GM to start laying off 4,000 salaried workers on Monday

CNN ^ | Friday, February 1, 2019 | Chris Isidore

[Jyotishi]

New York (CNN Business)Layoffs for about 4,000 salaried staff at General Motors are due to start Monday.

The layoffs are part of a 15% reduction in white collar jobs in North America that the automaker first announced back in November. At the same time, it announced plans to close four US plants as well as a fifth in Canada.

While those plants, which include about 6,000 hourly jobs, have yet to close, GM is moving ahead with the salaried staff reductions, a GM spokesman confirmed Friday. The timing of the layoffs was first reported by the Detroit News.

The company had about 2,300 salaried staff accept voluntary buyout packages that were offered to 18,000 employees. In addition, there were 1,500 contract employees who were not retained by the company.

GM workers will have job options -- but they may not be as good

That leaves the remainder of the 8,000 planned job cuts to be accomplished with the involuntary layoffs.

[soundapproach]

They can’t because they are forced to pay outrageous Union wages...

[Myrddin]

I was doing some contract work in San Diego for a Ford/Qualcomm joint venture in 2001. Ford management held a meeting where they made it clear that white males would not be considered for any promotions or raises. It was supposed to be a "closed door" meeting where the brass could privately scheme. Too bad. One of the participants leaked the news and it spread like wildfire through the company. The white male engineers are the backbone at Ford. Huge mistake. It was met with a collective "F*ck Y**!" back to the management. Qualcomm called back a large number of their staff (away from the joint venture). I was left covering the duties of 4 Java programmers, 2 C++ programmers and 2 EEs. That ran up an average 210 hours per month. My work was complete by Dec 2001. About 6 weeks later, the Qualcomm engineer I left in charge of the lab called to say the venture was over. Employees were getting escorts by security to their desks to pick up personal effects on the way out.

[Beagle8U]

America has but one car company left, the one with the blue oval.

[TwelveOfTwenty]

That’s OK. American auto manufacturing is down to two companies, Ford and GM (three if you count Tesla). Even if I never step foot in a GM dealer again, I still wouldn’t want them to go out of business.

[stillfree?]

I wonder how much cheaper the same car is in China.

[jjotto]

I know the Buick Excelle GT, the Chinese version of the Verano, sells for thousands less in China. I don’t know how much of that is due to unrealistic exchange rates.

[EVO X]

Even if I never step foot in a GM dealer again, I still wouldn’t want them to go out of business.

They plan to go all or mostly EV at some point. It would seem to me they would start scaling back on ICE operations and development. They have a huge presence in China and it seems likely they would let the more expensive US worker go if redundant.

[gogeo]

I think the domestics are finding they can't compete with the Koreans on sedans. Heck, they've even taken market share from Toyota.

No point in building models with no financial reward.