General Motors is discussing plans to sell of a number of its brands. It appears like a phenominal opportunity to have the employees step up and say, we can run our plant better than the company has been run in the past. After all, all it would take is a change in the attitude. Should the management and the workers of any one division come together and offer to buy out the plant, the cash starved GM would be foolish not to sell. The employees also don’t have much to lose, since if they do not do something along those lines soon, they will be without the jobs and without the plant period.
Would it be a gamble? Absolutely. But playing Russian Roulette actually makes sense if that is your only option to avoid certain death.
Shedding the overhead and converting employee liabilities (retirement and other commitments that GM will not be able to keep anyways) in to company equity, which the employees would now for the first time truly control would dramatically reduce the disadvantages that are not based on poor quality of poorly designed vehicles. The direct ownership at each plant would have the long term potential to solve the problems of poor design, poor quality and being ignorant of the market. More importantly, employee engagement and commitment would for the first time match or exceed those at Toyota, which is the foundation of all lean Toyota initiatives that GM in their futile effort to become lean has failed to take in to consideration.
Surely, some of these plants would fail outright, but others will adjust to better serve the market and thrive. And even if a few do, the gamble will have paid off, because GM has been dead for a while and salvaging even a few plants out of the company would do wanders for the health of american economy and long term cometitiveness of US automotive market.
What would you do if you were on the plant management team at one of the closing plants at GM?
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