Three of Ohio’s biggest shuttered auto plants have been reborn as glass factories, warehouses and, soon, a hospital operations hub — but none of them have come close to matching the workforces they employed at their industrial peak. At the former GM assembly plant in Moraine, Fuyao Glass America now employs 3,022 workers, nearly three times the number GM had on-site the day production stopped. Yet that figure is still only about 70% of the roughly 4,300 union workers GM employed there a decade before the plant closed.
The pattern repeats across Northeast Ohio’s old auto corridor, according to a Cleveland.com analysis by Michael Johnson and the Advance Local Express Desk. Redevelopment has, in some cases, produced or is projected to produce enough jobs to match or exceed the workforce that existed on closing day at these plants — but it has not recreated the much larger peak workforces from decades earlier, when these were single-tenant manufacturing giants anchoring entire towns.
Moraine’s GM Plant Becomes a Glass Factory Powerhouse
GM stopped production at its Moraine assembly plant on December 23, 2008, in the depths of the auto industry’s collapse. An Ohio auto-industry report attributed to a 2009 state analysis found the GM closure directly affected 2,400 workers, while the plant’s hourly headcount stood at 1,080 when it shut down. The site was later redeveloped as an automotive-glass factory operated by Fuyao Glass America, and today’s workforce of 3,022 is about 600 workers greater than the number directly affected by the original GM closing.
The Moraine site’s transformation also became internationally known well beyond Ohio business circles. The plant’s rebirth, including cultural friction between Chinese management and American workers, was chronicled in the 2019 documentary American Factory, which won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in February 2020, according to Wikipedia.
Twinsburg’s Chrysler Site Falls Short of Peak-Era Employment
Chrysler’s Twinsburg Stamping Plant employed more than 5,000 people at its peak, but had shrunk to about 1,200 workers by the time the closure was announced in 2009, the same year Chrysler entered bankruptcy. The site was redeveloped as Cornerstone Business Park, which had roughly 1.64 million square feet of industrial space and 303,000 square feet under construction at the end of 2020, according to figures in the Cleveland.com report…