They’re losing them from every industry, not just light industrial. It’s good and bad.”
A TIMELY LIFT
Bloomington-Normal, the seventh-largest metro area in the state, had been struggling prior to the pandemic. Employment in the area peaked at 96,400 jobs in May 2015 before Mitsubishi closed. The plant, opened in 1988, once employed about 3,100 employees. It was down to about 1,100 workers when it closed. State Farm also began shedding jobs.
The insurer is hiring again, and candy maker Ferrero is adding 200 jobs over the next four years at its factory in Bloomington. But all eyes have been on Rivian, which paid $16 million for the 2.6 million-square-foot factory and has been expanding it.
“Initially they said they’d be happy to fill one-third of the plant,” says Hoban of the Bloomington-Normal Economic Development Council.
A developer is doubling a long-underutilized warehouse to 1 million square feet for Rivian.
The company has created about 2,000 construction jobs in addition to the 6,000 jobs at its manufacturing plant, Hoban estimates. Suppliers now are looking for space, too, though none has announced plans and Hoban declines to identify prospects he’s talked to. “You’ll see suppliers opening their doors this year that will add 5,000 jobs,” he says.
The state has its eye on an even bigger prize: A new plant to make batteries for electric vehicles. Pritzker says the state is still in the hunt for a major battery manufacturing facility.
New jobs are the best hope to reverse a 3% population decline since 2013 to 186,230 last year. The outflow of people already shows signs of slowing, based on credit-card data, Crane of Moody’s Analytics says.
Bloomington-Normal is best known as a college town because it’s home to Illinois State and Illinois Wesleyan universities. But manufacturing is an important part of the economy, too. An automaker seems an unlikely economic savior in an area that has been suffering manufacturing job losses for decades.
“(Rivian) is good news for central Illinois, which has really suffered from years of population losses, decline in manufacturing and the state’s fiscal problems,” Crane says. “To have a high-tech, high-value-added employer coming in will put it on a stronger trajectory. The labor force is recovering more quickly than the rest of the state. The labor market is really tight.”
The growth was hard to see, at first, even as Rivian employee shuttle buses showed up at hotels around town. The hiring didn’t show up in the data until the Bureau of Labor Statistics revised its jobs count in March.
Heartland Community College created an EV manufacturing-training and apprenticeship program involving maintenance of high-voltage batteries that launched a year ago. The apprenticeship program, which has about 25 students, is expected to double enrollment.
Rivian is now building another plant in Georgia that’s expected to employ 7,500 workers. The company is getting an estimated $1.5 billion in tax breaks to build the new factory. That makes the Normal deal looks like a bargain: Illinois offered Rivian $50 million in incentives, while local governments gave up just $2.4 million in property taxes in a deal that ended last year.
“The plant was within two days of being sold for scrap metal,” says state Rep. Dan Brady, R-Bloomington.
