DETROIT — General Motors Corp. will furlough entire shifts of workers at some truck factories and may move them to nearby car plants as it restructures to adjust to a rapidly changing U.S. market brought on by $4-per-gallon gasoline.
GM chairman and chief executive Rick Wagoner and top managers are finalizing additional restructuring moves and likely will announce details at the automaker’s annual meeting Tuesday in Wilmington, Del., two people familiar with the plan told The Associated Press. The people requested anonymity because the plan is not finished.
One said production cuts were part of the plan. Neither would give details.
Key to the plan are the 19,000 hourly workers who signed up to leave the company by July 1 through buyout and early-retirement offers. GM on Thursday announced the number of takers in the latest round of offers, which amounts to a quarter of the company’s U.S. hourly workforce.
The world’s largest automaker expects to replace some of the workers at a new entry-level wage of about $14 per hour, about half the rate of current production workers. The new wage rate for up to 16,000 nonassembly workers is part of the national contract negotiated with the United Auto Workers last year.
“This attrition program gives us an opportunity to restructure our U.S. workforce through the entry-level wage- and-benefit structure for new hourly employees,” GM North America president Troy Clarke said in a statement Thursday.
