Sep 30th, 2008 by RJ Menezes
General Motors made a recent announcement that the company will begin cutting U.S. contract workers as early as this week. The cuts are part of a bigger effort to reduce the automaker’s overall costs. The number of contract workers who will be dismissed is unclear, but it could be up to several hundred.
GM spokesman Tom Wilkinson said that the automaker will have some contract cuts coming up, but declined to provide any specific details.
The automaker is trimming its salaried job costs by 20 percent also in an effort to meet that goal. GM needs to eliminate about 15 percent of its U.S. salaried jobs to be able to be successful at implementing it’s plan. That translates to about 5,000 of the 32,000 workers currently employed at the company.
Expect lot’s of upheavel over this news as this means a lot of lifetime GM employees might be out of a job. The company better take advantage of this to do some good with it, cause if GM fails to meet its cost reduction goal with the voluntary program, executives may consider involuntary job cuts.