The GM Cultural Shift & What It Really Means

This closure would result in about 15,000 or so job losses in total and about 2500 in Oshawa. Of course, those 2500 direct job losses blow out into probably twice that many when you factor in suppliers and the Oshawa retail market.

Almost immediately the Ontario labour union honchos and every politician with their shoes on started raging. They can’t do this. It contravenes our agreement and our labour contract. It’s illegal. It’s immoral etc.

And all of them raged on about how they would fight until the last dog dies to keep that plant open.

The one thing they did not factor into all their rage, disgust and bluster is that General Motors has made this decision based on a different set of standards.

General Motors is one of the largest corporations in the world. They are publicly owned and operate on three little words and three little words alone….Return…On…Investment.

It’s easy to get caught up in the human tragedy that this will create, especially at a time when economies are so fragile and the most influential free market capitalist state is in the hands of a bunch of greedy idiots, but the simple fact of life in this society is that large public corporations will do what ever the have to do to, at the very least, maintain their share price.

Why? Because their first obligation is not to their employees. It is to their shareholders. Period. Everything else is simply a set of expandable or contractable chess pieces in the cutthroat game of commerce.

The union leaders and the politicians will not affect this decision, no matter how angry they sound. The corporation has no empathy. It is only interested in its own survival and growth.

So when I hear well-intentioned union leaders and asshole politicians creating sound bytes, I just see them as jackals picking at a carcass, ripping off little bits of publicity and creating false hope

Why Is This Happening Now?

There are two reasons for GM closing these operations. One is the public reason which is that they are moving their business into electronic and self-driving vehicles. And that may very well be the case.

To GM, there is no point in continuing to make vehicles that are dependent on fossil fuel and destroying the planet in the process.

They have seen what a lot of countries (ex the US) have seen and that is the future of transportation, as the future of just about everything else, is going to be based on non-polluting or renewable energy.

Otherwise we will have no planet to worry about. And it will all be moot.

This time, logic and corporate sociopathy meet in a good place for the planet. For the workers, not so much.

You Always Need A Plan B

All this goes to reinforces a key adage of modern day society, which is that everybody, and I mean every single damn body, needs a Plan B.

High profile business thinkers have been chanting this mantra for 20 years. It’s out there in the public domain but sadly it is, like everything else that talks to the whole population, subject to its own Pareto Principle in that the vast majority of people either ignore or do not have the intellectual capacity to grasp the logic of always making sure you have a plan B.

So what you end up with, in industrialized countries, is a whole lot of sadness, displacement, anger and tragedy. And people whose dependence on one set of now, or soon to be, obsolete skills have been their undoing.

Is This the Fault of GM?

I don’t think so.

Because, at the end of the day, GM is simply responding to trends in the marketplace. 

They are seeing the consumer shift towards electric vehicles. They are seeing the cultural shift around the world to large scale renewable energy for both manufacturing and the products that that being manufactured.

And they responding in the only way they know how to respond…,.logically.

Welcome To The Future

I was lucky to have gone through a 45 year career in advertising without the need of a plan B.

If I had needed it, and I did think about it, there are lots of ways I could have gone. But I probably would have gone into sales, because copywriters are really nothing more than sales people who can write. Persuasion is persuasion, and I could easily have figured out how to make a good living selling just about anything that didn’t require specialized medical or scientific knowledge.

And believe me, there were several times in my advertising career, when that Plan B crossed my mind.

The majority of people at GM probably do not have a Plan B, and this is where the real tragedy lies.

I sincerely believe, however, that for many of them there is hope, But the first thing that has to happen for them to realize this hope is that our governments need to start thinking more progressively about alternative energy.

Their economies are thriving and they are doing more than their part in curbing CO2 emission which is the major contributor to climate change.

Government subsidies in renewable industries and ideas have proven to be extremely worthwhile investments

Corporations like GM see this and think….yep, that’s where we need to be. The way they go about getting there is cruel and unusual punishment for a lot of their workers. But change, especially change of this magnitude, is always going to create displacement.

The smart displaced workers should see this as an opportunity to take advantage of whatever programs are created either by GM or the government to learn the skills that will make them employable in this brave new world.

Because the future is taking shape right before our eyes, and clinging to the past, in this case, simply means getting left behind.

Jim lives in St Catharines Ontario (AKA The Quiet Side Of The Lake) and is currently a partner at Bullet Proof Consulting. www.bulletproofconsulting.ca

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