[re_tail20]

They were at their membership high 30 years ago - in 1979 - with 1.5 million members.

In the last 30 years, they’ve lost 66% of their peak strength - down to about 500,000 members now.

It’s like pulling teeth, but their membership and relevance keeps on going down slowly.

It just takes our society time to realize it.

[SkyDancer]

Give GM to IKEA.

NOTE: Allen wrench extra!

[ontap]

So 26% of these morons would rather GM went into bankruptcy....you can’t cure stupid!!!

[steve8714]

Yeah..no CPLA, no dental for retirees. big frickin’ deal.

[grellis]

If you would like to be added or dropped from the Michigan ping list, please freepmail me.

[CharlesWayneCT]

If they had done this a few years ago, GM might not have had to borrow so much money and maybe they wouldn’t be going bankrupt.

[Jacob Morgan]

In 1999 GM tried to launch project Yellowstone in an attempt to make small cars at a profit. The cars were to be somewhat modular and suppliers would have provided more sub-assemblies. GM came out and said that suppliers would have to be within so many miles of the proposed new plants and, to make the UAW happy, even said that the suppliers would have to let the union in. So it wasn't sending jobs to China (or even out of state in most cases), or even to non-union shops. It was an attempt to go from the most hours-per-vehicle (and also the most expensive hours) in the industry to somewhere in the middle. UAW said over their dead bodies...looks like they are getting their wish ten years later. They finally killed the goose that laid the golden eggs.

GM made money back when the SUV craze was going on. They had advantages in that market—for the time being, although it was only a mater of time before Honda, Nissan, and Toyota caught up (which they were trying to do, their vehicles were getting larger and larger). But small cars? Forget about it—lost money on every one of them. When gas prices went up they stopped making money. The new CAFE standards are a death sentence.

I used to work at a GM plant and left for a different industry in 1999. It was apparent that things could not go on like they were. There was blame on the management side as well: multiple layers of do-nothing jobs that added no value. Being at a plant was heroic, and after the requisite number of years at a plant it was off to carpet land until retirement. Engineers used for what amounted to arts and crafts projects. The whole computer services agreement with EDS was stupid—paid double what PC’s were worth, for what? Higher-up managers who would show up at the plant once a year for a grand tour, complete with entourage (contrasted to a plant superintendent I saw at a Toyota plant once who was helping to run a spot welder). At GM the plant manager didn't know his way through his own plant; he also once mistook a washing machine for a lathe. For much of management inputs, not outputs were measured. In short, it looked a lot like a job with the government, which I suppose is official now.