The only thing I would disagree about in this article is putting almost all the blame for GM’s failure on its unionized workforce. Oh, they did their part, all right, but GM’s management also made one bad decision after another - in product planning, and also in their “diversification” by ill-conceived acquisitions of other companies. GMAC and its subsidiaries were totally out of control. GM did not need Saturn to compete with its own existing brands. And so on.
I certainly do agree, though, that the main reason for this bailout was to save the UAW workers of GM and Chrysler, and will not otherwise achieve anything that couldn’t have been just as well achieved by reorganizing these companies without gov’t intervention when it first became apparent that they were no longer viable.
One take I read was that GM had to go out into other areas in a big way just to try to earn the money needed to meet their obligations to retirees for health and pension benefits. It still relfects foolish management in having made these commitments in the first place. Their “Di-Tech” outfit seemed to get heavily involved in the residential mortgage market and, back in ‘07, when I saw that begin to head south, coupled with lagging GM sales, I doubted whether they could last. I wish I had been “crazy” as many said I was at the time. I would much prefer to have been wrong.
Saturn, the new kind of car company, turned into the same old Sh**, in six months.
Gm business model, a small town has 2 hookers and ten johns, Gm management would double the number of hookers for the ten johns.