高级英语视听说第七单元文本 GM's Difficult Road Ahead

Unit 7 GM's Difficult Road Ahead

Episode 1

If the old saying “what’s good for American is good for General Motor and vice versa” is still true, we are all in a lot of trouble. General Motors is limping along in the breakdown lane, in need of a lot more than a minor tune-up.

With GM’s stock trading near an all time low and its bonds rated as junk, the company reported losses of more than $10 billion last year. Unless it stops hemorrhaging money, it will have to be towed into bankruptcy court—a consequence that could cascade through the American economy, threatening up to a million jobs and changing the dreams of American workers.

*General Motors is not just another company.For almost a century, it was emblematic of American industrial dominance, with a car for every customer and a brand for every stratum of society.

***Back when Pontiacs were as sexy as Sinatra and Cadillac the synonym for luxury, GM made half the cars in the United States. And a job on one of its assembly lines was a ticket into the middle class. But that was before the first oil shock, and the Japanese imports. Today, General Motors is losing $24 million a day—and *** all bets are off.

Cole: **And this is not a phantom crisis or a fake crisis. This is a real crisis.

David Cole is chairman of the Center for Automotive Research, a non-profit consulting firm in Ann Arbor Michigan. He is widely considered one of the industry’s top analysts, and believes that Detroit is now facing what the steel industry and the big airlines have already been through: high labor costs that make it almost impossible to compete.

Cole: And every one of the Big Three faces a problem right now of about $2000 to $2500 per vehicle produced cost disadvantage. ** If that plays out over time, they’re all dead. Correspondent: Change or die.

Cole: It’s change o r die. Everything is driven by a profitable business. If you can’t be profitable, you can’t be in business.

Episode 2:

Wagoner: This is a mid-sized car, the Chevy Impala SS…

It has certainly not escaped the attention of General Motors chairman Rick Wagoner, who we met at the Detroit Auto Show and may have the toughest job in America: running a corporation many analysts believe has become, too big , too bloated and too slow to compete with more nimble foreign competitors.

Correspondent: How did General Motors get to the point where it is right now?

Wagoner: ‘Cause we have a long history, almost 100 years. We have a lot of employees. We

have a lot of retirees, a lot of dependents. And promises were made about benefits to those people that weren’t very expensive when they were made. And it’s really given us some financial challenges.

One of them is that most of the people on GM’s payroll are no longer making cars. Every month, it sends out nearly a half million pension checks to former workers, many of whom retired in their 50s after 30 years of service and live in communities where GM plants closed long ago.

Then there is the ever-rising cost of health care. GM has one of the most generous plans in America and provides it to 1.1 million people — retirees, workers and their dependents at a cost of $6 billion a year. More than any company in America.

Gary Chaison, a professor of industrial relations at Clark University, has done the math: Chaison: It comes to ab out $1400 a car now. that’s what the health care premiums of the workers who make that car is.

Correspondent: More that steel?

Chaison: Yeah. Much more than steel, much more than glass, much more than any other part. What you’re doing when you’re buying a car is you’re spending a lot of money for the health care benefits of workers who are making that car.

It’s cost most of GM’s foreign competitors don’t have because their workers are usually covered by some form of government health insurance in their own countries. Rick Wagoner says it’s one of the promises made to workers, in good times, that it can barely afford in bad. Episode 3:

Correspondent: Do you think that those promises can be kept?

Wagoner: Well, we feel a responsibility to the people that those promises were made to. We also have a responsibility to insure that our business is successful in the future.

The future looks so bleak that the United Auto Workers, the union that represents GM’s hourly workers, agreed last year to give back some hard-won concessions, which included a $1 an hour cost-of-living raise for active workers, and required retirees to pay up to several hundred dollars a year towards medical insurance that had always been free. UAW President Ron Gettelfinger says it was painful but necessary.

Correspondent: Was it hard to sell?

Gettelfinger: Sure it was hard to sell. First of all, it was hard for us to convince ourselves that we needed to do something. It was not the easy decision to make, but it was a right decision to make in the long term. Because our concern is the long-term viability of our membership both active and retired when it comes to their benefits or to their wage levels.

And the consensus is the union may have to give up a lot more, either before or during next year’s contract negotiations, if General Motors is to avoid bankruptcy—an outcome that could