General Motors Takes Steps to Boost Requirements for White-Collar Workers

TapTechNews September 12th news, General Motors (GM) is enhancing the requirements for white-collar employees through a series of measures. Since this year, the company has revised the bonus system, employee evaluation methods, the scale and location of the global headquarters, and cancelled the work-from-home rights for some employees. Industry experts believe that this conveys a clear message to white-collar employees: improve efficiency, and those who fail to meet the standards will face layoffs.

TapTechNews noticed that last year GM had already cut about 5,000 positions and announced last month that it will further lay off 1,000 to 1,500 people, with about 600 positions in Detroit. These measures are all to achieve the goal of cutting costs by 2 billion US dollars (TapTechNews note: currently about 14.249 billion RMB) by the end of this year.

Erik Gordon, a professor at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan, believes that GM's move is an epitome of a common trend in the automotive industry. As the profit margins in the automotive industry decline, major automakers are all seeking ways to reduce costs and improve efficiency. They can hardly control the costs of materials or blue-collar employees, and white-collar employees naturally become the optimization target.

It is worth noting that as a traditional automaker with a long history, most of GM's employees are union members. While emerging enterprises such as Tesla tend to adopt a non-unionized employment model. Against such a background, how GM balances labor relations will become a major challenge for its future development.