GM Inside News Forum banner

WSJ: Life Goes On For The "Migrants" Of GM

17K views 207 replies 28 participants last post by  sdotjeezy 
#1 ·
The Wall Street Journal
November 30, 2020

Lordstown workers leave families behind in Ohio for far-away jobs.

On Zach Sherry’s first day of work at the General Motors Co. factory in Bedford, Ind., trainers gave a safety presentation that included an image of a cartoon hand spurting blood from the ring finger.

The overt message was straightforward: Rings can get caught in the machinery, so don’t wear them on the job.

The symbolism wasn’t lost on the 48year-old Mr. Sherry, who had transferred to the Indiana facility after losing his previous job at the GM plant in Lordstown, Ohio, that shut down last year. The transfer meant leaving his family behind one state away.

“You just took me 450 miles from my home and you’re telling me to take my wedding ring off,” he says.

Mr. Sherry is one of a cadre of Lordstown workers turned middle-aged industrial migrants, venturing out alone in search of good pay and benefits.

Itinerant work has long been common in manufacturing, including people moving around the country for fracking jobs. Auto workers haven’t been immune to chasing their livelihoods across state lines, either. When GM and Chrysler LLC. closed plants as part of their bankruptcy restructurings a decade ago, workers were moved to the factories that survived.

The workers in Lordstown, many of whom are multigenerational GM employees, never planned to be among them. The plant was an example of American manufacturing might when it opened in 1966, churning out Chevrolet Impalas, Bel Airs and Caprices.

It has since become a symbol of the economic struggles of those who work in factory jobs. American auto workers in particular, already losing work due to advances in automation and shifts to overseas plants, now also face dwindling job prospects as car makers increasingly look to move to easier-to-assemble electric models.

A few months after taking office, President Trump traveled to Youngstown, a short drive from Lordstown, addressing blue-collar supporters who worried their factory jobs were gone for good.

“They’re all coming back,” he said. “Don’t move. Don’t sell your house.”

Instead, cratering demand for the Chevrolet Cruze left the Lordstown plant without a car to build, and, following a 40-day strike, company and United Auto Workers union officials agreed on terms for closing the plant. A large cadre of veteran employees faced the choice between staying home with their families but uncertain financial futures, or relocating to other GM plants where they’d hang onto their union pay and benefits.

When the assembly lines at Lordstown finally stopped, nearly all of the plant’s roughly 1,400 hourly auto workers were able to find jobs at other GM plants. The vast majority were in Texas, Missouri, Tennessee and other out-of-state locations, according to the company.

Veteran GM workers have an incentive to stay with the company. For decades, good pay and defined-benefit pensions were guaranteed in contracts negotiated by United Auto Workers for workers at GM, Ford Motor Co. and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV. U.S. car companies and the union agreed to eliminate pensions for new hires in 2007.

GM’s Bedford, Ind., facility, which took some 60 former Lordstown workers, churns out engine and transmission components 24 hours a day. The company often requires employees there to work seven days a week. There’s abundant additional overtime for those who want it.

The result is that many Lordstown migrants have seen their lives reduced to work-eat sleep-work cycles, clocking in and clocking out until they can rejoin their families.

Jay Dye

It’s almost like the bright yellow Chevy Cobalt is taunting Jay Dye.

Every day around 7:30 p.m., after another 12-hour shift at the Bedford factory, Mr. Dye unwinds with a stroll around the Eagle Pointe Golf Resort, where he shares a two-bedroom rental unit with another transient GM forklift driver. The route leads him past the home of a GM family with the Cobalt in the driveway.

The model used to be assembled at the Lordstown factory. The chances are pretty good that Mr. Dye installed the speedometer or the radio on the yellow one.

“Seeing that car every day is a kick in the gut,” he says.

Mr. Dye, 45 years old, started out studying special education at Kent State University. But the $18,000 he expected to earn as a teacher after college couldn’t match the $50,000 he’d make at GM with a high-school diploma. So he quit school and, in 1996, took a job at Lordstown, a ticket to the middle class. In six years he’ll complete three decades at GM and be eligible to retire with a $3,400 monthly pension.

As rumors swirled about Lordstown’s closure in 2017, Mr. Dye found comfort in Mr. Trump’s words and in the UAW’s reassurances that union leaders would press GM to find some use for the plant.

“My whole life I thought Lordstown was going to be there,” he says.

His daughter, 17-year-old Gianna, is a drum majorette and a competitive golfer and dancer. Neither Mr. Dye nor his wife, clinical social worker Cathy Dye, wanted to tear her away from her high school and activities in Ohio.

Some co-workers transferred to other factories in the months before GM and the UAW agreed on terms for closing Lordstown. Mr. Dye held out until just a month before the shutdown and found himself with limited options.

He settled for a $5,000 relocation bonus, which committed him to work one year in Bedford, 6½ hours by car from home.

He brought very little with him: Five pairs of ****ies work pants, four pairs of jeans, some T-shirts and a few sweatshirts. He figures he can pack it all, start the car and be gone in two minutes.

The Dyes’ youngest, 9-year-old Jaxon, has taken his father’s absence the hardest of their three children. During his evening walks, Mr. Dye fields calls from Jaxon about football or his favorite hobby—racing small, high-powered cars on a dirt track.

When Mr. Dye visits home, every third weekend, he usually sleeps in Jaxon’s room.

In Bedford, he punches in each day between 6:54 and 6:56 a.m., and starts driving the forklift at 7. He usually logs 84 hours a week—12 hours a day over seven days— loading trucks with parts for factories in Mexico, Canada, New York and other states.

“Right now I’m existing,” Mr. Dye says. “I’m not really living.”

This fall, Mr. Dye got a reprieve of sorts. GM granted his request to transfer to a plant in Toledo, and he started there Monday. Unlike the Bedford factory, Toledo doesn’t have mandatory weekend shifts, so he plans to visit home every week. And the plant is just 2½ hours away, adding eight hours of family time to every weekend visit.

Zach Sherry

Before he punches in at the factory by 3 each afternoon, Mr. Sherry takes off his wedding ring, secures it in an Altoids tin and tucks it into his lunchbox.

He and his wife, Liz Sherry, 48, were high-school sweethearts. Thirty years later, he is still happy to warm up her cold feet at night. “It’s just a little thing, but it makes me miss him,” says Mrs. Sherry.

One morning after he left for Indiana, she woke up to discover that during the night she had organized his pillows into the shape of a person.

Mrs. Sherry lives on her family farm in East Palestine, Ohio, in the dream house she and Mr. Sherry built together, sunflowers lining the driveway.

In Indiana, Mr. Sherry rented for a while. In July he bought a two-bedroom condo, complete with furniture, in the Eagle Pointe development where Mr. Dye lived. The condo retains the impersonal cleanliness of a real-estate developer’s model home.

The house backs onto a wooded hillside leading down to Monroe Lake. Most mornings before work, Mr. Sherry carves a couple of steps into the steep slope, gradually building a staircase connecting the condo to the shore.

It’s a ploy to make Indiana an appealing place to stay for his kids, 19-year-old Parker, a quarterback at West Liberty University in Wheeling, W.Va., and 17-year-old Payton, in her senior year of high school.

Mr. Sherry bought two kayaks and fantasizes that Parker will do his online studies at the condo and they’ll paddle around the lake together. He watches Payton’s basketball games online and plans vacations around her golf tournaments.

After Mr. Sherry finishes cutting stairs, he goes for a short hike or jumps in the lake. One recent morning he pointed across the cove toward the home of another Lordstown bachelor. “He’s got three kids,” Mr. Sherry said, before pivoting and pointing toward a house in the other direction. “He’s got kids.”

Stories circulate among the Lordstown transplants of marriages crumbling under the pressure of separation.

Payton feels guilty for not making more time for phone calls with her dad. To compensate, she saved their favorite shows from Shark Week to watch with him.

Parker worries about his dad’s loneliness, and about his own. “It’s like I lost my best friend,” Parker says, his voice catching.

After high school, Mr. Sherry worked in a country-club locker room, before starting his own cleaning service.

He felt lucky when his brother hooked him up with GM in 2000. “In our area there aren’t many jobs,” he says.

Now he’s 10 years away from being eligible to retire and, having grown up poor himself, hopes to have enough money when he dies to leave something for Payton and Parker.

To do that, he took on one of the most dangerous jobs at the Bedford factory—mixing alloys in a foundry that burns at 1,700 degrees. He spends all day in a smock and a full sweat, melting down rejected parts and other aluminum scrap.

“I don’t know if I’ve got 10 years in me,” Mr. Sherry admits.

Dan Santangelo

On the wall of Dan Santangelo’s rented house at Eagle Pointe is a cluster of framed photos. Happy grandkids. An expectant couple. Palm trees and a grinning vacationer.

It’s a typical display of family photos. But it’s the landlord’s family on the wall, not Mr. Santangelo’s.

Mr. Santangelo, 50, started missing his family even before he left them to work at Bedford last year. Day after day he sat silently in a recliner at the house in New Middleton, Ohio, and stared into the void like a man facing a prison sentence— five years away from home until he could retire.

He’d chew over the what-ifs. What if his parents got sick? What if something happened to his two kids, or his wife? What if he didn’t earn enough to cover two households?

He stopped eating but couldn’t stop throwing up. His wife, Anna Santangelo, finally convinced him to seek help.

The doctor put him on “happy pills,” as Mr. Santangelo calls the antidepressants. He’s not happy. But the drugs keep him suspended above the abyss.

The blackness was familiar and frightening. In 2009, the Santangelos found themselves in a deep financial hole, having overspent on their three-bedroom ranch house. The national recession led GM to cut shifts at the Lordstown plant, and the combination of growing debt and reduced income forced the family to seek refuge in bankruptcy.

Mr. Santangelo contemplated suicide, contriving ways to make it look accidental so that his wife could get his life-insurance payout. “I felt like I failed as a man, a husband and a father,” he says.

His family talked him back from the brink, and life settled down into a happy decade of basketball games with his daughter, 19-year-old Gianna, and working at the volunteer fire department with his son, 22-year-old Joe. The family shared Sunday night pasta dinners with his parents.

Mr. Santangelo admits he cheated his way through high school and struggled with the book work when he tried aircraft mechanics.

His father, Perry Santangelo, worked at the GM Lordstown plant from 1966 to 2000. He pulled strings with the union to get Dan a job in 1995.

“I knew if I got into GM, my worries were over,” say the younger Mr. Santangelo.

When Lordstown shut its doors, Mr. Santangelo took a $30,000 bonus for a three-year commitment to relocate to Bedford. “You’ve got no choice, buddy,” his father told him. “You can’t just quit GM.”

Until Mr. Dye moved to Toledo this month, he and Mr. Santangelo shared the two-bedroom unit at Eagle Pointe. Some days, the only time they saw each other was when Mr. Santangelo finished the overnight shift, which starts at 11 p.m., and handed off the forklift to Mr. Dye in the morning.

Every day Mr. Santangelo packs the same sandwich— ham, turkey, cheese and Miracle Whip on wheat—for the unnamed meal that comes in the middle of his shift.

He frets over the possibility that he won’t be close enough to help if something bad happens to his family. He calls Joe to remind him to replace the smoke-detector batteries. It was mere chance that he was home in May, when Mrs. Santangelo’s father grew fevered and delirious and died of Covid-19 alone in the hospital.

The stability and security Mr. Santangelo thought would be his when he joined GM remain just out of reach. “Never in my wildest dreams did I think Lordstown would close,” he says.

‘My whole life I thought Lordstown was going to be there,’ a worker says.








.
 
#2 ·
In Bedford, he punches in each day between 6:54 and 6:56 a.m., and starts driving the forklift at 7. He usually logs 84 hours a week—12 hours a day over seven days— loading trucks with parts for factories in Mexico, Canada, New York and other states.

“Right now I’m existing,” Mr. Dye says. “I’m not really living.”
The Lordstown assembly plant was the place of the notorious Lordstown Strike of 1972, a strike against management at the GM plant. The strike resulted in many defective Chevys coming off the line with torn upholstery and other defects. The strike lasted a total of 22 days and cost GM $150 million. Later strikers elsewhere who similarly engaged in disrupting production lines were labeled as having "Lordstown Syndrome". According to Peter Drucker, a management consultant, it was not just the rigid discipline of the assembly line, or the speedup of operation, but rather that the workers almost unanimously felt they could have done a better job at designing much of their own work than GM's industrial engineers (hence the need to include the floor workers in part of the plant design process).
You wonder how this is possible. Lordstown assembly got screwed with incredibly bad GM vehicles (Vega, Monza, Cavalier, Cobalt, Cruze, among others), over the years. GM did right in shutting it down - there was no going back - but the human toll is tough to take.








.
 
#3 ·
“You just took me 450 miles from my home and you’re telling me to take my wedding ring off,” he says.
LOL, well, if you had taken time to improve your skills, you could have stayed with your family fool, no one owes you anything in this life, not even your own mother.

Meanwhile, I just got accepted for a Ph.D program in Data analytics, please someone convivence me how America discriminates against black people, for a poor kid that came to America (Legally) with $3000.00 to start college, America has been a great place for me. I even found a wife. (Pole) and no one has ever given me sheit for my color, not even in Arkansas
 
#5 ·
People can't get a PHD in... anything... without a college degree and a Masters.
These guys don't have that.

There's 2 sides of the same coin. America's institutions do discriminate. They were built and designed that way. The flip side is, people need to WANT to do better. You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink.
And while there are a lot of exceptions out there, that isn't always the case. Also, the data does show that education for black and latinos is lower than whites and Asians.

But when you live in a town of < 10,000, the opportunities are few and far between. You have to leave and go to where the opportunities are. You and I live in a major metro area where opportunities are limitless. A good number of this country does not.
 
#8 ·
Mind you, excellence is not only found amongst the college graduates, there is excellence in all fields, from brick laying to machinists, and everything in between.

One cannot stay stagnant in their chosen field and expect to have the freedom to chose their destiny.

Mother Barrah, started out checking fender panels and bonnets on the factory floor as she went to engineering school, and built from there.

But Unions sell these poor souls a bill of goods
 
#14 ·
Lordstown some of the worst quality control of any GM Plant. It turned many people off so they weren't buy them. The cars themselves were decent but missing screws, parts not fully put together are just issues had with my sunfire and Cruzes. From the guys comment about his wedding ring tells me he only went to work for a check and didn't care about the product he was putting out.
 
#16 ·
tLordstown some of the worst quality control of any GM Plant. It turned many people off so they weren't buy them. The cars themselves were decent but missing screws, parts not fully put together are just issues had with my sunfire and Cruzes. From the guys comment about his wedding ring tells me he only went to work for a check and didn't care about the product he was putting out.
In 1982 I did a term project for an Organizational Behavior class where I compared the working conditions at Lordstown vs a Volvo plant at Kalmarr, Sweden. The Lordstown plant was as bad as it could be: they fought all the time, were bored, absent and maybe drunk.

Volvo was the opposite. Volvo rotated workers so that they attained mastery, for example, everything that you needed to know about the interior. There was pride in being an expert. Then the worker supervises others in this area. Then he steps back and works on improving processes. Then he moves on to another area.

I concluded that the mundane processes and the hidebond culture at Lordstown made people into drones, and the unions fanned resentment. If GM worked to emulate the Volvo model, the work rules imposed by the union would have been an obstacle, not that GM tried.

I also compared the Ford Flat Rock plant with the NUMMI plant in Fremont, CA, but I'll save that for another day.
 
#38 ·
I agree. They're finally in the reality that most people have faced their whole lives. Outside of government and teaching, very few jobs are guaranteed to be employment for life. And no jobs should be guaranteed for life.
 
#59 ·
That's kind of the fundamental problem with most unions and UAW in particular, right?

But there's really 2 sides of the coin too.
GM is no longer the type of company that can fund excessive salaries and pensions. That's in part because of decades of mismanagement on their part and competition that is faster, more agile, and operate in lower cost countries and have lower cost structures.

UAW fought for high pay and pension to protect the workers. But they also allowed GM to not be as efficient in order for GM to to compete more effectively, forcing GM to make cheaper cars with lower quality in order for GM to increase margins in order to support the excessive cost structure.

It should have been more of a cooperative relationship.

Lordstown seemed to be a factory that received bad product after bad product. We've known for a while now that GM can't make compact cars in the US profitably. So that should have signaled something.
 
#71 ·
Relocating and Retraining sound simple but those problems have a little more depth to them than what some of you are representing:

1. Relocating: especially if you're a homeowner who now has to try and sell a house in a town that depended on a particular business as the sole pillar of economic support that is now gone. This is actually the biggest problem, because the home that they may have had a mortgage on is now pretty much worthless. Who wants to buy home in a place where there are no jobs to pay for said home.

2. Retraining: people on the whole are resistant to change, some of us are better at adapting, but for a lot of people out there, they only go with what they know. Especially line workers, or workers who are used to following a set of steps day in/out...1, then 2, then 3...throw in any deviation they're lost because they're used to having something/someone spell out exactly what they need to do.

I'm not going to even touch on some of the socioeconomic issues grossly misrepresented in this thread, that's another topic for a completely different forum.
 
#73 ·
What you say is true, but the overall point here is, what is so special and unique about these workers from Lordstown? It's happened to countless other workers around the country and the world. All throughout history. How this qualified as a national WSJ story rather than a backpage human interest story in the Lordstown Gazette is the mystery.
 
  • Like
Reactions: gkr778
#72 ·
It all comes back to financial responsibility. These employees should have at least 6 months worth of savings accumulated to weather any potential job losses or personal crisis. Along with that, they should continue to develop their skills either at their job or on their own so they can pivot if necessary.

The days of punching the clock, mindlessly doing a repetitive job, and having lifelong job security are way gone. Adapt or be faced with tough decisions.
 
#102 · (Edited)
And that’s a big difference between the two countries. Australia doesn’t have a big enough economy to insulate it from even the slightes economic headwind.
America has a huge economic flywheel that will recover from recent events and come back even stronger because people are not held hostage by exorbitant trade costs. Those skills and labor are needed, won’t go away in our lifetime but the influence of high prices can be moderated by increasing competition- that’s America’s gift to the world.
 
#104 ·
It is hard for some of these people to get a additional college education when they are forced to work 6/7 days a week without notice. Sometimes 10+ hrs and/or working 2nd shift. Have known several people over the years that work 32-3800 hrs/yr. Meet one guy in passing that his only day off that year was Xmas day. Plus when they cut a shift they usually force OT on the remaining ones and have been know to shuffle start/finish times with little notice.

Lets not forget, Lordstown was profitable building the Gen1 Cruze too.
The company implemented some major chances that ended up ADDING cost to vehicles built there at the tail end of G1, beginning of G2. That was not the fault of the hourly employees, or local management for that matter. It was decisions that came from Detroit.
 
#107 ·
It is hard for some of these people to get a additional college education when they are forced to work 6/7 days a week without notice. Sometimes 10+ hrs and/or working 2nd shift. Have known several people over the years that work 32-3800 hrs/yr. Meet one guy in passing that his only day off that year was Xmas day. Plus when they cut a shift they usually force OT on the remaining ones and have been know to shuffle start/finish times with little notice.

Lets not forget, Lordstown was profitable building the Gen1 Cruze too.

The company implemented some major chances that ended up ADDING cost to vehicles built there at the tail end of G1, beginning of G2. That was not the fault of the hourly employees, or local management for that matter. It was decisions that came from Detroit.
Exactly, you get it! Make a decent wage and then they put 10-20 hours over-time on top of that, there isn't time or desire to cross-train your skills.

Once GM "sets the hook" it hard to get away, that is, until they decide to cut the line............


In 1990, my last full year at the Ford Dealership, I made ~$33,000 - then almost 6 years later, my first job out of college, I was making $25,000 at EDS as a contract employee on the GM account.

It took me a bit longer than it should have to finish school, but had I not quit and gone back full-time, it would have been a lot longer, and I doubt I would have ever got done.
 
#111 · (Edited)
No one is ever forced into anything. It’s just a question of the price you will to pay for a little more wiggle room. If I was asked to give up an apprenticeship to increase my skill level vs. losing my current dead end position, it’s a no brainer for me, let the kids starve for a few months, but they will be feasting on later... when I am swimming in dough
 
#113 ·
Ed, I fully understand how difficult it can be to learn something new when you are working 60+ hours a week, I've done that, actually 80 hour weeks - you feel trapped. You sleep, eat and work with no life while the company bleeds you dry. But on the same token, no one was forcing me to do that - every morning on my own free will I got up and went in until one day I decided it sucked and opened up newspapers and called headhunters and got out.
 
#118 ·
It doesn't have to be that way...and if the answer is "it just does", then people aren't trying hard enough to change course. It's the whole reason why this country is such in a foul mood. "Own free will" is not something that your capable of just because you did it. There are many people you didn't even know that probably made the decisions you made fruitful for you.

...but to get back to the title of this thread...these people also made decisions just like everyone else did. The fact that those decisions were made "of their own free will" doesn't mean that we as lucky US citizens just sit on the sidelines and wag our fingers at them. We are lucky because our decisions went our way--even though we think we orchestrated the whole thing when in fact we didn't...
 
#157 ·
#181 ·
Bleep off...I don't throw my service in anyone's face, you probably didn't even know. Secondly no one said **** about Africa so dont drag your little 3rd world politics into this conversation....this is about your constant warhawking to fight China for whatever reason...my stance is and will always be put up or shut up. If you're not willing to suit up to "fight commies" then shut the entire **** up about doing so. That is all
 
#192 · (Edited)
People of good will can agree or disagree on an issue.

The Situation in 2008 however had nothing to do with Capitalism. I was CFO of a midsize mortgage bank at the time.

Fannie, Freddie and Ginnie were the real problem. They literally gave away Government guarantees without bothering to do proper underwriting if you’d call it that.

Stated income loans? Seriously? You just made up the income you have, and got a mortgage or a refinance, and the Freddie’s would take those documents in.

Our Operation was well run enough to be able to sell to a bigger Bank

But the Political class used the Opportunity to advance their political narratives. While the real problem was the Government.
 
#193 ·
people of good will can agree or disagree on an issue.

The situation in 2008 however had nothing to do with capitalism. I was cfo of a midsize mortgage bank at the time.

Fannie, freddie and ginnie were the real problem. They literally gave away government guarantees without bothering to do proper underwriting if you’d call it that.

Stated income loans? Seriously? You just made up the income you have, and got a mortgage or a refinance, and the freddie’s would take those documents in.

Our operation was well run enough to be able to sell to a bigger bank

but the political class used the opportunity to advance their political narratives. While the real problem was the government.
Bingo!

;)
 
#197 ·
Repeal of the laws was motivated by social engineering goals, not banks.

The argument went something like, banks hate people that are not of European descent and laws in place are discriminatory, giving them the short end.

Ultimately without Government social engineering, to make ‘homes more accessible’ and Government security guarantees, this would not have come to pass.

The Political class was irresponsible in the end, they allowed this who charade to pass.
 
#198 · (Edited)
Yes the political class is to blame, specifically for being corrupt. But to me it is clear that they are nothing but "tools" of the bankers - they work when they are told to (example, repeal of laws that inhibit bank profits), and stay the heck out of the way when they are told to (example, just give us the money and bail us out or the whole house comes down).
For many the political class is the only cause of this, because that is the hand that everyone sees. But to me the mind that drives the hand are the banks. As I said, any games these banks play is camouflaged under some socio-economic conditions - in this case they used the "home loans for poor people scheme" which they happily exploited after having got the govt to repeal earlier laws. This "social engineering scheme" would never have seen the light of day if the banks did not think they could exploit it.
 
This is an older thread, you may not receive a response, and could be reviving an old thread. Please consider creating a new thread.
Top