“We always worked really hard at GM, and it was a fun place to work,” he told me. But any enjoyment came in spite of the way the workers were treated, not because of it, he recalled: “Management did not like to see you smiling or having a good time. They would rather see you miserable and not producing than happy and producing.” In much the same fashion, he contended, GM kept introducing changes to the organization of work on the floor that seemed designed to further divide the labor force, and thereby secure management’s increased control over working conditions. “It seemed like every decision GM made inside the plant had nothing to do with building a quality car, and it had everything to do with retaliation,” he said. “On the plant floor, there was basically a war on the workers. It never made any sense.”

“On the plant floor, there was basically a war on the workers. It never made any sense.”

Yet those battles came against the backdrop of declining union power at GM facilities, and throughout the auto industry. For years prior to Lordstown’s closure, the UAW had already made enormous concessions to GM. The infamous two-tier contracts, accepted in 2007, sliced wages and benefits for new hires to well below what workers already on the line were getting. This skewed arrangement sometimes meant workers making $14 an hour were doing the same job at the same time as workers making more than twice that. This was still another management tactic, in Denison’s view, to “split us up.” There was a brief strike at the time, attempting to stave off the concession, but Denison recalled feeling “lots of doubt” about the future at GM.

After the 2008 meltdown, meanwhile, it looked as if GM itself could be collapsing. A series of plant closures came in the wake of the company’s 2009 bankruptcy. “We had people transfer here from 26 different states,” explained Tim O’Hara, the vice president of Local 1112 and a Lordstown worker for 41 years. “The parking lot looked like you were in an amusement park, because there were license plates from everywhere.” O’Hara said that the shift over to the Cruze helped pull GM out of bankruptcy; small cars were in higher demand than SUVs and the other, larger, less fuel-efficient vehicles that had been GM’s calling card. The workers who transferred to Lordstown thought, for a while, that they’d be safe. But apprehension stole over the Lordstown line as another round of contract negotiations looms after the current UAW contract with the automaker expires this fall. And when the Lordstown bosses shut down one shift at the plant earlier this year, senior GM workers started to put in for transfers. Others, O’Hara said, weren’t given a choice. Forced transfers begin with the lowest-seniority workers—they could either pack up and go wherever GM needed people or get laid off and lose their health insurance. So instead of waiting for the company to lower the boom, many union members began to apply for voluntary transfers.

This flurry of early departures means that those left behind in Lordstown are mostly locked into a waiting game. The union won’t know the fate of the plant until this September’s negotiations with GM are finished. For its part, GM has only told reporters, gnomically, that the plant remains “in a state of readiness.” The technical term is “unallocated.” When workers on the ground at Lordstown heard the term, O’Hara said, “We all looked at each other like, ‘What’s that? We’ve never heard that before.’” David Green, the president of the local, added, “You ever lose somebody? You go through seven stages of grief. A job’s a pretty important thing like that too. But we can’t go through all seven stages. We’re stuck in the middle.”