Building electric vehicles has become a family affair for Detroiter Evetta Osborne, 47, and her daughter, Monique Watson, 28, of Livonia.
They see each other daily because they work side-by-side at General Motors Co.’s Detroit-Hamtramck Assembly Plant.
The mother-daughter duo have installed nearly every lithium-ion battery pack for GM’s plug-in hybrid electric vehicles — Chevrolet Volt, Opel Ampera, Holden Volt, and Cadillac ELR — since the Volt was in pre-production in 2009.
That means they’ve helped give life to more than 80,000 electric vehicles, a fitting tribute as Mother’s Day approaches.
“We look at these cars as if they are our babies,” said Osborne, a mother of five. Watson is her oldest.
“We’re a good team and our relationship is secondary when it comes to performing our jobs — but it’s great to work alongside my daughter,” Osborne said.
Not many families get such a privilege, said Joel Stone, senior curator at the Detroit Historical Society.
“To work side by side on a line, that’s unique,” Stone said. “It’s long been a tradition in the auto companies for family members to follow in the footsteps of their ancestors and end up in the same plant, but working next to each other is quite unusual. Frankly, before World War II, it was all guys, so to have a mother and daughter, this is a great thing.”
While no organization tracks the number of mothers and daughters who work together as employees, the trend of mothers and daughters who have businesses together has reached 2.3 million and is on the upswing, said Jamie M. Kizer, founder of National Association of Mothers and Daughters in Business.