A Giant Falls

The tires are flat at GM. The transmission is croaked and the radiator is full of holes. The behemoth American corporation that once stood astride the global automobile market is in the death throes, stumbling into bankruptcy, a ward of the federal government. This is like the day Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon, or the day the Berlin Wall came down in chunks -- a day we won’t forget, a milestone, a marker in American history. The symbol of our faded industrial prowess is broken down on the side of a one-way road.

Although this day has been coming for years, it’s hard to accept that the United States has thrown in the towel and quit the manufacturing game in disgrace.

Because that’s really what this means, Mr. Jones.

The reasons for GM’s demise are too numerous to list here. Like every other American corporation that once made money building stuff, GM’s top brass became more enthralled with finance than on building quality products that domestic and foreign consumers wanted to plunk money down for. As the world around it changed and Honda and Toyota elbowed their way into the US market, GM clung stubbornly to the formula that had once made it great. In the end it was simply too many vehicle models with too much similarity between them, too much marketing hype and too little quality. One of the reasons it’s such a sad tale is that it didn’t have to happen.

No, thousands of workers didn’t need to be sacrificed to the gods of downsizing and globalization, ruthlessly discarded so the corporate bottom line might look rosier for Wall Street investors. As GM’s fortunes declined year after year, entire communities in the Midwest watched helplessly as their lifeblood drained away. For at least two generations of working stiffs, GM was the Golden Goose, a place where a worker with a high school education could earn wages and benefits sufficient to support a family, put kids through college, vacation in Mexico, and score all the rest of that American Dream stuff.

Long gone.

UAW members have been on a concession binge for decades, steadily ceding ground in the hope that givebacks would halt GM’s slide. Workers gave and GM executives issued self-congratulatory pronouncements, but it never altered the downward trajectory. With great fanfare, GM reorganized, redesigned, re-engineered, but market share continued to erode. Plants closed, workers got the sack. The management class was immunized from the pain of failure by stock options and golden parachutes.

Nothing new or surprising about that. Protecting executives, stockholders and Wall Street investors at the expense of workers is the American way of doing business. The United Auto Workers union usually played a convenient scapegoat role for GM’s staggering inability to compete with Toyota and Honda, as if earning a decent wage with decent benefits and a decent pension was a crime against the natural order.

An American giant has fallen. Remember the names: Oldsmobile, Cadillac, Chevrolet and Pontiac. Remember the glory years of Motown, for we won’t be seeing them again.