STILL DRIVEN
A town is determined to fight GM’s plant closure, just as it did in 1998
WARREN, Ohio — For Jim Graham, it seems like just yesterday he helped halt the closure of the Lordstown Assembly plant.
It was 1998 and the General Motors plant had been given a few months to live. At the time, Graham was the president of the United Auto Workers Local 1112, and for generations union and management were sworn enemies. Graham would know — he had been at the plant since 1968, two years after the first car rolled off the assembly line.
“I knew if we were not only going to stop the closure but also save the community, it was time to work together,” Graham said.
So he forged an alliance with plant manager Herman Maass, working to boost morale and assure workers that they had their backs — and so did the community.
Then they went to the town and asked locals to prove it. “We got the Chamber of Commerce on board, and we came up with this simple idea that engaged the entire community. It was called ‘Bring It Home.’ We had signs in every business, home, church. People wore blue ribbons. The workers knew the entire valley had their back,” said Graham.
In return, union members gave deep concessions and GM brought the Chevrolet Cobalt to Lordstown. “We lived to fight another day,” said Graham.
When he retired in 2011, he thought they’d weathered the storm for good.
Then, on Monday, GM announced they would end production at four plants in the US — the one here in Lordstown, two in Michigan and one in Baltimore, all by next spring. The move comes just less than 10 years after the US government distributed $50.2 billion in bailouts to GM after the 2008 economic crisis, followed by the company’s Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the summer of 2009.
The Treasury Department auditor estimated in 2014 that American taxpayers lost $11.2 billion in the GMdeal.
“The news was a gut punch,” said Tim Ryan, the Democratic congressman who represents Warren, where the Lordstown plant is located.
The sprawling 6.2-million-squarefoot assembly plant employs more than 1,600 people and has solely manufactured GM’s compact Cruze vehicle since 2010. It is the main economic driver in a region that has seen businesses fall like dominos for the past half-century, decimating families, hollowing out neighborhoods and depleting the tax base at large.
Current UAW Local 1112 president David Green isn’t taking this lying down. He is working with elected officials and the community while tapping into Graham’s past success by launching a “Drive It Home” campaign. “We are telling Detroit that Lordstown workers can build anything,” he said.
“We are optimistic that a rallying cry throughout the valley will show GM how central to this community those jobs are.”
It’s not that the plant is old or out of date. In 2014, GM made a multimillion-dollar upgrade to the facility for next-generation Cruze vehicles, and the future looked bright for the oncepopular compact car.
But by 2017, two things had changed: Gas prices had dropped, and consumers started favoring SUVs and pickup trucks over smaller passenger vehicles. There was one tiny optimistic moment when GMannounced a new Cruze sedan, which came out this year, but that series turned out to be the model’s last.
Now, Graham is encouraging new union leadership to put a flyer out reassuring townsfolk that everything is being done to get a new product allocated for Lordstown.
“Now is not the time to panic,” said Graham, 71, now a Democratic city council president in Warren. “Just do your job, do it right, do it well like we’ve been doing since 1966, and good things happen. I have all the confidence in the world that General Motors is not gonna let that plant just blow in the wind. I have a gut feeling, just like I did 20 years ago.
“All we are asking is for GM to . . . trust our workforce like they have done since in 1966,” Graham added. “When we work as a united front — whether it’s different politicians or community members or different unions — we become a force, and we will not let this plant go down.”