Savannah Bet Its Economy on a Big Hyundai Plant. Now It Has to Find the Workers

Bloomberg

5 days ago

The historic city, known for gardens and gothic mystery, is leaving no stone unturned as it helps the South Korean auto giant staff up a futuristic new factory
Photography & Video by Elijah Nouvelage for Bloomberg
Savannah, Georgia, best known for its sumptuous gardens and moonlit ghost tours, is betting its future on a decidedly less romantic pursuit: factory work.
About 20 miles from the coastal city's cobblestone streets and riverboats, Hyundai Motor Co. has built the 'Metaplant America,' a gleaming facility where the South Korean auto giant plans to produce up to 500,000 hybrid and electric vehicles a year.
Construction of the plant was a significant economic development victory for southeast Georgia, which had watched other southern cities lure massive foreign auto plants that transformed their local economies. Today, thousands of workers across the region assemble German, Korean and Japanese-designed cars and trucks.
Walking around the Metaplant's floor, it would appear to need few human hands. Amid a clatter of whirrs and clanks, robotic arms lift and weld steel components into place as table-like robots scurry around the floor delivering parts. But by 2031, Hyundai hopes to have some 12,500 people working at the plant and for its nearby suppliers.
The Savannah region's civic, business and education leaders are pulling together to help Hyundai fill those jobs—no small challenge in a metro area with just over 400,000 people and an unemployment rate of 2.9%. Economic and education leaders are introducing manufacturing to kids as young as grade school, courting jobseekers with criminal histories and previous addictions, and traveling up and down the East Coast looking for workers who might be willing to relocate.
So far, Hyundai has hired some 1,400 workers, including 900 production employees, for the plant, which formally opened in March. The facility has one of a planned three production lines up and running, cranking out Ioniq 5 and Ioniq 9 crossover SUVs.
'Husbands are asking their wives to come, people are asking their partners, people are asking their children to come work here,' Brent Stubbs, the Metaplant's chief administrative officer, said in an interview. 'This is just the beginning.'
Meeting its hiring goals means Hyundai will have to confront a series of obstacles that are both unique to the region and representative of wider economic forces. Some prospective hires may be eager for a new job, but uneasy about moving because of higher home prices and mortgage rates. Pay in the motor-vehicle factory sector has also been falling behind the rest of the economy; when adjusted for inflation, average hourly wages have declined 8% since January 1990, federal data show. In Savannah, a heavy reliance on tourism has kept wages down locally.
For many workers, there are also gaps in both skills and perception. Some people are reluctant to apply for manufacturing roles because they don't understand what factory work involves—or what its rewards are, say officials involved in the Metaplant recruitment push.
'I would probably venture to say they don't understand what manufacturing is,' said Susan Williams, who oversees state-run training centers for Hyundai and other big employers in eastern Georgia.
The Trump administration is staring down similar challenges as it seeks to revive American manufacturing might. The nation will have to fill around 3.8 million factory jobs between 2024 and 2033, almost three-quarters of them to replace retiring workers, according to a 2024 study by Deloitte and The Manufacturing Institute. Half could go unfilled, the study found.
Industry Diversity
These are good times for Savannah's tourism industry. On a weeknight in May, it's hard to find a table at the restaurants in the old cotton warehouses along River Street. A few blocks away, a young woman on a park bench poses seductively for still shots in moss-strewn Chippewa Square, where Tom Hanks waited for a bus in Forrest Gump. A record 12.6 million visitors came to the area in 2023, according to the most recent tourism bureau figures.
Savannah's economy isn't as tourism-dependent as it seems, said Moody's Analytics senior economist Tyler Case. Hospitality is part of a 'three-legged stool' supported by the fourth-busiest US seaport and manufacturing, he said. The biggest employer in the region is Gulfstream Aerospace, which moved to Savannah in 1967 and now employs 13,000 workers making business jets.
Still, the importance of the hospitality industry locally is one reason the region's average wages, at $28.31 an hour, lag Georgia and the nation. Community leaders thus rejoiced three years ago when Hyundai announced it would open a $5.5 billion plant in nearby Bryan County—later upped to $7.5 billion—with average annual wages of $58,105. Charleston, South Carolina, broke locals' hearts several years earlier by winning a Volvo factory that was eyeing the same tract of land Hyundai eventually took.
'We needed another massive, really awesome advanced manufacturing facility to really intensify the diversity that we have,' said Trip Tollison, chief executive of the Savannah Economic Development Authority.
The work being done at the Metaplant looks different from what many people might think of when they imagine a car plant. In one area of the factory, platform-like Automated Guided Vehicles take direction from QR codes on the floor, slipping under assembled cars to move them to quality testing. Nearby, a four-legged robot resembling a dog, known as Spot, peers into the vehicles and looks for defects before they are carried off for painting.
People step in for intricate tasks the robots can't do, like affixing a door seal to a car door with a power tool. Other employees handle higher-end functions like programming and fixing the machines. Even with all the automation, the Metaplant will need 8,500 human workers on-site and another 4,000 at its suppliers.
Local development advocates, school administrators, state workforce officials and Hyundai itself have plotted a multipronged strategy to find the needed hands. A new group, the Regional Industry Support Enterprise (RISE), has been taking roadshows up and down the East Coast to recruit workers. At a country music festival in Tampa, Florida, they offered Southern pralines—gooey blobs of nuts, sugar and cream—to get passers-by to stop and talk.
At the Metaplant, the manufacturing system is designed to allow for robots to assist human workers to build more than 500,000 vehicles per year.
Following programmed paths affixed to QR codes, Automated Guided Vehicles move vehicle components across the factory.
The Metaplant has partnered with four technical colleges in the greater Savannah area offering the Electrical Vehicle Professional (EVP) Technical Certificate of Credit (TCC). The certificate program was designed to prepare students for entry-level employment in the electric vehicle production industry.
The Metaplant will manufacture the Hyundai IONIQ 5 and the Hyundai IONIQ 9 and eventually produce models for Kia and Genesis.
Hyundai constructed four roundabouts near the 2,900-acre megasite to help manage the anticipated increase in traffic.
The group is also courting some of the 3,500 soldiers who leave nearby Fort Stewart and an affiliated airfield every year for the private sector. And to attract potential workers scrolling through social media on their phones, they're making breezy TikTok and Instagram videos showing young people rowing in the nearby coastal salt marshes and sunbathing on the beach.
RISE is also following the lead of a Pennsylvania program that recruits young adults to go into local schools and share the 'gospel' of industry, said Anna Chafin, who's leading the area's industrial workforce effort with RISE. For many students, pay is the most important consideration.
'What kind of truck they can purchase? What kind purse they might can get?,' Chain said. 'They want to know what type of things can they have.'
Housing Pinch
Some locals said Hyundai's arrival is changing the local economy, though not necessarily for the better, by pinching the housing supply and making it harder for other businesses to retain workers. Single-family homes in the Savannah metro area are cheaper than elsewhere in the US, on average, but the median sale price has climbed 55% to $380,000 since April 2020, outpacing the 47% gain, nationwide, Redfin data show.
'It's a tourist city, so you still have people that aren't making $100,000 a year, but you've got a lot of apartments going up where the rents are, you know, $2,800, $3,500,' said Melanie Wilson, who's paid to worry about such things for the region's Metropolitan Planning Commission.
In suburban Richmond Hill, a half hour from downtown Savannah, Buck Holly owns a small factory that mills aftermarket components for pistols called C&H Precision. Holly, who has a red Make America Great Again cap displayed in his office, supports Trump's efforts to rebuild US manufacturing. But since Hyundai arrived, he has worried about his ability to keep his 35 workers, including a young couple he lured from New Mexico.
'When I go to talk to them about them staying here long term and buying a house, they're like, 'We can't buy a house here,'' he said.
Housing issues have also complicated Hyundai's efforts to lure professional and managerial workers who don't want to relocate with average 30-year mortgage rates still hovering near 7%. The company provides relocation assistance for those roles, said Stubbs, the Metaplant administrator, without elaborating.
Around Savannah, as heavy industry hosts field trips to factories and warehouses, young people are starting to realize their worth to potential employers. Jalaya Bost, a 17-year-old from Savannah, ducked out of class for a few minutes on a Monday afternoon to share that she's open to a job at Hyundai in the future.
'I like cars,' Bost said. She credited the online gaming platform Roblox for sparking an interest in factories and factory-building. Like so many others her age, though, she said many of her friends see themselves getting rich as social-media influencers.
'Watching YouTube, it looks like they're just recording themselves making money,' she said. 'They make it look easy.'
Edited by Tim Annett and Cecile Daurat
Photo edited by Marie Monteleone
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