General Motors

William C. Durant founded General Motors in 1908 by buying Buick and then everything else he could finance. He lost control, regained it, and lost it again. Alfred P. Sloan, who ran the company from the 1920s, gave it the form business schools still diagram: separate divisions, Chevrolet through Cadillac, under a central staff that allocated capital.

Sloan's GM offered a car for every purse and a job for every step of a ladder. For long stretches after 1945 it was the largest private employer on earth. A supplier in Flint or Lordstown did not have a plan that ignored it.

The division and the union

Each division had its own plants, dealers, and identity. The people who worked in them bargained, after the sit-down strikes of 1936–37, through the United Auto Workers. The contract, not the foreman's mood, set wages, seniority, and the pace. That bargain defined American industrial work for half a century: high pay, a narrow job classification, and a company rich enough to afford both.

2009

GM went through a government-backed bankruptcy in 2009. The old corporation's shareholders were wiped out. A new General Motors Company bought the useful assets and kept the brands. It still employs people by the tens of thousands to design and assemble vehicles. It is not the company that employed half a million, and it is not gone. The page calls it active because the gates are open, and the history because the 1908 firm died in court.

The division and the union

2009

The work it organized

On the timeline

Related