In 2019, when the last Chevy Cruze was built at the Lordstown Ohio Assembly plant, the Mahoning Valley community responded with a simple demand to GM: “Invest in us.”
Last month, Ohio’s Mahoning Valley was hit once again with job cuts at the Ultium Cells battery plant; around 500 jobs lost, and 850 workers temporarily laid off.
The community spent years working to bring manufacturing jobs back to the area.
Workers and the United Auto Workers (UAW) spent additional years organizing the Ultium plant to ensure safety and living wages.
It is difficult to see the gains of these workers and this community lost again, and that basic ask from our community years ago, “invest in us” stays top of mind.
Since 1966, the Lordstown Complex employed thousands of Ohioans who showed up and worked hard, even as our jobs were threatened with offshoring and automation.
After I had the honor of being elected as President of Local UAW 1112, I did everything in my power to see a new vehicle brought to Lordstown.
We knew that plant had all the right stuff to be a herald of a revived American automotive industry, and our members were ready to get back to work.
We believed then, and continue to believe now, that our members are the backbone of our communities, our states, and our nation.
We have urged our representatives on both sides of the aisle to invest in workers and in communities like Lordstown across the country.
But for companies like Ultium, the passage of the Republican budget bill (the “One Big Beautiful Bill”) this past summer makes it clear that Congressional Republicans are willing to lay waste to these goals.
Ohio U.S. Sen. Jon Husted lauded the significant tax cuts in the bill, but failed to mention that these historic tax breaks for the ultra-rich come at steep cost for working people.
More than 410,000 workers are currently employed in manufacturing facilities like Ultium that build the next generation of clean vehicles or their components.
This includes more than 240,000 manufacturing jobs in the domestic electric vehicle (EV) supply chain alone.
Many of these jobs are supported by federal policies and regulations, including the 30D EV tax credits and the 45X subsidies.
The UAW believes that incentives like these need stronger protections for workers attached, to make sure public dollars are only used to create good union jobs.
But instead of working with us to improve the credits, Republicans used their budget bill to eliminate them altogether, throwing companies that produce EVs and their parts into uncertainty.
The Ultium plant in Ohio is not an outlier.
Significant layoffs at GM’s Factory Zero and Rivian were also announced last month, as were temporary layoffs at Ultium’s Tennessee plant.
The loss of jobs at these facilities is not only a loss for the workers, but also a loss for all of us who live and work in these communities.
These plants uphold local economies, build innovative technologies that position the United States to compete in an advancing global marketplace, and ultimately, produce safe, reliable American cars.
In the plants we organized, the UAW worked to ensure these jobs were good jobs, safe jobs, where workers were able to achieve significant union-backed wage increases and benefits to support themselves and their families.
Facilities like Ultium proved that auto workers building parts and components for clean vehicles could receive the strong union protections and benefits they deserve.
This fight is not over. Our workers will continue to advocate for a system that invests in all of us.
This commentary was originally published by the Ohio Capital Journal and republished here with permission.