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Tuesday, December 09, 2008

If I don't produce, I don't have a job. Why should the chairman of GM be any different?
Posted by Jill | 6:10 AM
You know, I work pretty long hours these days. I have early morning teleconferences with people on the other side of the world who work equally long hours. I take work home. I have deadlines. If I don't live up to expectations, I don't have a job.

But when you're a CEO, being the Head Cheese means never having to say you're sorry:
General Motors vice chairman and auto industry veteran Robert Lutz says saving America's auto industry must be a joint effort, and he thinks GM chief executive Richard Wagoner, Jr., should not be made a "sacrificial lamb" in the process.

Lutz was responding to weekend calls, notably from Sen. Christopher Dodd, for Wagoner to resign. Dodd said management changes have to be part of conditions for a bailout to help the companies restructure.

[snip]

"All I know is that there's going to be sacrifice required from all parties," Lutz said in an interview on CNBC. "All stakeholders are going to have to give something, otherwise, this isn't going to work."

[snip]

Lutz stressed that the dire situation facing the carmakers is not just a domestic one.

"The Japanese are off 30 and 40 percent, the German producers are off 40 and 50 percent," he said. "We're just the tip of the iceberg of the automobile industry."

He also countered criticism of Wagoner.

"He is without doubt the best CEO I've ever worked for," he said. "He has made enormous transformations at General Motors in his tenure."


That's why GM is in such great shape, right Mr. Lutz?

For decades, we've seen a worship of CEOs, often based on nothing but puff profiles of them in magazines, showing them with their trophy wives and trophy houses and trophy jets. Executives like Malden Mills' Aaron Feuerstein are a thing of the past, and even Feuerstein was viewed as a kind of anachronistic curiosity.

Compare Feuerstein, who in 1995 kept his 3000 employees on at full pay after the factory he owned, in which they worked, burned to the ground, with executives like Merrill Lynch's John Thain, who in an example of the appalling and astonishing tone-deafness of financial industry executives, lobbied for a $5-10 million bonus until yesterday, when he finally backed down amidst the expected outcry. Or compare him to the owners of Republic Windows and Doors in Chicago, whose workers are occupying the plant that the company shut down with three days notice, refusing to honor policies of paying severance or compensation for the employees' accumulated vacation.

I'm heartened by these workers, just as I'm heartened by the UAW workers who demonstrated in New York yesterday. I wonder how many of these people fell for the Republican line of bullshit over the last twenty-eight years; this notion that "rich people create jobs"; this fantasy that if they just Work Hard Enough, that guys like Thain and Rick Wagoner will allow them into their elite club. I wonder how many of them have demonized immigrants and black people and "lazy bums on welfare" while guys like John Thain and Rick Wagoner and the politicians who enabled them picked their wallets while they were looking down the ladder. I'm heartened by the demonstrations, but I'm also wondering where the hell these people were while Republicans and corporatist Democrats brought us to this point.

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