Two years after GM plant closes, worker stress mounts
When General Motors ended a half-century of building cars in Ohio’s blue collar corner, 1,600 workers had to decide whether to accept the automaker’s offer to move to another factory.
Those with enough seniority retired. A few started new careers. Everyone else from GM’s shuttered assembly plant in Lordstown went as far away as Texas, Tennessee, and Missouri, some leaving behind their families so they could hang onto their pensions and high-paying union jobs.
Now, two years later, many of those autoworkers are finding that their lives and futures are just as unsettled.
Worries about the fast-changing auto industry and the stability of their jobs have left hundreds still unsure whether to uproot entirely and sell their homes. Some are spending every weekend driving hundreds of miles back to Ohio to see their children. Others are holding out hope that the next contract will give them a chance for an early retirement.
No matter their situation, they all face the same question: is it worth chasing a job
always seen as a sure path to the American dream?
‘It’s like he wasn’t even here’
By now, Tiffany Davis figured she and her two children would be settling into a new place with her husband, Tom. That was the plan — to join him when the past school year ended — after he transferred to GM’s Corvette factory in
Bowling Green, Kentucky.
Instead, she’s been a single mom much of the past 18 months to their two children back in Ohio, where she also teaches fifth grade. Only on weekends are they all together when Tom makes the 16-hour round trip home.
Even then, they only get one full day together that’s usually filled with catching up on household chores.
When the weekend is
over, “It’s like he wasn’t even there,” Tiffany Davis said.
Tom Davis, 39, has been home more than expected this year because of work shutdowns caused by the pandemic and supply issues. That’s added more worries, and comes at a time when GM is beginning a transition to making battery-powered vehicles that will need fewer workers.
‘Not the life I was planning’
Matt Moorhead tried to stick it out.
Like so many others, the 48-year-old Moorhead didn’t want to uproot his wife from her career or their daughter from high school. And he didn’t want to walk away from a job that he was counting on to put his two children through college.
So he went by himself in the summer of 2019 to Lansing where he paid for an apartment on top of his mortgage back in Ohio. His days were spent staring at the TV and eating frozen meals “just so you could go to work.”
The new job on the assembly line left him with a knee that was ailing him. “It was not the life I was planning on living,” he said.
After six months of traveling back and forth and “trying to be a dad through a cellphone,” his wife convinced him to quit.
They’re now getting by on savings and his wife’s job at a hospital. What happens next for Moorhead, after 24 years at GM, is still up in the air. He spent last summer managing a golf course.