The Electric: U.S. Automakers Face Another Threat—Restive Battery Plant Workers

In 1966, General Motors opened a new factory in a cornfield in Lordstown, Ohio, 210 miles southeast of Detroit, to manufacture top-selling Chevys and Pontiacs. When it opened, Lordstown was the most modern GM plant, to which the company soon added 26 robots. For workers, though, the plant was a brutal physical experience with a vastly accelerated assembly line. By the 1970s, the factory’s 7,000 workers, represented by the United Auto Workers union, were in bitter rebellion: The assembly line pumped out Chevy Vegas with damaged upholstery, paint and gear shift levers. Workers said the defects were the result of the quickened assembly line; the company said workers were sabotaging the vehicles. Either way, chronic worker walkouts at Lordstown persisted into the 2000s and spread to other companies, generating the term “Lordstown syndrome.” Their hard edge only softened with the loss of jobs to competition from foreign car companies, the 2009 financial crash and finally the plant’s closure in 2019.  

Now Lordstown is the spearhead of a surprising revival of UAW militancy—and a new threat to the American transition to electric vehicles: The GM auto plant is no more, but the company last year opened Ultium Cells, an EV battery assembly factory located next door, in a joint venture with South Korea’s LG Energy Solution. Last fall, the Ultium plant’s roughly 1,000 workers—infuriated with hourly wages inferior to those paid at some area fast-food joints—voted to unionize, and they are now in tense contract talks with plant management. The workers’ main demand is to be treated as GM employees, rather than as a separate work force employed by the joint venture, and receive the same top rate of $32.32 an hour that auto assembly workers earn, which would be a whopping 47% raise.