Short strike, pledge by GM give Valley reason to hope

Although all the details of the new four-year contract between General Motors Corp. and the United Auto Workers won’t be known until local union officials have been briefed and have then talked to their memberships, what has leaked out appears to be good news for the Lordstown assembly plant.

We use the word appears because until a formal announcement is made by top executives of GM about the company’s future in the region, there can be no let-up in the campaign to secure another product after production of the Chevrolet Cobalt and the Pontiac G5 ends in June 2009.

The Valley should be heartened by a statement issued from GM’s headquarters in Detroit that said the company would maintain its manufacturing presence in the United States with “significant future investments.”

Given that the world’s leading automaker invested $1 billion in readying the Lordstown assembly complex for the Cobalt and the G5 several years ago, it would seem like a good business move on its part to build on that investment.

Indeed, as we have consistently argued in this space, the Lordstown plant today stands as the leader of the new manufacturing paradigm in which management and labor are partners rather than adversaries.

This partnership has resulted in the assembly plant’s being one of the most efficient in GM’s North American structure. The efficiency has brought about a major reduction in the per-car production cost.

Proof that good things are talking place in the plant can be seen in the success of the Cobalt, which has been one of GM’s top sellers since it went into production.

No commitments

A local contract is being negotiated, which would pave the way for the new product, but because no commitments have been made by Detroit, the push to secure another product must be maintained. Why? Because Lordstown isn’t the only facility fighting for its future. There are GM plants in Kansas City, Tennessee and Michigan that are also said to facing the loss of manufacturing. Like Lordstown, they are scrambling to secure their futures.

A battle of the states can be expected, as there was when GM announced several years ago that it was looking for a home for the Cobalt. Now, as then, Ohio should take nothing for granted.

The Strickland administration has a blueprint for dealing with General Motors — left by Gov. Bob Taft when he successfully outmaneuvered other states by offering the company an economic incentive package that corporate bigwigs acknowledged was superior to any other they had received.

We have no doubt that Taft’s successor, Ted Strickland, and Lt. Gov. Lee Fisher, who also is director of the Ohio Department of Development, are well aware of what’s at stake. It helps that the governor represented a portion of the Mahoning Valley when he was in Congress. In fact, Strickland had a house in Lisbon — and witnessed first-hand the economic impact of the Lordstown assembly plant.

A team of officials from the state development department, the technology division, DOD’s regional office in the Valley and the governor’s office has been assembled to work on the project.

“Both the governor and the lieutenant governor are intimately involved in this,” a development official said this week. “They are talking to General Motors about what the state can do to keep the plant in the Valley.”

Strickland and Fisher will travel to Detroit in mid-October for meetings with company executives. The Lordstown plant will be one of the top items on the agenda.