General Motors’ 1991 Christmas Massacre: 21 plants, 74,000 jobs gone

This article is part of the People’s World 100th Anniversary Series.

In the 1980s, General Motors CEO Roger Smith became infamous in the eyes of auto workers nationwide after he initiated a major onslaught against organized labor and the working class with his mass shutdown and outsourcing of auto plants across the country. He and his deeds were immortalized in filmmaker Michael Moore’s 1989 documentary, Roger & Me.

Smith’s successor at GM, executive Robert Stempel, carried on the offensive. On Dec. 20, 1991, just as auto workers were ending their shifts to go on holiday break with their families, Stempel and GM announced it was closing 21 more plants across North America, eliminating 74,000 jobs.

The article below, published in our Dec. 21, 1991, edition, was People’s World’s first article on the “General Motors Christmas Massacre.”

The General Motors Christmas Massacre: GM to shut down 21 plants

Special to the World

Dec. 21, 1991

DETROIT—General Motors Corp. yesterday announced that it will close 21 North American plants over the next four years and slash thousands of jobs, decimating auto worker communities already reeling from years of double-digit unemployment. The announcement is hitting auto communities like a bloody Christmas massacre.

The statement said six vehicle assembly plants, four powertrain plants and 11 component plants will be permanently closed. United Auto Workers’ President Owen Bieber and UAW Vice President Stephen P. Yokich, head of the union’s General Motors Department, compared GM to Ebenezer Scrooge.

“Both in the long and the short term, strategies which close plants, reduce employment, and curtail capital spending are self-defeating,” they said. “This announcement will not only strengthen our resolve to fully enforce the contract, it will further energize us to win the White House.

One of GM’s two plants that produce large rear-wheel drive cars—either the plant in Arlington, Texas or the one in Ypsilanti, Mich.—will be shut down. GM’s refusal to say which will be

closed led UAW members to charge that GM is resorting to “whipsaw” tactics, pitting the workers in the two plants against each other in order to force wage and benefit concessions.

Dave Perdue, President of UAW Local 276 representing the 3,800 workers at the Arlington plant told People’s World that the members were voting by secret ballot Wednesday on whether to allow the local “to put together a package that will be attractive to the company.”

Perdue denied that GM had asked for concessions, but he said the shutdown of the plant would be devastating to the Dallas-Fort Worth region, which has already been hit by deep job cutbacks at the General Dynamics plant and the closing of Carswell Air Force Base.

“These jobs are really vital to the economy of this part of Texas,” he said. “We’ve really been decimated by lay-offs.” Every candidate for the presidency, whether Republican or Democrat, must be confronted with demands for action to reverse the economic recession, Perdue said.

“The problems we have out here have been accumulating for 12 years,” he said. “The Republicans haven’t helped us a bit. George Bush isn’t asking us, ‘Are you better off now than you were 12 years ago?’ We’re all much worse off.”

In addition to the plant closings, the company will accelerate a white-collar job reduction program that eliminated 6,000 jobs this year. An additional 9,400 salaried jobs are to be eliminated in 1992 through attrition and a new early-retirement program. GM also plans to reduce its hourly work force by 15,000 people through attrition and retirement next year.

The assembly plant closings are likely to affect supplier plants inside and outside the mammoth automaker, boosting the number of layoffs.

GM CEO Robert Stempel was asked which of the two rear-drive plants will close. “Obviously, we’re not down to which one,” he said, adding GM would decide early next year. Asked whether GM was playing one plant off against another, he said, “We are not in the process of whipsawing.”

At least one of GM’s five plants making mid-sized front-wheel drive cars would be closed next year. These closings are in addition to the four assembly plants GM already announced it would idle. Starting in 1993, GM said it will stop making V6 engines in Lansing, Mich. These engine lines will be consolidated into plants in Flint, Mich., and Tonawanda, N.Y.

GM has more than 300,000 active hourly workers and about 94,000 salaried employees in the United States. The UAW contract requires that laid off workers get payments supplementing unemployment to bring their benefits to 95% of their normal take-home pay. After 36 weeks, the workers must be rehired or put in a special job pool at full pay.

Even before the official announcement, workers coming off the night shift at the Arlington plant reacted with fear and disbelief. “We’re just holding our breath. We don’t know what’s going to happen,” said George Grishman, 64, who has worked at the Arlington plant for seven years. “You just have to look for another job. It reaches down to every nook and cranny in your life. ”

Clearly, it will take more than hope to stem the massive loss of jobs being planned by corporate America.

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