Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
GM plant’s closure reverberates
2 years later, many transferred workers see little stability
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 on to 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 fastchanging auto industry and the stability of their jobs have left hundreds of workers 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 of whether it’s worth chasing a job that was once seen as a sure path to the American dream.
Tiffany Davis figured that by now, 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, Ky.
Instead, she’s been the only parent much of the past 18 months for their two children back in Ohio, where she also teaches fifth grade. Only on weekends are they all together, with Tom making the 16-hour round trip home.
Even then, they get only one full day together, and it’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.
“I knew this would be difficult, but I could not have anticipated how difficult it would be. I’m worn out and exhausted,” she said. “We’re always under this umbrella of stress.”
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 it comes at a time when GM is beginning a transition to making battery-powered vehicles that will need fewer workers.
“It brings up all of those scary feelings we had before,” Tiffany Davis said.
Tom Davis, who started working for GM soon after high school and has about 11 years before he can retire, said he and his wife don’t know what will come next now that their plans to move to Kentucky are on hold.
“I still have days where I’m like, ‘Did I do the right thing?’” he said.
‘IT’S TOUGH NOW’
That’s a question Jim Moyers asks just about every day he’s away from his family.
Moyers transferred almost two years ago to GM’s assembly plant in Lansing, Mich., that makes Cadillacs and Chevrolet Camaros. He shares a sparsely furnished apartment with another former Lordstown worker.
It’s a four-hour drive every weekend — 263 miles to be exact — back to his wife and three children in the Youngstown, Ohio, area.
What he misses most are the routine things, including father-daughter dances and helping his son change the oil in his car.
“It’s tough now. That’s all my wife’s responsibility,” he said.
He also missed his son’s last high school track meet and most of his youngest daughter’s volleyball games. His wife, Mindy, said that until the move, he never missed an event. Now he watches the volleyball games on FaceTime.
“She could hear him cheering,” said Mindy Moyers. “My husband’s very loud. She definitely knew he was there.”
Jim Moyers, 54, said he didn’t have much choice in accepting a transfer, being too young to retire and it being too late to start a new career.
Now he’s hoping the next round of United Auto Workers contract talks in 2023 will give him a ticket to early retirement if GM decides that fewer workers will be needed in the years to come.
“I’ll get out at the first opportunity I have,” he said.
GM is building a new electric vehicle battery plant near its former Lordstown factory, which was sold to an upstart electric truck maker that plans to begin production later this year. Both projects will bring new jobs, but few of the GM workers who moved out of state see those as a path back to Ohio because it’s doubtful they would get the same kind of pay and benefits.
Dave Green, former president of the UAW local in Lordstown, said quite a few of the plant’s former workers are within sight of retirement and looking for a chance to move on.
While just about all of the workers are quick to say they’re thankful they have jobs, they also say they feel “stuck” far from home.
Green estimated that 40% of those who transferred to factories around the country still have their families in Ohio or haven’t sold their homes and plan to move back once they can start collecting a pension.
FUTURE UNCERTAIN
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 persuaded him to quit, he said.
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.
“When GM was closing [the plant], there was a fear of what happens next and everything was going to end, but it doesn’t,” he said. “Our futures aren’t guaranteed. But I guess our futures were never guaranteed.”