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...save his company, Wagoner will have to persuade the U.A.W. that what's good for GM is good for labor, even if it means shutting down plants and laying off workers. The company can't slim down easily, a legacy of earlier battles with the U.A.W. and labor deals that make it prohibitively expensive to shutter factories. What happens to a GM worker when his or her plant shuts down? Not much. Under GM's contract with the U.A.W., laid-off workers are entitled to 95% of their salary plus benefits for nearly two years. So while closing factories saves...
Meanwhile, GM is playing catch-up in the hot market for hybrids because it has been losing sales to Toyota and Honda. The Japanese companies began developing hybrids in the '90s, when Detroit scoffed at the technology as economically unviable. "GM's reasoning with hybrids was, Why bother when trucks are selling?" says Matheson. Toyota put hybrids on the market even when the company knew they wouldn't make money right away. "Detroit doesn't think that way," Matheson says. Both GM and Ford are coming to market with their first hybrid models, while Toyota and Honda are already selling...
What really scares Wall Street is the prospect of a Delphi strike. Goldman Sachs estimates that a Delphi work stoppage could shut down GM factories at a cost of $2 billion a month, causing GM to burn through its cash reserves at a deadly clip. "A strike could push them over the edge," says Steven Szakaly, an economist with the Center for Automotive Research. Unions representing Delphi workers have described the bankrupt company's latest offer--cutting wages from an average $27 an hour to $10.50 for production staff--as "insulting," and U.A.W. chief Ron Gettelfinger has described Delphi boss...
Another legacy of GM's pact with the union is its crushing pension burden. Having shed so many workers in previous rounds of cost cutting, GM finds itself in a demographic choke hold--paying for the pensions and health care of 400,000 retirees (plus benefits for their dependents)--with a shrinking company. GM's strongest rivals, such as Toyota and Nissan, haven't gone through decades of downsizing and don't bear that lopsided burden. At GM, each U.S. worker's production has to support 2.5 retirees, adding an average of $2,200 in legacy costs to the price...
Wagoner is playing an actuarial waiting game, betting that as the retiree population declines, health and pension costs will fall, helping the company swing to profitability. But on Wall Street, worries about how a smaller GM will pay its retiree obligations have sent its securities plummeting. GM says it owes $89 billion to current and future retirees, and if GM's pension plan were terminated tomorrow, it would be $31 billion short, according to the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation. GM says its pension obligations are more than fully funded and it has no intention of terminating its plan. But GM...