More good news for Valley

More good news for Valley

Last Sunday we celebrated encouraging developments in an impressive list of Mahoning Valley industries in which investments ranging from $3 million to $650 million will be creating hundreds of jobs in years to come.

During the week, Mark Reuss, president of General Motors North America came to the Valley, appearing at the area’s primary industrial anchor, the GM Lordstown plant, to deliver more good news.

Based on the anticipated success of the Chevrolet Cruze, GM will be restoring a third shift to the Lordstown plant, which will mean jobs for about 1,200 production-line employees and 70 salaried employees. First in line will be more than 300 workers from the Lordstown roster who are laid off. The other 800 workers will be coming from the ranks of 6,000 furloughed GM employees nationwide.

These are prized jobs

It is a commentary on both how prized GM assembly-line jobs are and how troubled the national economy is that there will be no problem filling the spots. An Associated Press story last week told of GM workers from Janesville, Wisc., who are making weekly commutes to plants 500 miles away after their plant closed. Some took jobs as far away as Texas and either moved their families or get by with monthly trips home. A theme in that story was that the people of Janesville didn’t know what they had in their GM plant until it was gone.

That hasn’t been the case in the Valley in recent years. Lordstown’s management and unions recognized the value of the plant and made an effort to convince General Motors that the company had a plant here that could make good vehicles and make a profit for the company.

Lordstown today is a more important part of General Motors than ever because Chevrolet is a larger part of GM than in the past. Chevy is expected to provide 70 percent of GM’s sales this year — and the Cruze is being billed as a defining product for the new GM. The Cruze is new to the United States, but it is a platform that is already a proven success in Asia, Australia and Europe.

GM’s total employment numbers are a fraction of what they were at the height of production at Lordstown and the old Packard Electric Division plants, but the well-being of the Valley and the company have never been more closely tied together.