Union workers in Lordstown, Ohio, are livid that they agreed to make $118 million a year in annual concessions to save the plant in mid 2017, only to have GM effectively threaten to close it down a year and a half later, Bloomberg News reported. Unless GM reverses its course, Lordstown will fall victim to the harsh reality that fewer consumers are buying small cars and that Chief Executive Officer Mary Barra is hyper focused on doing business only where GM can earn big returns. GM idled the plant in March saying demand for the Cruze was too weak to continue. In an email, GM spokesman Dan Flores said that the union agreed to many concessions, but that they didn’t address the realities the company faces. The problem isn’t high wages, it’s falling sales — and GM’s post-bankruptcy cash flow discipline. “We didn’t discontinue the Cruze because of something the local union did or didn’t do,” Flores wrote. “It was a market-driven decision to discontinue the Cruze, and there were no products to allocate to Lordstown.”
