Death of a Thousand Cuts at GM

(MoneyWatch)  General Motors plans to cut an additional 27,000 jobs this year. As painful as that is, it's only the tip of a very big iceberg dating back a lot of years.

Even before additional job cuts planned for this year, General Motors has steadily become a smaller, more global company, as U.S. employees have shrunk as a percentage of the total.

Back in 1986, GM's worldwide employment peaked at 876,000. U.S. employees made up 72 percent of the worldwide total. At the end of the first quarter of 2009, 88,000 total U.S. jobs made up only about 37 percent of the worldwide total.

As part of that process, GM has also become less vertically integrated, which helps explain some of the job cuts. GM spun off its former parts operations to create Delphi Corp. in 1998. Delphi has been in bankruptcy since 2005.

In this decade alone, GM's worldwide employment has already shrunk from 390,000 in 2000, to 235,000 at the end of the first quarter of 2009, a drop of about 40 percent. In the United States, GM employment fell 50 percent in the same period.

All this served to remind me it's been 20 years since Michael Moore skewered then-GM Chairman and CEO Roger Smith in the movie, "Roger & Me." I watched the movie again a few months ago, and I was struck by how unfair it was to Smith personally, in petty ways. (Smith has since died, in 2007.) In one scene, Moore shows up unannounced at GM headquarters, and makes a big deal out of the fact that he's not ushered straight in to see Smith.

In the same era, I almost literally tripped over Smith all alone at the New York auto show. Despite his portrayal in the movie, he wasn't all that hard to find. Of course nobody was going to see him in his office without an appointment. least of all Michael Moore. After all, you can't drop in on your dentist without an appointment, either.

But in the end, Moore lands a lot of punches by showing the devastating effect that GM's cuts at the time had on real-life people, especially in his home town of Flint, Mich.

Twenty years later, the really chilling part of watching "Roger & Me" again is that in some ways, the late 1980s were the good old days.

Chart: GM data, BNET Autos chart