In a new video, UAW President Shawn Fain and UAW Vice President Mike Booth visited Local 292 members at the General Motors Component Holding Plant in Kokomo, Indiana. For fifty years, the plant produced semiconductors, until the work was outsourced overseas to devastating effect in 2017.
“This place changed my family’s life,” Fain said, whose grandparents hired in at the facility in the 1940s. “It’s a shame to see where it is today. There’s over two and a half million square feet of floor space here. Over two million of that square footage is empty, and a workforce that used to have roughly 15,000 people, now there’s just 100 people left.”
“We made semiconductors here from the 1950s forward,” President Fain said. “It’s a shame to think that GM chose to close the fabricator plant where we made semiconductors in late 2017, and you know what the rest of that stories been,” Fain said, alluding to the massive semiconductor shortage during the global COVID-19 pandemic that crippled the auto industry in 2020 and 2021.
“This is just another example in a long line of failings of GM and the Big Three companies and how little they care for the workers and the communities we live in.” Fain said. “These workers want to be here. They’re proud of these jobs. Some of these people have been here twenty-five years, and they’re standing here hanging in the balance now waiting to see what’s left for them in the future.”
“It just seems like there’s been a black cloud over this place,” one member noted. “I’d sure like to see that black cloud get pushed away.”
“We’ll see if we can’t get up a windstorm,” responded Vice President Booth.
GM made over $100 billion in profits in North America over the last decade. The UAW-GM contract is set to expire on September 14th.
View the video here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UssNZ0EgtRg
Other users read these articles next...