The General Motors flameout has been a disaster for blue collar Americans working on assembly lines. Out of 123,000 North American GM workers, 20,000 are scheduled to lose their jobs.
Meanwhile, the Auto Task Force, appointed by President Obama to oversee the process, is led by Wall Street financiers who seems intently focused on a single goal - turning a profit and getting stock prices to rise. It's an approach that has some people worried.
On a rain-soaked afternoon two weeks ago, I set out for Wilmington, Delaware in hopes of talking with a few of the 500 General Motors assembly workers who were finishing up their shift at the city’s 62-year-old automotive plant – the last of its kind on the East Coast.
The plant is shutting down for good at the end of next month (after a five-week summer recess) as part of the highly publicized bankruptcy agreement worked out by the Obama administration and GM.
With the help of a few of my colleagues, we were able to track down several workers who lived in and around the area.
What we found was enormously difficult to comprehend. Men and women all over town who were coping with the fact that the end was in sight for them at a company they had helped build.
One hardened man, who had a thermos jug and his lunch leftovers thrown over his shoulder, had worked at the plant for 31 years, and he told me as he was leaving that he was confused and mostly in pain about what has transpired in these last few weeks. I asked him if he had anything else to say.
"What else is there to say," he shot back?
And now, after GM has pocketed a total of $50 billion in taxpayer money, the man with the thermos and the rest of his blue collar colleagues were essentially being told:
The only path to return GM to profitability is for their jobs to be outsourced to China or Mexico or anywhere really where the company can score labor at a sweatshop rate.
It’s a tough position for the Obama administration because they clearly could have let the entire company fail (a position most Americans seem to agree with judging by recent polls), which would have only led to more unemployment. But hopefully this video gives a glimpse of what life will be like for the unlucky workers who didn’t quite seem to fit into the GM's massive restructuring plan.
Now that you’re a 60% shareholder of General Motors, you may want to take a look: