DealZone

‘New GM’ Gets a Visit from a Shareholder

By Bernie Woodall
September 15, 2009
bailout | Barack Obama | Cobalt | General Motors | GM | health care | President | UAW

obamalordstown1

GM’s Lordstown, Ohio assembly plant has become a symbol of both GM’s hard times and its best hopes for a turnaround after a $50 billion federal investment. A recent bump in sales because of the government’s “Cash for Clunkers” program has allowed GM to call back more than 1,000 workers from layoff.
 
So it was a natural backdrop for a return visit by President Obama, who held a roundtable with workers and then gave a stump speech from the factory floor for his economic policies and health care reform.
 
But this is not your father’s GM anymore and nothing about it as clear-cut as it seems — even if you are the leader of the free world and head of the government that holds a controlling stake in the automaker.
   
At one point, Obama — veering from his prepared remarks — suggested that health-care reform would allow the UAW-represented workers in the audience to negotiate better wages.

“Think about it. If you are a member of the union right now, you’re spending all your time negotiating about health care. You need to be spending some time negotiating about wages, but you can’t do it,” he said.

 

In fact, the UAW locked itself into a contract limiting wages and changes to health care, without the ability to negotiate with a threat of strike, until 2015. These stands were agreed to by the union at the prodding of the Obama administration, which demanded that union autoworkers accept lower wages — as a condition to the bailout that saved Lordstown — to match non-union workers at Toyota plants in Kentucky and Honda plants in Ohio.

 

Even so, Lordstown is something of a success story for both the UAW and GM, and Obama’s remarks were punctuated with enthusiastic applause.  After winning deep concessions from the UAW in 2007, GM agreed to invest $500 million to retool the plant to make a new fuel-efficient small sedan, the Chevy Cruze.

 

Obama had nice things to say about the Cruze, which GM expects to get more than 40 miles-per-gallon in highway driving.

 

“I just sat in the car,” Obama said of the Cruze. “I asked for the keys. They wouldn’t give me the keys. I was going to take it for a little spin. But it was nice sitting in there. It was a roomy car.”

 

Consumers will not get the keys to a new Cruze, either, until the middle of next year when it arrives in showrooms. In the meantime, Lordstown is stuck building the Cobalt, a budget-minded Chevy and vestige of the “old GM.” 

Consumer Reports in its October edition branded the Cobalt as one of the five “cruddiest cheap cars” on the market.

(Writing by Kevin Krolicki. Reuters photo by Larry Downing.)

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