Staff Reports
In a year that may well be regarded as a history-changing one for the American economy, a company once thought to be a bedrock institution — the backbone of American industrialism — General Motors took a long, hard fall.
Thankfully, at least locally, the company’s Tonawanda Powertrain plant remains a vital — and significantly downsized — component of future plans.
The series of events were put into motion years, some might argue decades, before June 1, 2009.
But on that date, what even a year before would have been unthinkable, happened. Despite a $19 billion taxpayer bailout, General Motors Corp., for generations the world’s largest manufacturer of automobiles, filed for bankruptcy.
It almost immediately announced a plan to cut more than one-third of its dealerships in the United States and a dozen factories were targeted for closure — resulting in layoffs for an estimated 120,000 Americans. Four core brands were shed: Pontiac, Saab, Hummer and Saturn; that left GM with just four brands remaining: Chevrolet, Buick, Cadillac and GMC.
Gone were the days of “Generous Motors” — the company’s lucrative benefits for its workers made for the long-running joke that GM was a health insurance company that sold cars on the side. That would all change. Union workers, already having made a litany of givebacks from contracts negotiated in fatter times, would swallow health care, retirement and pay cuts. Many took buyouts aimed at reducing the size of the workforce and allowing the company to rehire new, lower-paid people to take their place.
GM’s board of directors, under heavy pressure from the Obama Administration after loaning taxpayer money to keep the company afloat, fired its CEO, Rick Wagoner. It then appointed Fritz Henderson, who would last only a few months before Chairman Ed Whitacre took the reins late in 2009. The company has pursued lighter, smaller, more fuel efficient cars and trucks in the wake of a shift in consumer demands — a shift many criticized GM for making far later than its foreign counterparts.
As the face of GM changed, so did the mission of its plant on River Road. Long a home for making the gas guzzling engines that powered so many of the company’s large trucks and SUVs, the plant on Dec. 18 made its last V-8 engine. The plant is now focused on another major assembly line, the one that produces a four-cylinder engine for the Chevy Cobalt and Chevy Malibu.
At the close of 2009, the plant employs 663 hourly workers and another 140 salaried workers.
Twenty years ago, the plant employed 4,350 people.
