通用罢工的原因之一，Lordstown 工厂简史

As recently as December 2016, the massive and proud General Motors plant in Lordstown, Ohio, was running three work shifts a day, employing more than 3,000 hourly workers making the Chevrolet Cruze. GM made about 190,000 of the compact sedans that year.

Then Americans lost their taste for sedans, demand for the Cruze dried up, and GM started eliminating shifts at Lordstown. The factory built its final car in March 2019.

The plant was idled and the lives of the remaining 1,400 GM employees were uprooted.

Today Lordstown is a central issue in an ongoing labor strike by nearly 50,000 GM workers. The fate of the plant — and the people who might work in it again — underscores the difficult issues facing America's biggest car maker as well as the United Auto Workers, the union that has represented generations of American autoworkers.

Century-old General Motors, like the auto industry as a whole, is attempting a dramatic business reinvention. It's moving from cars driven by people to self-driving vehicles. From selling cars to selling rides like Uber does. And its evolving from a company that makes cars fueled by gasoline into one that specializes in electric vehicles that run on batteries.

Who will make those batteries is a sticking point in the strike, which began on September 16.

The union has made bringing the Lordstown plant back to life a key goal of the negotiations. The problem is GM says it doesn't need it to make the traditional sedans it once made.

Instead, according to a person familiar with GM's offer to the union, the company is proposing to build large lithium batteries — the kind used in electric vehicles — on the Lordstown property or at a different, nearby facility. GM said its offer to the UAW included the "opportunity to become the first union-represented battery cell manufacturing site in the US."