As the last Chevrolet Cruze rolled off the line at the General Motors (GM) plant in Lordstown, Ohio, in March 2019, the workers there had no idea what would be next for them. Their plant was “unallocated,” a new term to just about everyone I spoke with at the time.
When I visited Lordstown that spring, some workers had already moved away, relocated to new positions within GM’s sprawling empire, in Bowling Green, Kentucky; or Spring Hill, Tennessee; or Michigan; or elsewhere. The storied “Lordstown culture” scattered to the winds over the next months and years. Even the 2019 United Auto Workers (UAW) strike at GM couldn’t save the plant.
The Lordstown plant was eventually sold to a company that promised to make electric trucks, but despite much fanfare and an appearance by then-Vice President Mike Pence, no vehicles were built.
Finally, though, there’s a bit of good news from Lordstown. Workers at the Ultium Cells battery plant, a joint venture between GM and the South Korean company LG Energy Solution, voted to join the UAW in 2022, shortly after the factory began producing batteries for GM electric vehicles, and they’ve now ratified a contract that will give them raises of up to 112 percent by 2027, or up to $35 an hour.
“This was a long road,” said David Green, director of UAW Region 2B.
When the battery plant opened, workers were making just $16.50 an hour—around half of the GM workers’ average wage. They had different health and safety concerns, because the battery plant, Green noted, “is essentially somewhat of a chemical factory.” So they began the process of organizing, telling the UAW, “Hey, we need representation. Our pay sucks. It’s scary in here.”
The fight might have been even longer, with battery workers struggling plant by plant to earn as much as they would have at Lordstown or other mainline GM facilities. But one of the key victories—indeed, possibly the key victory—in the UAW’s historic “stand-up” strike last year across GM, Ford, and Stellantis was the inclusion of electric vehicle workers in the UAW’s national agreement with the companies. That means that those Ultium workers will finally earn the kinds of wages they would have if Lordstown hadn’t been shut down. They’ll have better protections from the new and hazardous work processes. And former Lordstown workers are being given the opportunity to transfer back home to Ultium.
“You’ve probably heard us talk about a just transition,” Green told me in June via Zoom. “That just transition is getting our members who work in internal combustion engines the ability to move to these E.V. jobs and not take a pay cut of half and put themselves in harm’s way every day.”
A just transition also meant being able to rejoin their families and resume lives interrupted by the plant closure. “In total, about 180 [workers] over the next couple of months from Lordstown are going to be back home with their families. And that is priceless for me,” Green said.
But that’s a small fraction of the more than 1,600 workers who directly lost jobs when the old plant was closed, to say nothing of the indirect job losses that rippled outward through the community. For many, the result at Ultium is bittersweet.
When I first met Green in 2019, he spoke to me of complicated grief, and of workers being unable to process it because they didn’t know what the future might hold. Five years later, he noted that “people lost their homes. People ended up committing suicide . . . . [We had] bankruptcy, divorces, all that stuff was very real. And until you are living in that moment, you could hear it and say, ‘Oh, that sounds horrible,’ but when these are people you know, and you see it happening, it’s a very powerful, life-changing experience.”
Over the years, the Lordstown complex had been chipped away. At one point, Green said, there were probably more than 10,000 people in the main production plant, more at the stamping plant next door, and another 10,000-15,000 at the Delphi plant in nearby Warren, Ohio.
“I’ve seen it go from this big thing that the whole community relied upon, as a tax base specifically, and it just continued to shrink and shrink and shrink and shrink and shrink,” he said.
During the stand-up strike, the UAW stressed the impact that those plant closures had on an entire community, and they won the right to strike over plant closures. But the UAW’s militancy alone wasn’t what made the battery plant workers’ win possible.
At first, auto companies looked to the transition to electric vehicles as a way to jettison high wages and troublesome unionized workforces. Shut down Lordstown, the site of dramatic wildcat walkouts and the heart of the workers’ fight to control the conditions of production, and open a non-union battery factory as a joint enterprise as a way to blame their collaborators if things went wrong, Green noted. “But make no mistake, they got a lot of federal, state, and local money to build this factory and create these green jobs,” he said.
As climate journalist Kate Aronoff wrote in 2023, “If the Inflation Reduction Act can be said to have a mascot, it’s the electric vehicle. Whenever they’re not out taking E.V. joyrides, White House officials tout a surge of manufacturing spending since that bill’s passage last summer. The Department of Energy now tallies $140 billion worth of announced investments in E.V.s since President Joe Biden took office, including over 100 new or expanded E.V. components or assembly plants.”
There was tension at first between the UAW and the Biden Administration, Aronoff noted, with UAW President Shawn Fain criticizing Biden for handing over billions of dollars to auto companies to create “low-road” jobs. But as the strike continued, Biden made an appearance on a picket line—a first for a sitting U.S. President—and the companies’ concession on electric vehicle workers probably included a calculation that Biden would continue to throw money their way, so they could afford to give the workers a slightly larger slice of the government-funded pie.
Biden got the UAW’s endorsement, even as its leadership has criticized his conduct regarding the war on Gaza. Green pointed to the salvage of the Stellantis plant in Belvidere, Illinois, as a clear contrast to what happened at Lordstown under the Trump Administration.
“Belvidere, when I saw that happening in Illinois, it hurt. It’s like pulling the scab off my wound. I can understand and feel what those people were going through at that time,” Green said. “I write the sitting President [Trump] two letters. I get no reply, not even an ‘I got your letter,’ automatic reply.” Instead, Green became the target of Trump’s angry tweets.
The question of a just transition looms large over the upcoming presidential election. Trump has attacked Biden’s funding for electric vehicles, as has his vice presidential nominee, the working class cosplayer supreme J.D. Vance, Republican Senator of Ohio, who tries to straddle the line between supporting the union and decrying its desire to create good electric car jobs. A second Trump Administration would likely scrap any subsidies and incentivize the companies to play hardball with the workers’ next contract fight, as well as in any new union drives at other facilities in the coming years.
But the UAW doesn’t plan to stop pushing, whatever the outcome in November. And the contract at Ultium in Lordstown gives them something to point to when embarking on new organizing in battery and E.V. production.
“We have unprecedented health and safety representation,” Green said. “That’s huge and important to protect the workers that are in there. And from a financial perspective, people are somewhat amazed.”
Companies have a choice, he continued, between increasing their wages and improving conditions in line with what the union plants are winning, or their workers will organize and join the UAW. “There’s a clear contrast you can see between the union and non-union facilities,” he said. “The Ultium contract: If the people in these non-unionized facilities look at what happened there and what their benefits and pay are, I would hope that they would be more likely to say, ‘Hey, why don’t we deserve that?’ ”
The Ultium workers are excited: 98 percent of them voted to ratify the contract. “I got calls from folks; this one lady’s in tears. She doesn’t have to have a second job doing Grubhub and Uber. Now she can provide for her family on one income,” Green said. “This was that just transition—just this.”