Lordstown, Ohio, will soon get about 600 American jobs to produce electric pickup trucks for the Lordstown Motors company starting in 2021, with thousands of more jobs expected to follow in 2022 for additional all-electric lineups.
As Breitbart News has chronicled, GM CEO Mary Barra idled the Lordstown plant last year — resulting in the immediate layoff of about 1,600 American workers, and since 2017, GM has laid off about 4,500 American workers in Ohio. Economists have said GM’s idling in Lordstown will eventually result in the layoff of about 8,000 American workers in supporting industries.
At the time, Barra’s salary was reduced by only less than half a percent.
GM has sold the plant to Lordstown Motors, a cutting-edge electric vehicle company, which is now vowing to hire about 600 Americans next year to help produce its first round of 20,000 all-electric pickup trucks known as the Endurance.
In 2022, Lordstown Motors expects to hire more workers to produce a line of all-electric SUVs and pickup trucks.
“We didn’t buy a mass volume plant like this and not plan to fill it up,” Lordstown Motors CEO Steve Burns told the Detroit Free Press. “This is a gem of a building built for volume manufacturing.”
After its initial hiring of about 600 Americans, Burns said he hopes to hire an additional 4,000 to 5,000 for the plant as early as 2022 to produce other all-electric vehicles based on demand. Burns told the Free Press, “We think the electric pickup is the new normal.”
Lordstown Motors’ Endurance pickup truck. (Screenshot via Lordstown Motors)
The electric vehicle industry in the U.S. is ramping up rapidly. Last year, Ford announced that its all-electric F-150 will hit the market in 2021. The truck will be made in Michigan.
Before China’s entering the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), GM’s Lordstown plant employed close to 11,000 Americans in the early 1990s.
American manufacturing is vital to the U.S. economy, as every one manufacturing job supports an additional 7.4 American jobs in other industries. Decades of free trade have eliminated five million manufacturing jobs from the American economy and resulted in the closure of about 50,000 manufacturing plants.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
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