One of the final remaining industrial anchors in what was once Ohio’s manufacturing core is now on life support, just a little over a year after President Donald Trump told people not to leave and promised that jobs would come back to the area.
General Motors announced Monday it plans to stop small-car production at its assembly plant near Youngstown and is considering closing it for good. Labor union leaders and others behind a campaign to save the plant in Lordstown are clinging onto hope that they can persuade the automaker to find another use for the factory.
But its outlook is dire after GM announced production of the Chevy Cruze would end in March, halting work at the assembly plant that already had lost two shifts and 3,000 union jobs since the beginning of last year.
GM said Lordstown is one of five factories on the block for possible closure as it restructures to cut costs and focus on autonomous and electric vehicles. What happens to those plants will be considered during contract talks with the United Auto Workers union next year.
The once-thriving GM operation in northeastern Ohio’s Mahoning Valley is one of the few remaining connections to an era when thousands worked in steel plants and factories in Youngstown and surrounding communities.
“That plant is the economic lifeline of the whole valley,” said Lordstown Mayor Arno Hill. “When we lost steel, that plant carried us through.”
Bobbi Marsh, who has worked at the Lordstown plant since 2008 and whose father was there 42 years, said so many other jobs depend on the plant.
“I can’t believe our president would allow this to happen,” she said Monday.
“It’s like we’re in a limbo now,” said Marsh, a single mother who said she has a teaching degree to fall back on if the plant is closed. “But it’s nowhere near the money I was making,”
Youngtown is in a Democratic and labor stronghold, where President Donald Trump won over a surprising number of voters two years ago because of his promise to bring work back to the U.S.
At a rally near the plant last year, Trump talked about passing by big factories whose jobs “have left Ohio,” then told people not to sell their homes because the jobs are “coming back. They’re all coming back.”
