GM Is Closing My Plant. What Are Politicians Going to Do About It?

For the past 20 years, I’ve walked at least nine miles a day on the body store ground of the General Motors plant in Lordstown, Ohio, wherein I help bring together the Chevy Cruze. In a few weeks, when GM shutters our plant, I’ll stroll my final mile.

I don’t understand what’s subsequent for me and almost 15,000 different workers who are being laid off at GM vegetation across the united states of America.

I know that GM is forcing my fellow employees to choose among obligatory relocation to different flora, loads of miles far from their families, and the unemployment line.

For many of my co-workers and me, that is a false choice. I can’t only pick up and go away. My whole circle of relatives lives within the Lordstown location — my eighty four-12 months-vintage mom merely is too frail to transport, and she is predicated on me for her care. I’m additionally looking ahead to my first grandchild right here in June. But if I don’t relocate, I won’t find any other task that pays a dwelling salary.

This is why I’m choosing as an alternative to fight for the correct remedy and dignity that I deserve.

The truth is that our political leaders have failed America’s workers. President Donald Trump promised to revive the automobile enterprise. However, he hasn’t completed something to pressure GM to store our jobs. In fact, in preference to punishing GM, the Trump management has provided the company with billions of dollars in federal contracts.

GM isn’t the only corporation that’s benefiting from our tax bucks even because it betrays employees. New studies from Good Jobs Nation show that 185,000 jobs were lost to overseas competition on Trump’s watch. His management has offered extra than $115 billion in federal contracts to corporations and GM that keep offshore jobs.

Our tax dollars shouldn’t reward task killers. That’s why the heaps of people who’re being laid off by using GM — and the encircling communities harm via GM’s closure of our productive, profitable plant — are calling at the 2020 presidential candidates to come to Lordstown to inform us how they’re going to do what Trump received do: hold GM responsible and save our jobs.

Politicians who ignore Rust Belt cities like Lordstown do so at their peril. Returns from the latest midterm election suggest that Trumbull County flipped from blue to crimson in 2016 and flipped returned to blue in 2018.

Workers in our county found out that Trump’s continued inactiveness to bring jobs lower back spoke louder than his rhetoric. With unemployment and poverty charges — at 6 percentage and 17 percentage, respectively — nicely above the countrywide averages, we need politicians who will do what it takes to show things around.

Here in Lordstown, GM turned into the most effective recreation on the town for employees seeking out a decent salary to help their families. What’s greater, our plant supported many different jobs in the network. It’s estimated that there will be 3 or four jobs lost inside the surrounding system for each GM activity lost.

Lordstown has given a lot over the years to GM — from tax breaks and subsidies in the car bailout to an able, hard-running body of workers. Now, GM is just taking walks away and sending our jobs to Mexico. They don’t appear to care that they’re making our hopes for destiny with them.

We need politicians who will stand on our facet, no longer at the agencies that handiest care approximately their earnings margins.

I wish to peer the 2020 presidential applicants here in Lordstown soon. And I desire to listen to them outline their plans to preserve GM and other offshoring groups responsible. We need suitable jobs right here now. Our future and the future of our network depend upon it.