SOUTH CHARLESTON, W.Va. — GreenPower Motor Company, the electric school bus maker, plans to hire production associates to assemble the vehicles at the South Charleston manufacturing facility over the next several weeks.
“We’re going to be hiring 45 people by the middle of next month (June),” Vice President of Business Development and Strategy Mark Nestlen said Tuesday on MetroNews Talkline. “They are production team members that will be on the floor in the manufacturing process of the Type A NanoBeast and the Type B Beast school buses.”
GreenPower employees will start at $20 per hour with full health, dental, and vision benefits, plus access to continuing education through a partnership with the Workforce Development Board of Kanawha County and BridgeValley Community & Technical College. The student or employee will have access to hands-on technical training to help them learn the job and additional skills to advance as opportunities develop.
“They will be working here four days a week, and they’ll be going to school one day a week so they can gain that experience and technical knowledge that they may not have when they come on board,” Nestlen said.
Nestlen said the workers will not recognize the 80,000-square-foot facility as a typical assembly line environment. Each process has evolved, and each GreenPower Motor model is built by a team of production workers.
“The group of workers move around from bus to bus to do what they do in each of the scenarios so those buses get made at the same time, and those ten buses get moved out, and the next ten buses get moved in to start the work on those.”
Last month, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced $400 million in grants available for school districts through the EPA Clean School Bus Program. That funding is provided through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law signed by President Biden in November 2021.
“We’re working across the nation, particularly on the east coast, with school districts to make that application for the next round of $400 million in federal funding and we expect to have a good share of that,” Nestlen said.
Other funding opportunities are made possible through the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. The law allocates $370 billion to expand tax credit programs to encourage the purchase of light- to heavy-duty commercial electric vehicles, according to Nestlen.
“Our stake-bed truck, our cargo delivery—all of those have the $40,000 investment tax credit that people are eligible for when they buy those vehicles,” Nestlen said.
To apply for the jobs, click here.