Tony Dejak/AP Photo
Workers protested outside General Motors’ sprawling Lordstown assembly plant near Youngstown, Ohio, on March 6, 2019, the plant’s last day of production.
“Nobody stood up for us,” said Robert Morrison, who made turbines at a plant in Burlington, Iowa, for over 30 years, until the German company Siemens closed it down in 2019. Nobody stood up: not the mayor, not the governor (who seemed to add insult to injury when she toured a non-union Siemens factory in North Carolina alongside Ivanka Trump), not their congressmember, not Sens. Joni Ernst (now fighting her own re-election battle) and Chuck Grassley, and certainly not Donald Trump, despite all of his campaign promises.
In a speech in Burlington in 2015, then-candidate Trump promised, “I will be the greatest jobs president that God has ever created.” But Morrison, whose voice choked with tears as we spoke by phone, is determined to tell as many people as possible that those promises haven’t been kept. He spent his last day at the plant just before Christmas 2018.
Donald Trump’s boasting of a manufacturing renaissance with him in the White House led counties like Morrison’s to swing from blue to red and hand Trump the Electoral College. But those words have in many cases turned into nothing. While many voters still seem to believe in the president, workers from these shuttered plants are doing what they can to get the message out: The jobs, despite campaign-trail bluster, have not returned. In too many cases, from Siemens to Rexnord in Indiana and Lordstown in Ohio, plants have continued to close down, with union jobs melting into air.
As Daniel Marans noted at HuffPost, on the campaign trail in 2016, Trump had “flouted long-standing conservative economic orthodoxies in ways that angered conservatives and inspired a mixture of ideological intrigue and political fear in some liberals.” But the rhetoric hasn’t matched up with the president’s governing style, which has been the same “wealthy-first, trickle-down economics” Republicans have long carried out.
The numbers show this: The Economic Policy Institute calculated that 1,800 factories had closed between 2016 and 2018, and the net loss in manufacturing plants—and jobs—continues, hastened recently by the pandemic. Foreign subsidiaries of U.S. manufacturers increased employment by 257,400 jobs in 2017 and 2018, while stateside workers struggled.
The losses are deeply felt. “I always wanted to make things,” Morrison told me. He and his co-workers saw the plant as a second home, and the community viewed it as a source of self-respect. Employees felt a deep pride in their work, in the quality of their product and the success of the plant, even in the givebacks their union, the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers Local 1010, made to keep the plant open after Dresser-Rand bought it in 2005. They’d taken a $3 an hour pay cut back then, Morrison said, and would have been willing to negotiate with Siemens, too, but they weren’t given a choice. Siemens also closed plants in Wellsville, New York, and Mount Vernon, Ohio, around the same time; the jobs, Morrison said, went to places as far-flung as India and as close to home as that non-union North Carolina facility.
Iowa is a key early presidential-caucus state, and so Morrison has had a lot of experience with this year’s Democratic crop of candidates. He described himself as a “Bernie guy” but also spoke warmly of vice-presidential nominee Kamala Harris, who spoke with him about his experience. Trump’s been scarce, so Morrison joined Mike Oles of Our Revolution—the Sanders campaign spin-off organization—to crash a Trump rally in Des Moines. Before the plant closed, Morrison told me, he had never done anything like that before, but when it shut down, he decided it was time to speak up.
Morrison describes himself as “lucky” to have been near enough to retirement—he’s 64—to not be on the job hunt. But that does little to change the sense of real loss from the plant closure. Fighting back is the way he can channel that anguish. And he has allies in that fight.
The Economic Policy Institute calculated that 1,800 factories had closed between 2016 and 2018, and the net loss in manufacturing plants—and jobs—continues.
WHEN I MET CHUCKIE DENISON in Lordstown, Ohio, it was 2019, and the General Motors plant, where they made the Chevy Cruze, was “unallocated.” The workers at Lordstown were stuck wondering what would happen. David Green, the president of United Auto Workers Local 1112, which represented Denison and the other Lordstown workers, told me at the time, “You ever lose somebody? You go through seven stages of grief. A job’s a pretty important thing like that too. But we can’t go through all seven stages. We’re stuck in the middle.”
Denison, who transferred plants one last time with GM and then left the company, told me then that he planned to spend his early retirement raising hell. He’s kept his promise: We spoke this month as he was bouncing from a Vice President Mike Pence rally to a Trump rally to a debate, “bird-dogging” the candidates with a colleague in a pickup truck bedecked with homemade signs reading, “DUMP TRUMP,” “Black Lives Matter,” and “222,000 Americans DEAD.”
Despite pressure from the union and even a major strike of 50,000 workers across GM in 2019, the Lordstown plant closed for good that year, setting 1,500 plant employees adrift. Denison bird-dogged Trump then too, traveling to Canton, Ohio, when Trump held a fundraiser there, demanding to know why the president wasn’t coming to Lordstown to offer his support. The facility was sold to a company that promised union jobs making electric trucks, but according to Denison and to Tim O’Hara, former president of Local 1112, the jobs haven’t come back yet. “He lies to his base and to the whole world while families like mine and others in the community of the Mahoning Valley are still battling the aftermath of the plant closing,” Denison said.
The Lordstown workers remembered Trump’s repeated assurances to the Mahoning Valley, during his campaign: no more jobs disappearing. Trump told a cheering crowd in Youngstown in 2017, “‘Don’t sell your house’ and ‘All the jobs are coming back,’ and the ironic part is the exact opposite happened,” O’Hara explained. “Hundreds of people that used to work at GM Lordstown, in fact, did sell their house and move to other states, including myself. I sold my own house.” These days, Trump claims that Lordstown is booming, but the plant remains empty.
The direct job loss from Lordstown led to indirect losses too, he noted. “You have everything from secretaries that we employed at the union hall, and you’ve got restaurants, you have teachers that had to be laid off because a lot of students ended up getting pulled out of the school systems and moving. The list is long. There are a lot of factors that are in play when a plant that size closes.”
O’Hara was able to retire, but at the time the plant shut down, his wife was still working at Lordstown and had six years to go before she could access her pension. So the family moved to Bowling Green, Kentucky, for a GM job. “I spent my whole life in the Valley until I had to move last year. I’m paying taxes in Kentucky now and I’m not paying them back in Ohio,” he noted. He likes Bowling Green—he appreciates that it’s diverse, that his kids are in school with immigrants and refugees from something like 30 countries—but it’s still rough having been uprooted at retirement age.
It’s particularly galling to O’Hara because Ohio had given GM $60 million in tax credits in 2009, when the post-crash auto companies were struggling to survive. After the closure, Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost pursued payback from the company, saying that GM had promised to keep the plant open until at least 2028 and maintain 3,700 jobs through 2040 in exchange for those credits. The company wound up agreeing to pay back $28 million, and the state required GM to invest $12 million more back in the Mahoning Valley. “One thing with GM is when something benefits them, they follow the contract to a T,” O’Hara noted. “But, when it benefits the workers, they violate it continually.”
THE PAIN OF PLANT CLOSURES may scatter some workers, but it brings others together with common purpose. Mike Oles, whom I met in Lordstown when he worked for Good Jobs Nation but who is now field director for Our Revolution, has been spending time with workers like Chuckie Denison and Robert Morrison, crashing Trump rallies and demanding answers. Oles, Denison, and Shannon Mulcahy from Indianapolis snuck into a Pence rally this fall to unfurl a banner; in Des Moines, they brandished a sign saying, “OLDEST FACTORY IN IOWA CLOSED.”
Mike Oles
Shannon Mulcahy worked at Rexnord, making bearings, for 18 years, just around the corner from the Carrier plant where Trump made his triumphant 2016 “mission accomplished” speech, announcing that he’d saved the factory. To Mulcahy, that speech was as meaningless as George W. Bush’s arrival on that aircraft carrier. Carrier might still be open, but Rexnord is gone. “Our company was doing very well,” she said. “They came in one day and sent us home that same day, told us that they was going to close the factory and suspend all operations, and open back up in Mexico. Basically, they fired us all.”
It was heart-wrenching to Mulcahy, who was 15 when she started working at the plant. “I grew up there. That was the only stability I ever had in my life.” She worked in “heat treat,” blasting bearings with heat to harden them. As the only woman doing the work, she said, “I put up with a lot of shit” to be accepted by the men. But she gave as good as she got, and it became her life, even if some days the heat and the speed of the work got to her. “My whole life revolved around Rexnord. I miss my friends, I miss my co-workers. Even the people that I didn’t even care for I miss. I would love to see them now. It changed everything about me,” she said.
Mulcahy’s cousin worked at the plant; her uncle had spent 46 years with Rexnord. “He can barely walk now,” she said. “He broke his back for Rexnord all those years, and then they moved to Mexico, then they canceled out his insurance and everything.”
She’d thought Trump would save Rexnord. Carrier, down the street, did indeed stay open. According to Chuck Jones, former president of United Steelworkers Local 1999, which represents the Carrier workers as well as Mulcahy and her colleagues at Rexnord, Carrier has hired back many of the people who had been laid off. “I never heard any presidents since I’ve been alive talk about saving our jobs, and he talked to us and I really felt like it was real for once,” Mulcahy said. Now, she feels like Trump lied. Carrier, rather than an example of the gleaming Trumpian future, feels like salt in her wounds.
Mulcahy is 46 now, and she can’t find a job that matches the $26 an hour—plus overtime—that Rexnord paid. Though she’s open to going back to school to train for a different career, she also has bills to pay now. The injury continued when she was laid off indefinitely from her new job due to the pandemic. Currently, she’s taking care of her granddaughter and trying to figure out her next step. That’s been made even harder because she had to have heart surgery in June. She worries that Trump will take away what’s left of the Affordable Care Act, and that she’ll be stuck uninsured and with a pre-existing condition that will require medication for the rest of her life. The health care fight, too, has made her a political activist.
When we spoke, she was in a car with Oles, on the way to Nashville to protest outside the final debate. She feels now like Trump is “such a bully,” and worries that that attitude rubs off on his supporters. After the humiliation at Rexnord, where, she said, the workers were expected to train their replacements from the plant the company was opening in Mexico, Mulcahy is enjoying raising a little hell. “It’s about time somebody does something. At least somebody’s trying.”
Mike Oles
From left, Chuckie Denison, Shannon Mulcahy, and Robert Morrison attend a rally.
CHUCK JONES HIRED ON at Rexnord in 1969; when the company shut down, he retired and handed off the presidency of United Steelworkers Local 1999, assuming he’d be headed for a quiet time. Instead, some people from the community convinced him to run for trustee in Wayne Township, overseeing community assistance and the fire departments. He made headlines in 2016, challenging Trump’s narrative about Carrier and earning the president’s enmity, expressed through vitriolic tweets. But it’s the plant closings, rather than the Twitter rants, that still get to him. “I’m still bitter over this stuff and I don’t think I’ll ever get over it,” he said.
At Rexnord, Jones said, the average salary was about $25 an hour, plus regular overtime. “When the plant closed down, these people are now on the street looking for a job. Luckily, some of them found jobs, but they were in the $16–$17 an hour range. A big part of it was there wasn’t any overtime opportunities,” he explained. “Some of them had to pull children out of college. Some of them, their wives went to work that maybe weren’t working before. You saw a lot of property up for sale. Part of it was through foreclosures and some of them had to get rid of it and maybe cut back on their house payment that they currently had.”
Both Carrier and Rexnord were making money, he noted. But the super-exploitable workforce in Mexico can do the work cheaper. “It’s frustrating when people say this old shit, ‘Well, the American worker can’t compete.’ Yeah, we can compete on everything, but we sure as hell can’t compete with $2 an hour wages.”
The U.S. economy, Tim O’Hara noted, has split more and more into two. There is what he called “the Trump side economy,” with a booming stock market, and then there’s the people getting up early to go to the assembly line, the mill, the warehouse, in places like Indiana and Ohio, where the pandemic has only accelerated the disconnect.
“Addictions are going through the roof, people are losing their houses,” O’Hara said. “They’re getting kicked out of their apartments because they can’t pay their rent because they’re not working.”
Everyone I spoke to was focused on the election to a degree, but was also looking beyond it.
For Oles, the point of showing up at rallies isn’t only to persuade Trump supporters that the president isn’t, in fact, on their side. It’s also to send a message to Democrats that working people expect more than they’ve gotten in the past few decades. The pandemic has made it harder to do that work, but he hopes that it’s setting the stage for continued mobilization once the election is over, to pressure a Biden administration to do more for these workers.
There are things, Oles and Denison said, that a Biden administration could do right away, including making an executive order ending federal contracts to companies that close up shop in the U.S. and move overseas. But such a thing, Oles noted, is only playing defense. What really needs to happen, he said, is an offensive on behalf of workers: expanding the minimum wage, improving workers’ rights, and providing health care for all, even a Green New Deal tied to worker justice. “The last Biden/Obama stimulus didn’t have strings,” Oles said. “They basically gave money away without worker standards and workers’ rights. In this era of recovery, you should only be getting stimulus money and government support if you make real commitments to keeping jobs here in the United States, supporting unions, and taking on inequality in the country.”
Chuck Jones agreed. “We damn well better do everything we possibly can for working-class people because Obama, his first two years, I think we controlled everything and he played nice. Then, when Republicans got in in his second two years, they forgot he was playing nice. This nicey-nicey shit has got to stop. People have got to say, ‘OK, who put me in office and what is the right thing to do?’”
Tim O’Hara hopes that a working-class spirit of resistance will spread across the country, uniting essential workers and those knocked down by decades of lies and neglect. Lordstown had been in the 1970s the embodiment of worker unrest and dissatisfaction with industrial jobs, what the bosses would call the “Lordstown culture.” Now, that Lordstown spirit has been scattered.
“I call [GM CEO] Mary Barra ‘Mary Appleseed’ because she basically dropped a hammer on Local 1112, sent our members all over the nation, but she planted seeds of Local 1112 in all these other states,” O’Hara explained. “And in some of the plants, some of our former members actually have run for office and been elected at their new facilities. Yes, they destroyed the Lordstown culture, but maybe it’s going to come back and bite them in the you-know-what at some point.”
