The Weekly season 1 episode 6 recap: The End of the Line

This episode of The Weekly takes a look at the automotive industry and the role it plays in the upcoming election and the future of the United States in general.

This episode of The Weekly is lead by New York Times national correspondent Sabrina Tavernise. She takes us to Lordstown, Ohio, where the closing of a GM plant threatens an entire community’s economic existence.

Since the plant’s peak in the 1980s, when it employed nearly 12,000 people (as opposed to the 1,500 left today), the car manufacturing location was an economic driver for the town. Now, Tavernise is investigating what will happen when the plant closes. The episode opens by following an emotional Rick Marsh on his way to work at the plant on the day they build their last car.

The episode quickly rewinds to set the scene a bit more—a scene which Tavernise calls a collision between car companies, Wall Street and Silicon Valley. GM is restructuring, closing five plants and eliminating almost 14,000 jobs.

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Tavernise talks to Werner Lange, a retired Kent State professor, who is standing outside in the snow and cold soliciting honks of support from passing cars. She also speaks to Dave Green, the local union president, who is rallying people to fight the plant’s closure.

The Weekly then sits in on a town hall meeting between GM employees and Sherrod Brown, the Democrat Senator representing Ohio. As they talk, Tavernise mentions that employees are offered transfers to other GM plants, but usually that means they’ll have to uproot and move to a new state. If they say no, they risk losing their job all together.

She also nots that these jobs, thanks to a strong union, average $85,000 a year, doubling the median income for the area. They’re some of the last good jobs around.

This shifts to an interview with Green (if you’ve been watching The Weekly, it’s the regular “sit at a table and look at documents” segment). Green shows her the GM national contract. He says that driving down operating costs and not reinvesting the money you save back into the communities around your workers makes you a “bad corporate citizen.”

(Brown mentions something similar, saying it’s unfair for a company like GM to receive government tax cuts that they then just pocket while shipping jobs to Mexico.)

Trouble is, GM is in survival mode. Well, the whole automotive industry is, as pointed out by Tavernise and Ned Hill, professor of public policy at Ohio State.

It’s not just competition among the typical automotive giants anymore. GM faces pressure to compete with the future of travel—a future that means fewer cars because of ride sharing, electric cars, and self-driving cars. GM now has to compete with Silicon Valley.

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Hill says that decisions made by automotive companies now could be the difference between success and going out of business down the line.

The Weekly then jumps to what GM is doing to prepare for this new future. They show a fully autonomous car that GM will be rolling out. After investing a billion dollars in a Sillicon Valley startup to get the computer system for the car, 40% of the car is completely different from previous cars.

It’s a shift from mechanic based cars to software based cars. Tavernise sits down with Mary Barra, the first female CEO of an American automaker, who has to navigate the biggest change in the auto industry in 50 years.

As part of the shift to more software-based cars, GM needed $6 billion. So, they started making job cuts and decided to stop making unpopular cars.

There’s a brief conversation with Susan Helper, an economics professor at Case Western Reserve, about how GM made some choices to appease Wall Street when they should have invested in their workers.

But the episode quickly shifts back to Marsh and Lordstown. Marsh, who has worked at the plant for 25 years, faces a tough choice. He has a 14-year-old daughter with cerebral palsy. Uprooting her from her local support system and healthcare benefits that won’t transfer to a new state isn’t a realistic option.

Then again, if he loses his GM job, he runs the risk of having to switch industries late in his career, even possibly dropping down to a minimum wage job. The family has to grapple with the idea of maybe letting Marsh move while the rest of his family stays in Lordstown. It’s a very emotional interview.

The Weekly then takes a political turn. First, the episode moves back to Senator Brown who points out that GM, who filed for bankruptcy protection after the 2008 financial crisis and received a massive bailout from the government, owes the taxpayers. The same taxpayers they’re not screwing over.

He says their decisions are all about pinching pennies—lower wages, moving production out of the country, tax cuts, etc.—and the government needs to hold companies accountable.

Jumping to Barra, she says she understands it’s difficult for workers, but she has to consider the long-term survival of GM. She can’t have the company pour money into products people don’t want anymore. She claims this move will wind up creating more jobs.

Quickly to Marsh. He says what’s happening could change politics in the area because people voted for Trump on the promise that he’d bring jobs back. He now says the country is headed in a bad direction.

Finally, to Hill, who says companies aren’t concerned with whether or not these decisions are fair. Fair, he says, is political and can be what causes a company to fall. But, he notes, workers seeing this move as a betrayal in a social contract could have huge political ramifications down the line.

Tavernise explains that the social contract used to be that you’d work at a company like GM, join the union, get paid well, buy and house and a car and, essentially, live the American dream. But that’s changed.

A clip of Trump telling a rally that jobs would be coming back to Ohio and that peoples shouldn’t move or sell their houses is juxtaposed with a dejected Marsh.

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As the episode winds down, it focuses on the upcoming 2020 presidential election, where candidates are looking at towns like Lordstown in an attempt to grab the state of Ohio for their party.

Tavernise says that Lordstown’s last GM car was made in March of this year. While more than 700 people have taken the transfer offer, hundreds of other decided to stay.

The episode ends with a group of workers gathered on the side of the street with signs, soliciting honks with Lange.

What did you think of this episode of The Weekly? Let us know in the comments!

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