Thread regarding General Motors layoffs

The scariest part of the 2008 reduction of force was that there were no jobs available and the housing market was crashing as well. You couldn’t even find a fast food job in 2008. There were no “help wanted” signs anywhere. Then you kept paying your mortgage watching the resale value of your house sink lower and lower.

So now you aren’t sure how much longer you will have a job, and if you are let go, you can’t find another job that is going to pay your bills, and you also can’t just sell your home and relocate because you won’t get enough money to pay off the mortgage.

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Incompetent CEO...the goal and focus first should always be the customer and giving them a great product. This is what happens when bean counters are in charge, they think the only way to win is to take cost cutting measures. I am a big fan of FCA because they value and listen to the demands of the customer, sure they have issues too all of the OEMs do however I think they have fun and exciting products and that's the bottom line for a customer. GM is more than capable of building fun and excitement too but as long as this company and it's CEO are at the helm I don't see anything changing. To make matters worse there is no investment in the people and they have made the public angry along with the image of GM is in the toilet.

Managers protect other managers, because they think they're the most valuable part of the organization.

They think they do all the real work.

I noticed too that the the number of managerial layers have either increased or stayed the same during the re-org last winter. Except for a few anomalies in IT and other groups, almost all of the engineering 8th and 9th levels stayed and moved around.

GM stock is slowly declining again. And now rumors of another layoffs in summer/fall! If their solution to dropping stock value is to keep reorganizing and laying off more people, it sounds ) like giving blood transfusion to a corpse!

I was a GM manufacturing engineer at a plant during 2008. The situation is wholly different. In 2008, as you might imagine, the bottom was falling out of the market. People literally stopped buying cars. So income had, for all the domestics, fallen to near zero. Then the layoffs came, In the plant I was at about 10-15% of the salaried workforce was laid off. From what I heard this was actually a little light, most plants laid off more. The layoffs mostly hit the low performers however their were some good workers who also were cut as most plants, by that time, were running lean anyway. But most importantly, and I saw this first hand, the middle and upper management cuts were almost non-existent. I personally know of cases where they shuffled managers and execs to various areas so they would avoid the 'car czars' scrutiny. Obviously, not being at corporate I don't have a good idea on the specifics for the product and the design groups.

Contrast the above to what is happening now and it is a little disheartening. You have a company that is making good profits and has just finished a hiring spree. They decide to drastically reduce their North American engineering headcount right after a massive hiring spree in order to be 'proactive'. This is either a ruthless act or the result of an incompetent CEO. How demoralizing would it be to be laid off when they are paying 10K+ bonuses to their hourly employees. That is what I see as the differences between 2008 and 2019 layoffs. However, the real tragedy is the similarity between the two events. From what I am reading and despite GM's earlier assertion that many managers and execs (the article I read said up to 25%) would be cut, very few have lost their jobs. If I am wrong about the current cuts to the executive staff please correct me since I currently am not working at GM as I quit several years ago to go into a different industry.

Sorry for the length of post but I hope that helps.