What happens to a factory town when the factory shuts down
An excellent NYT photo essay on the closure of the GM plant in Lordstown, Ohio.
The End of the Line
Photo Essay by LATOYA RUBY FRAZIER
Text by DAN KAUFMAN
Early in the morning on Nov. 26, 2018, Dave Green, the president of Local 1112 of the United Auto Workers, which represents workers at a General Motors plant in Lordstown, Ohio, received a call from the plant’s personnel director. Green needed to be at the plant at 9 a.m. for a meeting. The personnel director rarely called Green, and when he did, it was almost always bad news. Green got into his car — a silver Chevy Cruze — and sped toward the hulking 6.2-million-square-foot factory, which had manufactured nearly two million Cruzes since the car was introduced in 2011.
“Management walks in 15 minutes late,” Green recalled, “and they say, ‘Hey, we’re going to unallocate the plant’ — that was it.”
Green had never heard the term before, but he soon found out that it meant his members would no longer have a car to build. The Cruze was finished, and G.M. had no plans to make anything else at Lordstown. Green followed the managers to the production floor, where they shut down the assembly line before repeating the same brief message to more than a thousand workers. “Some people started crying, and some people turned white as a ghost and looked like they were going to throw up,” Green said. “It felt like, ‘Oh, the end is coming."
On that same day, Mary Barra, the chief executive of G.M., announced that the company would unallocate four other North American plants and cut roughly 6,000 unionized hourly positions and 8,000 salaried positions. The largest affected plants manufactured sedans, and sedans would no longer be a major part of G.M.’s domestic production; instead, the company would focus on building S.U.V.s and trucks, which generate much higher profits. Manufacturing trade publications like IndustryWeek heralded Barra’s “willingness to wield the ax,” while Wall Street investors cheered the shedding of the “legacy” costs — pensions, health insurance — associated with G.M.’s American workers. On the day of Barra’s announcement, the company’s stock closed nearly 5 percent higher.
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After decades of industrial job losses, the valley’s fate has become a national political issue. Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign relied heavily on the promise of restoring those jobs, a message that helped him win Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Significant to his Ohio victory was flipping the Mahoning Valley from blue to red. In the summer of 2017, Trump visited Youngstown, signaling the importance of the region to his re-election prospects. “Don’t move; don’t sell your house,” he said. “We’re going to fill up those factories.” (In a sign of how concerned he may be about Lordstown’s closing, he recently took to Twitter to personally attack Dave Green, who had appeared on a Fox News segment about the plant, writing that Green “ought to get his act together and produce.”)
(snip)
[re transferring to another plant] .... This had already been happening for many years with other G.M. plants that have been idled or closed. One worker at the transition center, Christina Defelice, said she knew plant workers who arrived at Lordstown after four other transfers, or had been commuting from Pittsburgh or even from as far as Tennessee to keep their families on their health insurance or make their 30 years. She said she knew of a number of divorces, nervous breakdowns and even three suicides caused by such dislocation. Now those out-of-town transplants might have to move on again, joined by hundreds of Lordstown’s newly unallocated workers — people like Ernie Long, who had worked at the plant for 11 years.
Full article
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/05/01/magazine/lordstown-general-motors-plant.html?em_pos=large&emc=edit_ma_20190503&nl=magazine&nlid=74838209edit_ma_20190503&ref=img&te=1
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