The United Automobile Workers gave a thumbs-up Friday to General Motors’ plans to build its latest electric vehicle at a Michigan plant, but the union isn’t relenting in its campaign to bring back work at factories the carmaker idled elsewhere.
Neither are U.S. politicians. The shutdown of GM’s plants in Lordstown and Warren, Ohio, along with its Detroit-Hamtramck site in Michigan have become an early flashpoint in the 2020 presidential campaign since they were announced last November.
President Trump has excoriated the company on Twitter, urging CEO Mary Barra to reopen or sell the Lordstown site, and likely Democratic contender Joe Biden says the affected communities deserve better.
“We have been and continue to be committed to leaving no stone unturned in keeping all of the GM plants open,” said Brian Rothenberg, a UAW spokesman. The union’s efforts include rallies, a prayer vigil outside the Warren plant and a federal lawsuit arguing the plant idlings violate a 2015 contract.
That suit, filed in U.S. District Court in Cleveland, cites an October 2015 letter from a GM vice president reiterating that automaker wouldn’t shutter or sell any further plants during the contract term, barring conditions it couldn’t control such as a “market-related volume decline” or “act of God.”
Trump, whose 2016 election victory was partly driven by victories in the states of Ohio and Michigan — where he had promised to restore a once-vibrant manufacturing economy — said at a Wednesday campaign rally that GM should start contract talks now with the UAW that are presently scheduled for the fall and will include the Lordstown plant.
“They said they have discussions coming up in September, October,” Trump told his audience in Lima. “I said, ‘Why not tomorrow? Why not on Monday? What do you have to wait months for? Get the discussions going. Get it open.'”
While GM hasn’t acceded to Trump’s demands yet, it has found new positions for about 1,000 of the 2,800 employees who lost work at two sites in Ohio and Michigan and is bringing production of a new electric Chevrolet it once planned to build overseas back to Lake Orion, Mich., where it makes the electric Chevy Bolt.
The move reflects GM’s focus on electric vehicles, billed as more environmentally friendly than their fossil fuel-powered counterparts, and self-driving cars that Barra views as the technology of the future.
Directing resources toward that and ending production of less popular vehicles like the Chevy Cruze built in Lordstown while the company is financially secure will keep it strong in the future, she says.
“We are excited to bring these jobs and this investment to the U.S.,” Barra said in a meeting at the plant with workers and local government officials. “GM will continue to invest in our U.S. operations where we see opportunities for growth.”
That hasn’t satisfied Trump, who complains that GM benefited significantly from his easing of federal regulations and a GOP-led corporate tax cut that recharged the U.S. economy.
Biden, the vice president from 2009 to 2017, pointed out in a video message to union members that those savings didn’t stop the production halts, which affected about 14,000 workers.
Nor did a $50 billion government bailout to keep the company afloat after the global financial crisis a decade ago, during which union members accepted pay and benefit cuts.
“I know GM corporate leaders have said they have to make tough decisions to deal with changing consumer sentiment — that’s true,” Biden said. “When GM needed UAW to step up, you did; but when the UAW needs GM to step up, they’ve chosen to close plants. Their workers, their families, their communities, this nation, they deserve better. It’s time for everybody to be in on the deal, for everybody to take a little bit of the hit.”
Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent making another bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, has been quick to point out that GM management and investors have been spared the pain of the closings.
The company has bought back $7.1 billion of its shares in the past three years, a tactic that returns cash to stockholders while buoying share prices, according to a regulatory filing. It garnered $147 billion in sales last year and paid its CEO $22 billion in 2017, the most recent year for which compensation data was available.
During the bailout era, union workers “took deep concessions,” said Angelique Noble, a member of UAW Local 22, which represents workers at the Detroit-Hamtramck plant GM is idling.
“We had to slash our wages and work next to people that made less money than us just so we could have a job,” said Noble, one of many workers who joined the union’s #GMinvestinUS video campaign urging the company to reconsider the closings.
“Now here are today,” she added. “They’re not a destitute company; they’re a company far in the black, far in the black, and they’re jumping in front of the curb to say, ‘We’re just going to kill and devastate communities so that we can do research and development so that we can figure out how to be autonomous and we can be strong in the future.'”
GM’s quandary represents the broader choice U.S. employers face in weighing profit targets against the welfare of their workers and the communities where they work, said Michigan state Rep. Lori Stone, who attended a Feb. 22 prayer vigil at the Warren plant.
“Once upon a time it was the best thing in the Motor City to work for the Big 3 — I’ve always kept that in the back of my mind,” said Bill Norona, another Local 22 member who joined the video campaign. “This is essentially a slap in the face, from my perspective.”
