GM, Chrysler make cuts to hold on for loans

At Chrysler, Nardelli testified, there’s a cash committee that scrutinizes requests every week.

But what they’re doing now may not be enough. Some in Congress criticized the CEOs for flying to Washington on separate corporate jets. GM is reducing its leased fleet from seven planes last year to three, but the stigma remains.

Lawmakers also rapped the automakers’ high labor costs and particularly the jobs bank, in which laid-off workers get 95 percent of their pay plus benefits even though they aren’t working.

The United Auto Workers said it has cut the jobs bank and placed time limits on it in new contracts signed with the companies last year. Still, more than 3,500 workers are getting paid for not working, and that number is sure to rise as the companies continue to cut jobs.

On Friday, GM announced it would extend holiday shutdowns and make other production cuts at five North American factories. It also accelerated the closure of a truck plant in Oshawa, Ontario.

Harlan Platt, who teaches corporate turnarounds at Northeastern University in Boston, said GM should turn to the UAW for help.

“The bank right now is the union, and they’re going to have to give up something in the near term so they have something very valuable in the long term,” Platt said.

Initially the UAW said it already gave up a lot in the new contracts, agreeing to lower wages for new hires and to shift the companies’ huge retiree health care costs to a union-administered trust.

But on Thursday, President Ron Gettelfinger softened his stance, saying that the union is at the bargaining table already.

“We would welcome all the other stakeholders to the table to make some concessions,” he said.

In Washington, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said lawmakers are trying to get reassurances that the companies have a specific plan to survive before the government hands over taxpayer money.

Congressional Democrats called on the automakers to show how they would ensure the government would be reimbursed and share in future profits, eliminate dividends and lavish executive pay packages, meet fuel-efficiency standards, and address their health care and pension obligations to workers if they got the federal help.

But that could be troublesome for the automakers.

GM Chief Executive Rick Wagoner told reporters Thursday that the company already has shared a detailed plan confidentially with the Bush administration and key staffers in Washington. He’s concerned that sensitive information could be made public.

“Historically, things like your future product plans, technology plans and financial plans would be competitively sensitive information, and so for a variety of reasons, we wouldn’t be sharing that publicly,” he said.

Douglas Baird, a professor who specializes in bankruptcy at the University of Chicago Law School, says the automakers were too vague, giving Congress less information than companies normally give lenders when seeking bankruptcy financing.

“That’s not the way you approach a lender in a work-out. That’s just not the way it’s done,” he said.

Wagoner, he said, will have the difficult task of showing Congress how GM can be viable with its current structure.

“That’s not going to be easy to do,” he said.

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