Nearly 50,000 take buyouts at GM, Delphi

Because so many people are leaving, both GM and Delphi will have to scramble to keep plants and assembly lines running by recalling laid-off workers, bringing in transfers from other plants and hiring temporary workers.

“There will be this challenge to make sure there are enough workers in certain locations. You can’t just move people around like chess pieces,” said Greg Gardner, spokesman for Harbour Consulting, a Troy company that tracks manufacturing productivity.

GM officials said they will maintain quality at the plants, mainly because they’ve already had plenty of practice at such transitions.

Officials said about 9,000 people already have left the company under the attrition offers.

“We’ve managed through that quite well,” Wagoner said, adding that the remaining workers who took the packages have departure dates that are scattered through the end of the year.

“We feel highly comfortable we can offer continued focus on great quality,” he said.

But Gerald Meyers, former chairman of American Motors Corp. who now teaches at the University of Michigan, said the cuts initially will cause problems but eventually will be positive for both companies.

“It’s a manufacturing manager’s nightmare with all these people moving in and out,” said Meyers, who predicted quality problems for Delphi and to a lesser degree, for GM, as the transition is made to a smaller work force. “It’ll take weeks before these people learn their jobs and before they find out how tired they’re going to get. It’ll show up in the quality of the product,” he said.

Delphi will lose so many workers that it will have trouble producing its products, said Rob Betts, president of a UAW local at a Delphi plant in Coopersville.

“It could end up being dangerous, a threat to the business,” said Betts, who said skilled workers are being replaced by inexperienced people earning far less money.

Analysts say they don’t have good estimates on how much all the buyouts and retirements will cost GM. But the company had about $21 billion in cash back in March, said Robert Schulz, an industry analyst with Standard & Poor’s in New York.

The job cuts are an important first step toward GM’s long-term stability, but won’t turn the company around by themselves, said Erich Merkle, an analyst with IRN Inc., an automotive consulting company in Grand Rapids.

“The other side of the equation is the revenue side. They’ve got to do something to stabilize their sales and market share. At the end of the day you still have to build products people will buy,” Merkle said.

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