The 'New GM': Layoffs, Factory Closing, and Offshoring

[Larkspur]

The 'New GM': Layoffs, Factory Closing, and Offshoring
SNIP

The GM bankruptcy and bailout is the continuation of post-industrial policies of the Clinton and Bush years. Those policies, which encouraged companies to shutter factories in the US and move operations to foreign countries with lower wages and weaker regulations, were defined by Wall Street rather than Main Street. The model of a "healthy" American company was defined by stock and bond speculators, who rewarded short-term thinking and brutal cost-cutting, even if these strategies resulted in the loss of millions of jobs, the closing of hundreds of functional factories and the deindustrialization of communities, regions and whole states that had once been among the most productive in the world.

Nothing about the old way of doing business made sense, and it made a wreck of GM. After decades of closing factories, laying off workers and shifting production overseas, the company now finds itself with $172.8 billion in debt.

It would make sense to change course, radically.

But the Obama administration is not doing anything radical.

Rather, it wants to create a "New GM" that stays the course of the old GM.

If all goes according to plan, the "New GM" will close down as many as 20 factories in Michigan, Indiana, Ohio and Delaware. Additional plants in Tennessee and Michigan will be put on "standby," for probable closing. At least 21,000 family-supporting jobs will be lost, as the corporation shifts production to new facilities in China and other foreign countries. Those cuts come on the heels of GM factory closings last year that cost tens of thousands of jobs and shattered communities across the Great Lakes states just as the downturn was developing into a deep recession.

This massive de-industrialization plan -- with its rapid offshoring of work once done in the United States -- will be paid for by the federal government.

SNIP

It takes very little courage for a Democratic president to side with multinational corporations, in the same way that his Democratic and Republican predecessors have.

Courage involves breaking pattern and doing something bold, like recognizing that the United States needs a manufacturing sector and making a commitment to modernizing basic industries and keeping skilled workers on the job. This is not a rejection of globalization; rather, it is an embrace of the future that says the US chooses to compete rather than give up.

An investment of $50 billion in federal money to close 20 major factories and shed 21,000 jobs is not a plan to "save," let alone revitalize, manufacturing in this country. It is an abandonment workers and communities that speeds up the de-industrialization of the United States. And it encourages GM executives -- be they "old" or "new" -- to be more concerned about the company's stock value than the adoption of smart long-term strategies.

Looks like John Nichols will be added to the Obama fanatics Enemies List.

I would like to know what is Obama's plan to keep American's employed and employed in jobs that give us at least a living wage? I haven't seen any plan of his to do so.

[Triana]

1. The auto industry - those blue-collar jobs are what CREATED the middle-class in this country...

..the objective, seemingly - is (and long has been) to DESTROY the middle class and only have the lower, and upper classes and very little in between. What has happened to GM is just continuation of that effort - YET ANOTHER example of Disaster Capitalism. And the Obama Administration has done nothing differently regarding this than past ones - they've just gone along with it.

The movement of GM jobs to China ought to pretty much wrap up most of that agenda:

Unions: BUSTED

Middle-class (blue-collar jobs): DESTROYED

US Manufacturing base: GONE

Economy: GUTTED

∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆ MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!! ∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆

But hey, the goddamned STOCKHOLDERS and WALL STREET are happy and that's all that counts, eh? :sarcasm:

:mad:
:grr:

[sharp_stick]

2. I suppose

they could have just let GM go tits up, there's another option. But why let reality in now.

[dgibby]

3. Letting GM go "tits up" would wreak economic chaos on the entire country,

plunging us into a sudden and deep depression. Letting it go incrementally accomplishes the goal that was intended all along---Globalization and Free Trade.

There is no way to complete globally as long as the US is more affluent that the emerging economies with which we have to trade, ergo the need to destroy the middle class wage structure and unions.

Simply put, it's all about obtaining wealth and power for the Movers and Shakers, aka Masters of the Universe, or Powers That Be. The poor and middle class are merely pawns in the international chess game.