General Motors Cuts 231 At Its Atlanta IT Center
28
Sponsored Links
General Motors is laying off 231 workers at its Information Technology Innovation Center in Atlanta, according to the Atlanta Business Chronicle (subscription required). The cuts are apart of GM’s larger restructuring that called for laying off 15 percent of its workforce and 25 percent of its executive staff.
General Motors opened its new IT Innovation Center in 2013, planning to hire approximately 1,000 workers. Then-Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal said, “The information age will be with us for a long time.”
The cuts come as General Motors continues to close factories and lay off workers. This week, production ended at GM’s Lordstown factory. GM also announced its White Marsh, Maryland transmission factory, which builds gearboxes for the Chevrolet Silverado and GMC Sierra heavy-duty pickup trucks, will idle May 4. GM has also announced its closing its West Chester, Ohio processing center May 31.
Layoffs throughout General Motors started last month after a round of voluntary buyouts failed to attract enough employees. Reports indicated General Motors wanted to lay off 7,000-8,000 people through the buyout program. However, only about 2,250 opted to participate. Employees were offered six months worth of salary and health benefits starting in January if they accepted.
The latest round of cuts comes as GM readies to negotiate it with the United Auto Workers union on the fate of three U.S. factories. The UAW is fighting GM on idling the three plants, filing a lawsuit against the automaker, alleging a violation of the contract between the two. A fourth U.S. factory, Detroit-Hamtramck, was slated to close this year, but GM extended production there through January 2020 to build the Cadillac CT6 and Chevrolet Impala.
The layoffs and closures are having an effect on suppliers and other local businesses. When GM began making staff cuts at its Warren Tech Center, local businesses immediately felt the impact. A study from the University of Michigan’s Research Seminar in Quantitative Economics, found that GM’s layoffs and closures could cost Michigan 16,000 jobs over the next two years.
Sponsored Links
Machete Mary Barra at it again.
Pure evil.
You would think the people GM needs most to deal with the future are the IT Innovation Center employees.
Instead, according to the figures quoted here, GM cut 23% of Innovation staff.
This, on top of the Tech Center in Warren taking a big hit earlier this year.
Seems like those are the people you’d need to achieve Mary’s ‘3 Z’s’ goal.
GM was given $25m in tax incentives from the state of Georgia to open the IT Innovation Center 5 yrs ago.
GM is making a lot of enemies in governments throughout the U.S., and the all-important federal one. And simultaneously it is losing on its China bet. Not a good situation as many staff know in the company.
P.S. It won’t be getting anymore tax breaks to prop it up anywhere. Like I said on another thread, it is much worse than many people know.
Machete Mary’s Triple Zero vision is a bunch of Bullcrap and lies. Just a bunch of PR talk geared toward appeasing analysts.
Geared towards appeasing her ego too.
She is typical GM insider bureaucrat. Company is going nowhere good fast with her at the helm.
Is not that easy. Many companies are switching to cloud computing. So you need a lot less staff running the data centers of old. If you need a new Linux/Windows server with X amount of storage and Y amount of RAM you. You click your mouse and provision a new server in minutes with no one ever touching a physical piece of hardware.
Your IT staff become more about your core business not the people necessary to have a business.
Well it isn’t all that easy. Talk to any of the GM folks who try contacting the IT help desk and are met with a message stating that the wait time is 3+ hours. The reason, there really are not many folks left doing that and that is intentional. They are trying to have everyone use self help portals and online tools but sometimes that doesn’t do the trick. Also outages now drag on as the operational teams have taken the brunt of the cuts as they don’t fit into Randy Mott’s “innovation” mantra. As the old saying goes, you get what you pay for and this is proving to be true in the post reduction world at GM.
I was with the “Fire Her” crowd but as seen back in 09′ it’s either cut now or amputate later. I’m sure and hopeful that 2 US factories will come back on line and GM will hire again.
True is may cost a finger but it will save the hand.
Cuts are just staring for many MFGs as everyone needs to do more with less.
Problem is that GM has been cutting off fingers, hands, and arms for decades and they are no better for it. Market share in the US is near record lows, and GM is gambling their future on speculative technology most if the market does not even want
Well said.
But you realize GM is worse off than many manufacturers, right? FCA just announced a $4.5 billion investment in Detroit and 6,500 new jobs. GM is doing the opposite.
So is it bad GM is not announcing new hires before the UAW talks?, right now GM have the cards. What products are coming to D-Ham and L-TOWN after the UAW talks since your an “insider” or another clandestine Ford agent….
I have nothing to do with UAW or D-Ham or L-Town at all. Did I even mention I work in the U.S.? The General is a massive company spread all over the world. But if you get enough insiders and smart people outside the company with specific skill-sets and experience talking together, you would be amazed at what can be ascertained and confirmed.
I have nothing to do with vehicle lines or engineering per se
Full disclosure: was offered a job once at Ford but never worked there and never really had interest.
Ok, it’s just here many Ford spy trolls here talking about thier garbage products and pretend to root for GM. Not as bad as the “other” GM site though.
What’s the other GM site BTW ?
Yeah what site is that other one ?
All the general auto sites pretty much say the same thing.
Only the GM and GM managed sites sound better do to truth ” negative ” management.
Even look at Facebook, GM tries so, so , hard to manage the truth ” negativity “.
These cuts have less to do with refocusing for Electric.
Cuts like this are to stop the bleeding.
By the way I have never owned a Ford product and never will.
Not everyone speaking the truth about GM is a troll.
Get real, I type the full site name and it’s vacation time from the moderator for me, but it’s GMi_____news.
It’s a difference between constructive criticism and just complaining. I do harp on GM on things not done administratively (poor product planning, imports from China) to production (no fun, affordable cars fwd or rwd ). If GM don’t at least offer electric products the’ll be in the dust again.
This happens to most global companies. It seems about every ten years the big fat companies just got too bloated. After the bail out GM was doing pretty good in sales and when income increases, so do budgets. Every management group want to add people and during sales growth they’ll usually get it. Now when things start to cycle down as in every industry, the budgets get cut and so do people.
For every employee it cost companies about 50% more than their pay. Companies need to pay the rent and building maintenance, benefits, vacations, computers, work stations and desk, telephones, the light bill and heating and cooling cost, workers comp, state unemployment insurance, social security, property taxes and on and on.
I worked for the third largest global company in the world and when revenue was dropping, I went about four years without a pay raise. No complaints because we all had benefits second to none. The telecommunications work I was in was changing and the industry was shrinking. The company started to sell its buildings and then was paying rent. Finally 51% of the company was sold to an investment group and the layoffs started. Two years later I was out.
For the automotive industry the business model is changing. Ford and GM are the first to start the reorganization. In a few years the rest of the industry will need to change also.
GMIT was hit with a sledgehammer in these cuts, far harder than most other business units. Virtually nobody was eligible for the buyout as probably 95% of those employees brought on board during the 2012 IT insourcing. A lot of them are not new college hires but folks who spent many years at EDS and HP supporting GM, some back to when EDS was owned by GM from 84 to 96. Never made any sense to me building all these IT innovation centers in places like Atlanta, Phoenix and Austin. Even less sense for all the senior leadership to be in Austin vs Detroit/Warren.
Can’t Mary see that the cuts me to come out of Austin? When Mott & Co came over in 2012, they brought a whole bunch of Senior Managers and Directors. Now you have Austin manager reporting to Austin manager reporting to Austin sr manager, reporting to Austin director…director…executive director…cio.
What’s more, they stole HP’s playbook and just changed logos in the PowerPoint documents from HP to GM that was the basis of GM’s IT Strategy. Owner and author of word documents still showed up as HP. Now you have a plagiarized HP playbook from 2012 and a top heavy IT management sitting in Austin that dont know how to think for themselves.
Good luck with all of that Mary
All I know is HP and some other less than ethical folks who ended up running EDS took a great company and ran it into the ground. What GM should have don is what Ackerson stated. GM should have brought EDS in-house in 1996 vs outsourcing it and gotten a 16 year head start on insourcing their IT. So many VERY talented folks lost during that period.
No large corporation that isn’t in IT – Microsoft, HP, IBM, etc… wants a large IT shop. It’s not their core business. GM wants to design and build cars, not run datacenters.
theflew, this is where I get a bit confused, Ha, Ha.
Mary herself has stated numerous times she wants GM to be a tech company.
So many times I cant remember them all.
So like you said, unless you are Microsoft, IBM, Etc. you don’t want in house IT.
OK SURE, but if it is your goal to be a tech company the first thing you need to do is tech.
What am I missing here ?
I also agree that GM is just trying to stop the bleeding with cuts and its just cut, cut, cut, get it straight, rebuild differently. ( I think that should have been done her first day on the job )
However if you know you want to be a tech company you need tech.
Unless China is the new tech ?
All this just will be handled through China also.
I am still a believer in the vertical integration model and GM was at one time the best at it. They owned and controlled everything related to their business. When I started at the GM Tech Center in the 80’s EVERYONE there, from the folks that cleaned the building to the cooks in the cafeteria and the IT worked for GM. When you have to pay someone else to do something you both lose a large degree of direct control and you now have to pay for that companies profit margins.
Does Carley Fiorina ring a bell? She was somewhat of a social experiment at HP during that time and ran the company straight into the ground. Machete Mary is fast becoming the Carley Fiorina of the automotive world.