[Daily Mail, where America gets its news] Hundreds of General Motors workers were summoned to an ominous 15-minute virtual meeting - and told their jobs were gone.
Employees at the Detroit car giant said they received an oddly timed email inviting them to a short online meeting with human resources on Monday.
At the online meeting, they were read a scripted message telling them they had been laid off. Then the meeting ended.
'No appreciation or empathy. No questions. Nothing,' one data analyst who had worked at GM for more than a decade told CNBC.
| If you want a friend in the work world, get a dog. No matter how much management wants to be loving and supporting, in the end it comes down to the cold equations. I was once fired for doing my job too well, and making the older employees nervous. Yes, it was a sign of poor management, the company closed its doors a year later, and I was definitely better off earning my bread elsewhere, but these things do happen. |
The layoffs hit about 500 to 600 employees, largely in IT roles in Austin, Texas, and Warren, Michigan, according to a person familiar with the cuts.
| GM has 156,000 employees at 396 facilities on six continents, producing about $185 billion in revenue. Six hundred is less than 0.4% of the staff. |
At the same time, GM is hiring for AI-focused roles as automakers ramp up their push to use artificial intelligence to boost worker productivity and streamline operations. As of now, 80 IT positions are listed including jobs working in AI, motorsports and autonomous vehicles.
GM told the Daily Mail AI was a factor, but not the sole cause and the cuts were also tied to workforce reevaluation.
| Workforce reevaluation should be ongoing: cut the bottom-rated 10% or quartile, hire new to fill the empty slots as needed, rinse and repeat |
The veteran programmer and data scientist who lost their job said staff had been pushed to use AI more in their daily work before the cuts landed.
'I've seen it firsthand. It can make you much more productive, as a programmer. It can really help you get more work done, but AI isn't going to do you any good if you don't know the business.'
As part of their severance packages, employees were offered sliding-scale compensation based on tenure, along with lump-sum payments to help cover healthcare costs and mental health services through Lyra Health.
| Think of it as an opportunity to take the time to find work that will be a better fit. Surely you wouldn’t want to continue to work for a company like that. |
GM said in a statement to the Daily Mail: 'GM is transforming its Information Technology organization to better position the company for the future. As part of that work, we have made the difficult decision to eliminate certain roles globally.
'We are grateful for the contributions of the employees affected and are committed to supporting them through this transition.'
The brutal cuts make GM the latest major American company to slash white-collar jobs as bosses race to reshape their workforces for the AI age.
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