Autoworkers win, Democrats lose
If you want to meet somebody whose biography encapsulates the recent developments in places like Lordstown and Youngstown in the former industrial heartland of Northeast Ohio, you couldn’t do much better than talking to George Goranitis, the young president of Local 1112 of the United Automobile Workers (UAW). At 35 years his is still a rather short but nevertheless interesting biography at the centre of the region’s recent history between hope and despair, between high minded political promises and deep private disappointments. It also shows the trade union of the automobile workers caught between electric and gas-guzzling vehicles and between Democrats and Republicans.
George Goranitis has just 25 minutes for the visitor before going into his next Zoom meeting with workers who want their company to unionize. So, we must be quick. His life so far: Graduated in 2008 and hired straight away as an operator for the large General Motors plant at an hourly wage of 29 Dollars. By 2017 the future of the plant was in jeopardy but in came Donald Trump telling workers like George in July 2017 that they should not sell their houses and move away because he was going to save their jobs. But in early 2019 General Motors closed the massive Lordstown plant with a workforce of roughly 4.000. The President’s pitch as the saviour of Trumbull County seemed to be ruined.
Because George did not want to work in jobs that only paid half his former salary, he took up the offer by General Motors to transfer to the sister plant in Spring Hill, Tennessee, where GM was producing the Cadillac SUV. “But being Greek and missing my close family”, George Goranitis says, “when I heard of GM starting a battery plant for electric vehicles in Lordstown I went back.” This was already the second attempt of GM to prepare for an electric future of the industry. The first start-up called “Lordstown Motors” had been touted by the Trump Administration during the election campaign of 2020, but General Motors destroyed the President’s repeated promises again and closed the experiment down shortly after.
With Joe Biden winning the presidency in November 2020 and with his Executive Order and to mandate that by 2035 half of the cars produced in the US should be electric, the new battery plant called “Ultium Cells” jolted into life. I had seen the impressive, brand-new facility on my way to George’s office at Local 1112. Here the life of the trade unionist George Goranitis took a new turn.
George thought that the 2.200 workers producing battery cells should be unionized as had been his colleagues in the old GM plant. George is an energetic and lively person, and you can imagine how he convinced his co-workers of his mission, how he even got a call to strike out of his UAW-Boss Shawn Fain; how George and his colleagues then negotiated a unionizing agreement with the company’s CEO Mary Barra. “She probably regrets it now” he says beaming with pride about his achievement. Today “Ultium Cells” is the first unionized electric vehicle cell manufacturing facility in the US. The agreement covers all the safety mechanisms of great importance to him and safeguards the payment of 35 $ per hour until 2028. Following all that George was overwhelmingly voted President of Local 1112 UAW.
So, the story of “Ultium Cells” is a ray of hope in a region battered by plant closures and the export of jobs. It is a rare success for a trade union movement with just 7% of American wage and salary workers in the private sector being unionized. But it also pinpoints the precarious position of the UAW between the political fronts. And it shows that Donald Trump can break all his promises and still beat the Democrats as the traditional party of the working class at the election. How come?
Just take the unenviable position of Shawn Fain, President of the UAW, representing almost 400.000 active members, most of them employed by the dwindling auto industry. During the election campaign of 2024 he strongly spoke out for the Democrats and still opposes many of Trump’s stances on union labour. But in early April 2025 Fain supported the first set of tariffs imposed by Donald Trump.
Georg Goranitis behind his desk at Local 1112 feels equally torn. He just had a telephone call with the progressive Democratic Congressman Ro Khanna from California about Trump’s revocation of Bidens EV-mandate. And they both agreed that they did not know yet if that was going to be good or a bad for US industry as things are changing every day. “Whatever you think about tariffs”, George says, “the federal workers whose contracts Trump is just ripping off are our brothers.”
Since George graduated at the time of the financial crisis his home state of Ohio has become a hotly contested territory. For decades the state was a Democratic stronghold. President Obama still won Ohio convincingly in 2012. Yet by 2016 Donald Trump’s bold promises to bring manufacturing jobs back to America found favour with many white blue-collar workers in the state and beyond. Even in 2020 when Joe Biden won back some of those workers in the industrial Midwest, Trump took Ohio and Trumbull County handily, a feat he repeated against Kamala Harris with an even bigger margin of 12 %. “An EV plant bolstered by Biden’s climate law sparks hope in Northeast Ohio – but not a revival of Democratic roots”, a CNN headline from September 2024 summarizes the bitter experience of the Democratic Party. Auto workers win, Democrats lose, that seems to be the new environment George Goranitis is organizing in today.
He has been steering his union troops careful through the political minefield. George had indicated to his colleagues that he thought Kamala Harris to be the better choice, but he knows that most of his co-workers at “Ultium Cells” have voted for Donald Trump.
And he is optimistic that at least some of the outsourced manufacturing can come back. “We have the workforce we just need the jobs”. There are already some discussions, he says hopeful, about a new assembly plant.
But now our time is up because George Goranitis has a Zoom-meeting with workers from a company that is recycling the used battery cells from “Ultium Cells”. “They also want to unionise and learn how we did it at our plant.”