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Anonymous
May 20, 2026 - 21:48

Mary Barra said it plainly in January at the Automotive Press Association. The people who got you to point A are not necessarily the people who are going to get you to point B. She was talking about the workforce. She was talking about us. I have been at GM for nine years. I worked on programs that are now cancelled. I built relationships with suppliers and dealers that exist nowhere in any system. I mentored three people who have since been laid off. And the message from the top of the company is that people like me are point A people and point B requires someone different. The quote got some press coverage and then everyone moved on. The people still employed here did not move on. We read it, we understood what it meant, and we are now making our own calculations about whether the loyalty we extended to this company over the last decade was well placed. For a lot of us the answer is clarifying itself.

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Anonymous
May 23, 2026 - 15:36

What you described is the thing that does not show up in any workforce analysis or restructuring report. The institutional knowledge problem. You built relationships with suppliers and dealers that exist nowhere in any system. That sentence should be in every post-mortem GM does on these cuts and it will not be in any of them.
I have been at a different OEM through two rounds of this and what I can tell you is that the people who frame Barra's quote as callous are not wrong, but they are also missing something. She said the quiet part out loud. Every CEO at every large company operates on that logic. The difference is that most of them do not say it into a microphone at an industry event. The implicit contract that loyalty earns you consideration has never actually been written down anywhere. The restructurings of the last three years have just made that visible to a lot of people who had not looked at it that clearly before.
What I did with that realization was stop optimizing for the company and start optimizing for myself. Not in a disruptive way. I still do the work. But where I put my energy outside of work, what skills I build, what external relationships I maintain, what I keep versus what I give away freely, those calculations changed. The answer to "was my loyalty well placed" is almost certainly no. The more useful question is what you do with that information going forward. You are clearly still there and still functional. That means you have options that the people who were already let go do not have anymore.

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