GM, Not Trump, Is the Real Villain to Some Ohio Factory Workers

LORDSTOWN, Ohio — After an election campaign in which he had pledged a manufacturing renaissance, President Donald Trump came to this once-thriving industrial region of northeastern Ohio last year and all but waved a mission-accomplished flag.

The jobs are “all coming back,” he announced. “Don’t move, don’t sell your house.”

That vow collided with the shifting dynamics of the auto industry on Monday when General Motors told workers it was idling Lordstown’s prized Chevrolet factory.

“Some people were crying,” said Joyce Olesky, a 23-year employee of the plant. “I looked over and saw people who looked like they had the flu, turning white.”

Many Lordstown residents recalled that Trump had promoted steel tariffs and his trade savvy as a way to create jobs. But rather than fault the president for failing to deliver what he promised, a number of workers were quick to exonerate him.

Some portrayed him as well-intentioned but simply outgunned by larger economic forces. Others suggested that whatever Trump’s flaws, they paled in comparison to those of General Motors, which they considered the real culprit.

“I believe that no matter tariff or not, GM will continue to take our cars out of this country because it’s cheaper to do it and ship it back,” said Olesky, a Trump supporter.

Beyond the roughly 1,600 jobs that are likely to be lost at the plant, there are a few dozen suppliers employing thousands of workers in the region, along with businesses here in the Mahoning Valley that will be hit hard by the loss of customers.

Timothy Francisco, director of the Center for Working-Class Studies at Youngstown State University, said a conservative estimate of the impact on the area was three additional jobs lost for every one cut at the plant.

On Monday morning, Earl Ross, the owner of Ross’ Eatery & Pub, a social hub in Lordstown, was in a tree stand poised to hunt deer when he received a text message about the news. “My reaction was a sick stomach,” Ross said, “and for the whole rest of the day, I just sat in the rain and thought about the future.”

There is also the likely effect on the housing market, as workers try to offload mortgages amid the prospect of unemployment.

Jason Sickler, who has worked at the plant since 2000, said he would prepare his house for a possible saleas he contemplated whether to request a transfer to a General Motors operation in another city.

“I was literally nauseous yesterday when I walked out of there,” said Sickler, who enjoys his job in the trim department and is loath to relocate with a son still in high school. “Today I’m trying to get a better game plan, accept it a little more.”

In some ways the story of Lordstown in recent decades sounds a lot like the story of industrial America writ large. The number of workers at the GM plant peaked around 13,000 in the mid-1980s, according to the union there. It had dropped below 5,000 by this decade, as foreign competition and automation took their toll. But in other respects GM’s presence allowed the village of about 3,200 to defy the economic realities bearing down on the region.

Factory workers have helped generate millions of dollars in village income-tax revenue over the years to pay for infrastructure and other expenses. “We’ve been blessed with the ability to have money to do that,” said Arno Hill, who has served as mayor in two stints totaling nearly 20 years since the early 1990s.

Even during the recession and financial crisis of 2008 and 2009, which pushed GM into bankruptcy, the plant and the town were only briefly affected. And in 2010, when GM began to produce a new fuel-efficient sedan, the Chevrolet Cruze, in Lordstown, workers at the plant were overjoyed.

“Oh, my God, we were so excited,” said Marisol Gonzalez-Bowers, who has spent more than two decades at the plant. “We had three shifts, were running at full capacity. Twelve hours if you wanted it.” Gonzalez-Bowers said that with overtime, she could easily take home $75,000 a year during the early half of this decade.

Even with Lordstown’s relative durability, Trump’s vision of an industrial comeback resonated in town. Trump carried the county by about 6 percentage points, a nearly 30-point swing toward Republicans since President Barack Obama won it decisively in 2012.

But the day after the election, GM announced that it would eliminate a third shift at the Lordstown plant. After years of strong sales, the Cruze was flagging as consumers defected to trucks and SUVs.

Then, in April of this year, as the slump continued, the company said it was eliminating a second shift. The workers’ last day coincided with news reports that the company would be building a popular SUV in Mexico.

“It was terrible — they announced that as people were walking out to their cars,” said Dave Green, the president of the United Automobile Workers local in the area. “They turn on the radio, and they hear that GM is going to build the Blazer in Mexico.”

Critics said Trump seemed oblivious to the plant’s struggles despite his promise to workers there. “I had a conversation with him and he did not know about the first two shift layoffs,” said Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, who spoke with Trump by phone over the summer. “It shocked me.”

Brown said he had asked Trump to intervene personally with GM’s chief executive, Mary T. Barra, and that the president had been noncommittal. “He said, ‘We’ll see,'” Brown recalled. The White House declined to comment.

The notion that Trump is indifferent or ineffective in the face of factory job losses challenges the essence of his political appeal, and he has moved to counter that idea — on Tuesday by threatening to take away GM’s government subsidies, and on Wednesday by calling for new tariffs on imported cars. At least some of the workers spurned by General Motors share Brown’s feeling that the president could have done more for them.

Tommy Wolikow was laid off from the plant last year and said he became a Trump fan after attending the president’s speech hailing the return of manufacturing jobs. “I felt he was speaking to me, and I believed him,” said Wolikow, who didn’t vote in 2016 but had planned to vote for Trump in 2020. “I took the man for his word.”

But in recent months, Wolikow has concluded that the president wasn’t interested in following through.

Wolikow, who now volunteers for the progressive group Good Jobs Nation, said that he and his fiancée, Rochelle Carlisle, together brought home around $100,000 a year when both worked at the plant in 2016, but that they now lived on her earnings as a waitress at Cracker Barrel. It brings in about $250 to $300 a week — not enough to cover their mortgage and car payments, to say nothing of expenses for their three daughters. Other workers continue to support the president, however. “What he had planned, it should have worked,” said T.J. Lambert, a former GM worker in Lordstown who left the plant in late 2016. Of the corporate tax cut passed under Trump, he said: “The plan was to bring those jobs back, a one-time tax cut. He can’t have control over what a corporation does 100 percent.”

Olesky and Sickler, the current GM workers, have voted reliably Republican in recent years, but they are proud union members who say the labor movement is often the only protection the middle class has against corporate greed. “Without a union, people would be making $11 per hour,” Olesky said. “Management gets as much as they can, and unions try to protect us.”

Sickler noted in disbelief that the company would be laying off eight of his colleagues at the end of this week, even though it would cost little to allow them to stay on until the plant goes idle in March. “They’re trying to run on a skeleton crew to save money,” he said.

Kimberly Carpenter, a GM spokeswoman, said the layoffs were “just regular people movement due to people returning from leave.”

Other Trump supporters simply refused to interpret Monday’s announcement as a death sentence. They were heartened by Trump’s confrontational comments toward Barra.

“I said, ‘I heard you’re closing your plant,'” Trump told The Wall Street Journal, relating their conversation. “'It’s not going to be closed for long, I hope, Mary, because if it is, you have a problem.'”

Hill, a tall, barrel-chested man who worked for decades for a local automotive supplier, said he thought the odds were fair that the president would eventually save the plant, though he conceded it could take several months.

“People say, ‘Trump promised us,'” Hill said. “Yes, he came here, told the people in the valley, ‘Don’t sell your house, we’re going to bring your jobs back.’ Well, you know, they made the announcement yesterday. How soon is soon enough?”