Chuckie Denison took the podium at the United Steelworkers hall in Canton, Ohio, in his ever-present blue Good Jobs Nation T-shirt, flanked by people holding protest signs. One handmade sign read “Promises Made, Promises Broken”; it featured a likeness of President Trump, who’d flown into Ohio that day for a big-money fund-raiser at a nearby country club. Another sign pointed out that Lordstown, home of the iconic General Motors auto plant, was only 49.4 miles away. Still another read, “We will lose 43,000 jobs because of Lordstown closing.”
Denison leaned into the microphone and told the assembled crowd his story, introducing himself as a third-generation GM autoworker. “I started in Dayton, Ohio. I watched that plant close. I went to Shreveport, Louisiana. I watched that plant close. I come here to Lordstown, Ohio, happy to be back in my home state. I’d never have thought that Lordstown would close.”
During the 2016 presidential campaign, Denison said, Trump came to northeast Ohio and promised better days. “He looked the people in the eyes and told them, ‘Do not sell your homes. The jobs are coming back.’”
The jobs never came back. When GM announced, last November, that the Lordstown plant would be closed as part of a restructuring plan, the community held out hope that the company would decide to retool the plant, and rehire some of the laid-off workers. But the last Chevrolet Cruze rolled off the Lordstown assembly line on March 6—a no-frills white model that workers draped in an American flag and posed behind for a last photo.
Variations of this scene have played out in countless shuttered plants and deindustrializing communities over the past four decades. But with the closure of Lordstown, workers are losing more than paychecks, retirement plans, and long-term job security; they’re also burying a lost chapter in union organizing—the moment in the early 1970s when the militant leaders of United Auto Workers Local 1112 at the Lordstown facility briefly revived the demand for greater control in the workplace. With the specter of Trump, the self-advertised mogul-savior of the manufacturing sector, lurking offstage, the last days of Lordstown feel like a parable about what becomes of workers in a political economy that hinges on their systematic disenfranchisement—on the factory floor and in the public sphere alike.
And as a twenty-first–century parable of the workplace, it naturally involved Donald Trump spouting off on Twitter. Nearly two weeks after the last car left the plant, Trump fired off a couple of tweets telling David Green, president of UAW Local 1112, to “get his act together and produce.” That outburst, combined with the news that Trump was heading to Ohio but skipping the plant, led to the press conference where Denison had laid into GM and Trump.
At the same event, Ohio Democratic Representative Tim Ryan—who’s mounting a 2020 run at the presidency—spoke about how plant closures destabilize the entire community. “You hear from a football booster, ‘So-and-so had to transfer. He was treasurer of the football boosters. So-and-so had to transfer. They ran this Boy Scout group,’” he said. “That’s what workers are.... They put their time in. You do everything right and then when you get home, you go coach Little League.” American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten joined him in calling for GM to reopen the plant. “If parents lose their jobs, it devastates the community,” she told me afterward. “Teachers understand that; they are in some ways the first responders.”
Alyssa Brookbank is one of those teachers and the president of the Lordstown Teachers Association. She’s seen the effects of the shutdown up close. “Students know they are going to have to leave some of their family and close friends behind,” she said. “They don’t know how to handle it, and it is not their fault. It is a lot to put on the shoulders of young kids. This is much bigger than just GM. It is going to affect other businesses in ways we don’t even realize yet. It is going to have a ripple effect.”
Denison has the words “Union Thug” tattooed across his forearm in sweeping script. Higher up on his arm, he told me, he has a tattoo of the state of Ohio. He returned to Ohio, to work at Lordstown, just in time for the bottom to fall out of the economy in 2008. By that time, he had enough seniority with GM—having hired on right out of high school in 1998—to survive the wave of layoffs that came with GM’s bankruptcy filing in the wake of the crash. “The biggest thing wasn’t the money,” he says now. “It was the fact that I had a pension.” Because of those benefits, he was able to retire this year after 20 years of factory labor. He’s one of the lucky ones.
“We always worked really hard at GM, and it was a fun place to work,” he told me. But any enjoyment came in spite of the way the workers were treated, not because of it, he recalled: “Management did not like to see you smiling or having a good time. They would rather see you miserable and not producing than happy and producing.” In much the same fashion, he contended, GM kept introducing changes to the organization of work on the floor that seemed designed to further divide the labor force, and thereby secure management’s increased control over working conditions. “It seemed like every decision GM made inside the plant had nothing to do with building a quality car, and it had everything to do with retaliation,” he said. “On the plant floor, there was basically a war on the workers. It never made any sense.”
Yet those battles came against the backdrop of declining union power at GM facilities, and throughout the auto industry. For years prior to Lordstown’s closure, the UAW had already made enormous concessions to GM. The infamous two-tier contracts, accepted in 2007, sliced wages and benefits for new hires to well below what workers already on the line were getting. This skewed arrangement sometimes meant workers making $14 an hour were doing the same job at the same time as workers making more than twice that. This was still another management tactic, in Denison’s view, to “split us up.” There was a brief strike at the time, attempting to stave off the concession, but Denison recalled feeling “lots of doubt” about the future at GM.
After the 2008 meltdown, meanwhile, it looked as if GM itself could be collapsing. A series of plant closures came in the wake of the company’s 2009 bankruptcy. “We had people transfer here from 26 different states,” explained Tim O’Hara, the vice president of Local 1112 and a Lordstown worker for 41 years. “The parking lot looked like you were in an amusement park, because there were license plates from everywhere.” O’Hara said that the shift over to the Cruze helped pull GM out of bankruptcy; small cars were in higher demand than SUVs and the other, larger, less fuel-efficient vehicles that had been GM’s calling card. The workers who transferred to Lordstown thought, for a while, that they’d be safe. But apprehension stole over the Lordstown line as another round of contract negotiations looms after the current UAW contract with the automaker expires this fall. And when the Lordstown bosses shut down one shift at the plant earlier this year, senior GM workers started to put in for transfers. Others, O’Hara said, weren’t given a choice. Forced transfers begin with the lowest-seniority workers—they could either pack up and go wherever GM needed people or get laid off and lose their health insurance. So instead of waiting for the company to lower the boom, many union members began to apply for voluntary transfers.
This flurry of early departures means that those left behind in Lordstown are mostly locked into a waiting game. The union won’t know the fate of the plant until this September’s negotiations with GM are finished. For its part, GM has only told reporters, gnomically, that the plant remains “in a state of readiness.” The technical term is “unallocated.” When workers on the ground at Lordstown heard the term, O’Hara said, “We all looked at each other like, ‘What’s that? We’ve never heard that before.’” David Green, the president of the local, added, “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.”
Jobs at GM used to pay a family wage, but these days, most workers are more likely to be in two-income families—and for some, both incomes come from GM. O’Hara was able to retire, but his wife, also a Lordstown worker, has six years to go until she can access her pension. In other words, O’Hara explained, “even though I’m retired, I could end up having to move too.” Workers have plenty of other family concerns as well—elderly parents who rely on a working-age child, children in school, partners whose jobs are based in the community and harder to move.
“Some are waiting until the end of the school year; some families are separated now,” Brookbank said. “It has been a black cloud hanging over our heads. Usually the end of the school year is a fun time, and everybody is excited for summer, but this year it feels so much different—not only for the students, but for the staff, knowing that some of the students won’t be moving up to the next grade.” Three of her colleagues, she said, have family members at the plant. “One family is moving. Two are waiting it out.”
Denison’s fiancée is one of the workers who’s already transferred, down to Tennessee. They met on the job at Lordstown, ten years ago. “On Fridays, I’d order pizzas,” he said. “She came walking by and I had half a pizza left and I offered her the pizza to start a conversation.” She has a daughter who’s now 17 and finishing high school in Ohio while her mother works in Spring Hill. “Most kids at 17, they want to get away from their parents,” he said. “But she’s the exact opposite. Her and her mom are like this.” He holds up two intertwined fingers, his eyes welling up, and pauses for a moment. “There’s all kinds of horror stories about families separating,” he said. “But ultimately, I’m tired of chasing GM. I’m not letting GM dictate what I do for the rest of my life.”
The fallout from letting GM dictate the terms of living in Lordstown for so long is unmistakable now—and stands out in especially strong relief beside the union’s past struggle for workers’ control. The unallocated Lordstown plant is just off Highway 80, impossible to miss even at 70 mph. It’s still adorned with a massive sign that features a blue car and the legend “Lordstown Home of the Cruze” in giant white letters. The Lordstown exit off Interstate 80 led straight to the sprawling plant, now a ghost town. The parking lots were empty except for one, filled with new white Cruzes—one of them, I imagined, that last car made at Lordstown.
Stark “Save the GM Plant” handmade signs on plywood stood outside of each entrance to the plant, alongside professionally printed “Drive It Home” signs made by the UAW. At one entrance, there was a hand-stenciled “Bernie 2020” sign.
Mike Aurilio, recently retired after 48 years at Lordstown, is still the recording secretary at Local 1112. He started at the plant in 1970, and fondly recalled his troublemaking days, when the plant was known for the workers’ radicalism. “We were average age around 20,” he said. Many of the workers were just back from Vietnam; others, he said, had been recruited to come to Lordstown to work from coal country in West Virginia and Kentucky. They brought Appalachia’s raucous, militant union culture with them. “It was an education like you wouldn’t believe,” Aurilio recalled.
Jobs were plentiful in those days. And the union was strong, despite its daily battles with GM’s new management division. “We used to call [management] the little SS or the Gestapo because they all wore white shirts and ties,” Aurilio said. “My third week there, a guy passed out on the line, and the supervisor reached in and just pulled him out of the way, and another body went over there. And the line never stopped.” In response, the union stuck together. In 1972, when the company began to speed up the line—to a production rate of 100 cars an hour—the workers rebelled and went on strike. “The international [UAW] hated us. GM hated us. We were a very radical group,” Aurilio said.
Tim O’Hara’s brother, Dan, began working at Lordstown shortly after it opened in 1966, but still lived at home with the family. O’Hara remembers sitting at home, watching his brother leave for work, and then return an hour or so later. “My dad said, ‘What are you doing home?’ ‘Oh, they fired Jimmy, so we all walked out.’ ... There were strikes constantly. It was kind of like the perfect storm of labor unrest.”
The 1972 strike at Lordstown became a national news story. Playboy reporters turned up to interview the workers about their frustration with the plant. Labor historian Erik Loomis, author of A History of America in Ten Strikes, explained that the 1972 Lordstown action symbolized the unrest among a new generation of workers who weren’t satisfied with what the assembly line offered. By 1972, Loomis explained, the UAW had been in place for around 35 years. Most of its earliest members had retired. Legendary UAW leader Walter Reuther—who was still president of the union when Aurilio began working at Lordstown—was gone, but only just, and UAW leadership wasn’t much younger than Reuther had been. “For them, given what they had lived through, working a mind-numbing job—it is as mind-numbing in 1972 as it was in 1942—the benefits, they were good enough,” Loomis said. “Obviously, for that generation that was coming back from Vietnam, it wasn’t.”
The old-guard leadership of the UAW didn’t see how they had laid the groundwork for a new generation of employees, surrounded by protests everywhere (Kent State, where four students were killed by National Guard troops during a protest, was a little more than half an hour’s drive from Lordstown), to start demanding more from their working lives than logging 40 years of 40-plus hours on a monotonous assembly line.
Things were changing in Washington, as well. Congress was considering major upgrades to the New Deal social contract that brought a fair amount of prosperity to the working class in exchange for longstanding labor peace. Under the ambitious overhaul of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and even via Richard Nixon’s surprisingly forward-looking battery of domestic policy reforms, such as the earned-income tax credit, momentum appeared to be building behind major egalitarian initiatives such as full employment and a universal basic income. “This was this moment where it looked like everything was possible,” Loomis said. But the protest over the speed-up didn’t seem to make much sense to a leadership that had acquiesced to management’s total control decades earlier.
The struggle among workers to win more meaningful power on the job, as Loomis explained, had been for decades “a daily battle between workers and foreman over who is really controlling the workplace.” In the 1930s, the big industrial unions of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) fought to bring dignity to factory work, and to the rank and file in the steel and coal sectors, by winning both improvements in the working conditions (e.g., rules dictating what could and could not be demanded of employees) and freedom from work, via a shorter workweek. Reuther’s aim, Loomis said, was “to have the UAW or the CIO be at the table on every major policy decision in the United States, whether it has to do with unions or not.”
But after World War II, business fought back. Congress passed the Labor Management Relations Act of 1947 (known colloquially as Taft-Hartley, after its Republican legislative sponsors), which cracked down on union organizing and shielded open-shop factory regimes from organizing drives. A growing Red Scare led to the purging of the Communists (and other leftist activists) from the UAW and much of the broader labor movement. The purges gave Reuther more control over his union, but backfired in terms of the quest to expand the power of labor. With the “Treaty of Detroit” with GM in 1950, the UAW largely ceded control over the production process in order to win a five-year contract with good wages, benefits, and pensions. “You get enough to live on,” Loomis said. “But at the same time, you really give up any control over your own life, and that never really changes in the American workplace.”
The 1972 Lordstown strike revived (all too briefly, as things turned out) the demand from organized labor for workers to exercise some control over the moment-to-moment process of production. Yet the Lordstown action also ended up marking a different kind of turning point for factory work in America. Employees won a few of their smaller, concrete goals, such as getting laid-off people rehired, but the international caved in to management when it came to the demands among Lords-town wildcatters for greater control over their own working conditions. “They were unable to win freedom from work,” Loomis said, “or freedom from that kind of work, because they were just starting a conversation and it never had the time to really come to fruition.”
The main limiting factor was a prolonged economic slowdown. In 1973, a major recession hit, miring the American economy in stagflation, and deindustrialization began in earnest. Workers started demonstrating to keep plants open rather than shutting them down with strikes. The Lordstown strike, Loomis said, “could have meant, ‘Let’s rethink the future of work while we still have these jobs.’ That moment is lost once everybody just starts hanging on to what they’ve got.”
O’Hara started at Lordstown in 1977, just as the steel mills were being shut down in nearby Youngstown. The age of strikes at Lordstown was now all but over. As the area lost jobs and people, and the tax base for the schools and social services was shrinking, a job at GM, O’Hara said, was still “the golden ticket.” The jobs might have been monotonous and hazardous, but they were union jobs. “To this day, you have people jealous of UAW workers because we were making good money,” Aurilio recalled. “All these people lost their jobs. They were struggling. Everybody knew what we made an hour. Everybody knew when we got a bonus. It was front page news.” In such conditions, the community was less sympathetic to the possibility of a strike that might augur further short-term losses for the local economy. And anything resembling the former spirit of solidarity that launched the UAW was in decidedly short supply, so far as ambitious reforms such as greater worker control were concerned.
The workforce got older, too, and settled down. “As you started your family, as you bought a house, then you had to come to work,” Aurilio said. “You couldn’t be this radical. You still stuck together, but that wildcat theory went out the window.” The renegade strikers at Lordstown remained GM’s poster children for radicalism within the union, but as the 1970s wound down, the reality was very much the opposite, O’Hara recalled. “We’ve kind of agreed to everything that they asked us to, to have job security.”
It’s still hard, Loomis said, to imagine what the Lordstown workers could have won in 1972, because the strikes arose in such spontaneous fashion, with strike leaders largely crafting their demands on the fly. “They didn’t really have articulated goals about what they wanted,” he said. “But they knew what they didn’t want, and they didn’t want a future—that they ended up having—of a lifetime working in a factory job. That is a very interesting moment and one that—in a different world—might have opened it up to a different kind of conversation about the future of work in America.”
The announcement of the closure of the plant in 2018 reminded a lot of people of “Black Monday,” when the first steel mill shut down in 1977, O’Hara said. The steel industry struggles onward, though Trump’s tariffs haven’t brought back the boom times, any more than his tweets are going to bring back Lordstown. And perhaps, Loomis said, we’ll look back on this moment at Lordstown as yet another turning point—as the end of large-scale industrial production in America. “Which is terrible,” he noted, “but at the same time, given the trajectory of where things are going, it is time to quit being nostalgic about the past and organize for the future with whatever economic world we have.”
Unlike many recent plant closures, Lordstown’s production isn’t being moved outside of American borders. (This may be why it’s less useful for Trump’s posturing.) Why it has been “unallocated” remains something of a mystery for the workers. The plant stayed open throughout the time when Lordstown employees had an unparalleled reputation for troublemaking. Aurilio and O’Hara both suggested that Trump’s elimination of Obama-era fuel economy standards, which had helped spur renewed demand for smaller, fuel-efficient cars like the Cruze, might also have sped along the plant’s fall.
A report released by the Hedge Clippers, a money-in-politics watchdog group, and the American Federation of Teachers principally faulted the short-term profit goals of hedge fund investors. They’d begun demanding that GM carry out another buyback of its existing stock in 2017 and 2018, in order to raise stock value for its shareholders. (Laying off workers is of course another quick way to juice stock prices.) GM had already spent $5 billion on buybacks in 2015, the report noted, but investors were angling for another stock-fattening buyback binge. “That means,” the report explained, “that every dollar ‘saved’ by plant closures and job cuts at GM could go straight into the pockets of Wall Street and billionaire hedge fund managers.”
Whatever the ultimate forces that conspired in the final shuttering of the Lordstown plant, the impact will be devastating. A study from Cleveland State University estimates the short-term cost of the shutdown to the surrounding community at more than $3 billion in lost economic output.
This means that in addition to the workers let go or displaced by the closing of the plant, northeast Ohio will endure the fallout from GM’s decision for years on end. Other unions, like the teachers, have a stake, too. Many of Brookbank’s students wrote letters to GM’s CEO to protest the plant’s closure. That was when her union rallied to support the Lordstown workers. “Doing nothing,” she said, “was not an option, knowing how it was going to affect the students and their families.”
This is another side effect of the denial of workers’ control: The futures of the 1,600 workers let go with the closure of Lordstown are in the hands of managers and investors far away from the community—and in another economic world entirely. Meanwhile, the phones at the union hall, O’Hara told me, ring constantly with local residents calling with suggestions to save the plant. The union would prefer that GM reopen the plant, since that would guarantee the workers’ pensions and allow people to stay in their homes. There was even a proposal from a local car dealer to buy up to 180,000 Cruzes in order to create a competitor company to Uber and Lyft, one that would own its vehicles and directly employ its drivers. GM, however, turned the proposal down. “Are they not interested because they have their own plan for the plant? Or were they just blowing it off?” O’Hara said. “We don’t know.”
O’Hara recalled that, after the closure of the nearby Youngstown Sheet & Tube steel mill in 1977, a coalition of church and community groups joined forces with the steelworkers’ union to try to buy the mill. “It ended up failing,” he said, “But there was a big push back then, that the workers should own the mill, because they would know best how to run it.”
This idea hasn’t gone away—indeed, worker ownership plans are enjoying something of a revival (see John Case’s story “An Economy in Waiting”). “The thinking behind the latest wave of experimentation with economic democracy, including the Evergreen Cooperatives in Cleveland, can be traced back to the early experience of deindustrialization, and in particular to Black Monday in Ohio,” explained Joe Guinan of the Democracy Collaborative, a group advocating cooperative ownership programs. From that effort grew the Ohio Employee Ownership Center and the Democracy Collaborative, which has now published a new paper proposing a “Right to Own” for workers at plants being closed or sold. “The workers should get a chance to come up with ideas for how they could keep their jobs, and give them the right to take over that plant if it’s being sold or closed,” said Peter Gowan, the paper’s author and a policy associate at the Democracy Collaborative. “They think they can do a better job with it than either it closing or being bought out by a private equity firm that’s going to asset-strip the company.”
The Right to Own proposal calls for the creation of public institutions to aid in the transition to worker ownership, from technical assistance to financing. But just as important, it’s a proposal that places faith in people like Denison and Aurilio to run the plants where they work. To Aurilio, the mandate for such fundamental transfers of power within the workplace has always been obvious. Management, he said, had never had any real idea how to build a car. “I remember arguing with a couple of engineers. They’d call me because they had trouble—the bolt they had was two inches and the hole was four inches. It was just common sense that you weren’t getting enough bolt in there to thread it down. They say, ‘I went to college and I know this. This is the bolt that’s supposed to work in that.’ When you prove it to them, they don’t care.”
The Right to Own proposal, along with something like the 10 percent worker ownership plan that has been suggested by the U.K.’s Labour Party, could be a step toward giving the workers more power to make decisions, on the shop floor and about the future of their jobs.
Youngstown’s earlier experiments in worker control, as well as more recent successes in Cleveland, also serve to drive home the ways in which the larger community stands to benefit from instituting basic protocols of worker ownership. “When a plant like this closes, it can often rip the heart out of a town or a neighborhood, the entire local economic ecosystem,” Gowan said. “The suppliers get screwed over, families, children, schools, tax revenues, all the sort of things that go into building a healthy society.”
The labor movement used to wrestle with such questions of control as a matter of course, Loomis noted. But those conversations faded as deindustrialization brought desperation. “There are many, many ways that one can think about work and who we work for and what work means. These are just conversations that are so lost in America.”
But as nostalgic Trumpian promises to bring back the old jobs continue to fail, and companies like GM continue to close plants, those big questions are rising up again.
Chuckie Denison’s not giving up. At Los Gallos restaurant one Tuesday night, he passed from table to table with a petition to save Lordstown. Two women at the bar told him they had moved with GM too. There was a band called Leather and Lace playing; the band’s fiddler, in a blue Good Jobs Nation T-shirt that matches Denison’s, told the story of the plant to the audience, asking for signatures on the petition. She sang a cover of Bruce Springsteen’s “Youngstown,” with the last verse rewritten to refer to Lordstown’s plight.
Politics always interested Denison, from his first high school government class. He got involved in politics for the first time back then, canvassing for Bill Clinton. “I came out of a conservative small town that survived on farming, probably 99.9 percent white, but I’ve kind of always had a problem with authority, I guess,” he laughed.
Since then, he’s focused a good deal of his activist energy on union matters. Even without exercising the right to strike—something that the UAW relinquished for a while after GM’s bankruptcy, though it has since issued strike notices—he still had stories of actions in support of his coworkers. He’d been part, too, of the campaign to turn back Senate Bill 5, which in 2011 would have stripped public-sector employees of their collective bargaining rights, but which was overturned through a massive effort by unions and allies. “At the statehouse, the solidarity I felt, the energy was so high and intense,” he said. “And we won, but it just seemed like it died down after that when, really, we should have taken that energy and moved forward.”
He’s seeking a fresh infusion of the same kind of energy to bring Lordstown back from the brink. “Now’s the time for unions to join forces together,” he said. He’s been inspired by the teachers’ strikes across the country, and wanted to occupy the Lordstown plant when it was closed. “Even though it might have been a small group of us, it could have grown,” he said, recalling how workers occupied and then took control of the Republic Windows and Doors factory in Chicago in 2008. “We had national attention. But if you’re watching this from the outside, you don’t see really hard resistance. It kind of deflates everyone else. ‘Well, if they’re not going to fight back, why should I?’”
He’s excited about Bernie Sanders, more so than any candidate in his lifetime—he made the “Bernie 2020” sign outside of the Lordstown plant, and he’s appeared in a video for the candidate. But even should Sanders come to power, he argued, that watershed would only mark the beginning, rather than a crowning victory for a whole new wave of worker organizing. “The massive protests you see right now, they’re only going to have to intensify, to push our legislators to pass this agenda for the American people.”
“Incremental change isn’t going to work,” he noted. “We’ve got to be running for a huge transformation. And it’s not like these ideas are fairy-tale ideas. These are ideas that we actually once had, or other countries do.” Shuttered factories and steel mills make him tear up, he said, but he’s also looking toward a future—the solar panels in front of the Lordstown plant made him think of possibilities for future production. Where he lives, in Craig Beach, he said, once there was an amusement park. “Now there’s just an old playground. As I drive through, I get upset and sad. But at the same time, it inspires me. There’s no reason why we can’t rebuild this.”
He harked back to another fiery union agitator of a more ambitious organizing era—the Gilded Age radical Mother Jones. “She had this saying, ‘I abide where there is a fight against wrong.’ That’s what I want to do in my retirement.”
This article was supported by the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.