No one knows better than residents of this Mahoning Valley about picking ourselves up after being knocked down.
We all remember that dark day, Sept. 19, 1977, when thousands of steelworkers lost their jobs with the shuttering of Youngstown Sheet & Tube’s Campbell Works, following by a domino effect of other area steel mills.
Our region survived and rebuilt, ultimately turning our manufacturing focus to automaking.
Another big blow came with the 2005 loss of nearly 5,000 Warren-based Delphi Packard Electric hourly and salaried jobs after the nation’s largest auto parts supplier declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
Then, General Motors, which just a few years ago employed more than 4,500 workers here, eliminated shifts and eventually announced it would close its local complex in March 2019 after sales of the Chevrolet Cruze declined and the Detroit automaker determined the future of the industry no longer was in small cars but in larger vehicles like trucks and SUVs and in electric automobiles.