Reaction to President Obama’s Auto Industry Plan
From the Detroit Free Press:
General Motors’s new chief executive is ready to take the company into bankruptcy to save the company
In his first press conference since taking over GM on Monday, Fritz Henderson revealed today that he’s been given a clear mandate: Make GM successful by “whatever it takes.”
“If I didn’t want to be part of a bankruptcy, if we had to do that, I would have just said, ‘No, I don’t want to be part of it,’” Henderson said about accepting his new job.
Gone are ousted-CEO Rick Wagoner’s strong protests against bankruptcy and the caveats about damaging the company’s brands and sales.
To meet the Obama administration’s demands for a more aggressive turnaround plan, Henderson said the automaker will need to take further measures to restructure the company — including possibly closing more plants than expected, likely offering additional buyouts to UAW members and reducing its dealer network faster.
“We need to reinvent General Motors
and we need to do it in a very, very abbreviated time period … so that we’re not spending our time careening from crisis to crisis,” Henderson said.
In his first press conference since taking over GM on Monday, Fritz Henderson revealed today that he’s been given a clear mandate: Make GM successful by “whatever it takes.”
“If I didn’t want to be part of a bankruptcy, if we had to do that, I would have just said, ‘No, I don’t want to be part of it,’” Henderson said about accepting his new job.
Gone are ousted-CEO Rick Wagoner’s strong protests against bankruptcy and the caveats about damaging the company’s brands and sales.
To meet the Obama administration’s demands for a more aggressive turnaround plan, Henderson said the automaker will need to take further measures to restructure the company — including possibly closing more plants than expected, likely offering additional buyouts to UAW members and reducing its dealer network faster.
“We need to reinvent General Motors
From The New York Times:
The Obama administration went into sales mode on Sunday, with President Obama and a number of senior economic and military leaders blanketing the morning talk show circuit to advance the administration’s efforts on the economy and the war in Afghanistan.
Mr. Obama, speaking on the CBS program “Face the Nation,” discussed both his plan, announced in the last week, to send more troops to Afghanistan but scale back American ambitions there, and the likely announcement on Monday of a new plan to bail out the nation’s struggling auto manufacturers — and lamented that he did not have the luxury of taking on such issues one at a time.
The findings of the president’s task force on the auto industry, expected on Monday, are expected to back increasing short-term aid to the two weakest of the Big Three automakers, General Motors and Chrysler, in return for concessions that would help the ailing companies become viable and avert bankruptcy.
Mr. Obama stressed that he intended to maintain an American auto industry. “But it’s got to be one that’s realistically designed to weather this storm, and to emerge at the other end much more lean, mean and competitive than it currently is,” he said. “And that’s going to mean a set of sacrifices from all parties involved — management, labor, shareholders, creditors, suppliers, dealers. Everybody is going to have to come to the table and say it’s important for us to take serious restructuring steps now, in order to preserve a brighter future down the road.”
One Response to “Reaction to President Obama’s Auto Industry Plan”
Ford has got to pissed with news that the gov’t is going to do warranty work for GM.
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