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Saving GM Lordstown: Workers & managers had an ally in Alli
By Kalea Hall
LORDSTOWN
Shortly after Herman Maass was named General Motors Lordstown Assembly Plant manager in 1996, he got a call from his boss.
Maass was told GM would not give Lords- town another vehicle to build after the year 2000.
“It was like my heart was cut out of me,” Maass said.
He knew he needed to immediately talk to Al Alli, longtime United Auto Workers Local 1112 shop chairman.
Before he even told his staff, Maass brought Alli into his office and shut the door.
“I said, ‘Al, I just got a call, and it came from a very high level that we don’t have a new product scheduled for Lordstown after the year 2000,’” Maass said.
Alli had heard these rumors before, so he wanted to check it out for himself.
“He came back a couple of hours later and he said, ‘You’re right – they are going to shut the place down,’” Maass said.
Alli and Maass knew they had to make changes to keep the plant alive, the workers employed and the Mahoning Valley economy stable.
“It meant outsource, it meant doing job consolidations and it meant eliminating a lot of people,” Maass said.
THE LEGEND
The late Alli was a man who could take command of a room. He always had a cigarette in hand. And he had a caring smile.
“When he would get up in front of our membership, you may not like [what he said], but you believed him,” said Darwin Cooper, a GM retiree who spent 18 years on the UAW 1112 executive board.
Upon his sudden death in December 1998 in his early 50s, Alli was the longest-standing shop chairman in UAW history with 22 years under his belt.
As shop chairman, he had the tough job of chief negotiator for the Local 1112 contract.
Alli’s friends and comrades credit Alli as a Youngstown South Sider with both street smarts and book smarts.
“I have never seen foresight like Al’s,” said Jim Graham, former Local 1112 president from 1997 to 2011. “He was brilliant at what he did.”
Members of the union were of utmost concern to Alli. He would interact with line workers often to find out their concerns and to get them resolved.
Joe Perry, another GM retiree, a union soldier and friend of Alli’s, recalled when the shop chairman brought an exercise room and learning center to the plant.
“Not only did he care about the people in the plant, he cared about their wives and kids, too,” Perry said.
Alli would often invite folks to his house for a cookout.
“One hundred people would be there, and he would cook for every one of them,” Cooper said.
Alli had a way of making people feel important, they said.
“I miss that guy every day,” said Jimmy Devlin, a GM retiree who worked in union leadership. “I miss him as a friend.”
CHANGING THE CULTURE
After Maass told Alli about GM’s plans, they got to work.
They had to lower the cost of production at the plant and make other changes to survive.
Maass, who had been a general foreman at Lords- town when the plant first opened in 1966, had returned to Lordstown in 1996 with new management experiences.
At the Saturn plant in Spring Hill, Tenn., Maass learned the benefits of management and union membership working together.
He brought that philosophy to Lordstown.
Maass believes a wildcat strike in 1996 – when the workers went on strike without the international union’s authorization – led GM to consider closing the facility.
Maass told Alli there could be no more hostilities on the plant floor, and the team concept needed to be embraced.
“Al basically had to agree to change,” Maass said.
A variety of jobs had to be outsourced to save money, and new training programs were put in place to encourage teamwork.
Within two years, more than $200 million in expenses were taken out of Lordstown.
“That’s a dramatic change in operating a plant,” Maass said.
Maass and Alli worked on a shelf agreement – an agreement that was signed and sealed until the company gave the plant a new vehicle to produce – that would change a majority of the rules at the plant.
It wasn’t a popular pact, but getting a new product would come down to getting the shelf agreement approved.
A few weeks before Alli died, Cooper and Alli were away on a trip and Alli couldn’t sleep.
He called Cooper at 5 a.m. and told him to come drink coffee with him.
“I have to get a new product for this plant,” Alli said to Cooper. “I can’t sleep.”
“I think the stress was just so hard on him,” Cooper said.
In the middle of working on the shelf agreement, Alli died.
“It was devastating to everyone,” Graham said. “I lost my partner. I just felt the whole weight of the plant fell on my shoulders. We got through it, and Al’s spirit got us through.”
SOLDIERING ON
The loss of Alli didn’t stop the union from getting a new product at the plant.
Graham and others soldiered on to make the plant’s future solid.
“We pretty much knew the direction Al was trying to take the plant, and we tried to follow through with that goal in mind,” said John Mohan, a GM retiree who worked in union leadership and was elected shop chairman in 2000.
The goal was to keep the plant in the Valley because the trickle-down effect of it closing would be devastating.
“The people understood the changes,” Mohan said. “The people get the credit.”
The contract was approved, and in 2001 GM announced a major investment to build a new paint shop.
That was enough for Maass to know there would continue to be a Lordstown plant, and thousands of workers would remain employed.
GM wanted to make money on American-made small cars and would invest $1 billion in Lordstown to do that with the Chevrolet Cobalt, according to an October 2004 Vindicator article.
The plant received a major remodeling, including new presses to stamp metal parts, more robots to weld parts, upgraded equipment to frame the car and improved assembly methods. And the massive paint shop opened.
Maass, who retired in 2001, returned last weekend to celebrate 50 years of production at Lordstown.
He was surprised to see the number of people who remembered him and what he and Alli did to make the celebration possible.
“It was a very, very uplifting feeling to know that I helped play a role in keeping Lordstown open and operating,” Maass said.
Inside the east plant where the next-generation Chevrolet Cruze is built is a plaque of Alli placed after his death. Many retirees and current workers still give the credit to Alli for saving the plant.
“Al has a legacy that will never die,” said Glenn Johnson, current UAW Local 1112 president. “Whether you liked him or not, he was always an utmost professional and always had the membership’s best interest at heart.”