Despite Trump Promises, Another Black Monday for the Mahoning Valley

Hope can bring in the votes, but no rhetoric can replace lost jobs, especially specifically promised jobs.

The Mahoning Valley really, really hates Mondays.

41 years after nearby Youngstown’s “Black Monday” meant 5,000 lost jobs immediately and tens of thousands more to follow, on this Monday the ax may finally be coming to GM’s Lordstown, OH facility.

It was only a few years ago that Lordstown, which sits 20-odd miles away from the remnants of the once thriving steel industry of Youngstown, OH, employed as many as 4,500 workers. The General Motors assembly plant, had flirted with closure before but seemed to be revived not long ago when GM moved car production for the Chevy Cruze there in 2010. But now it has been “unallocated” for 2019, a more pleasant and truncated way of saying nothing will be produced there, and no plans to do so are forthcoming. To the workers — some of them children, grandchildren, and other relations to the men laid off that September morning in 1977- this is a movie they have seen before.

Deja Vu All Over Again

Black Monday refers to the Monday morning when 5,000 men of the Campbell Works at Youngstown Sheet & Tube were informed they would no longer have jobs after that following Friday. It was called a furlough, but it was permanent, a fact the company knew at the time and the workers would learn…