I am going to tell you exactly how GM layoffs work because I lived it last week and I have not seen anyone describe the full sequence accurately yet.
Monday morning. Calendar invite arrives. Fifteen minutes. No agenda. Organizer is someone from HR you have never interacted with. The meeting is set for later that same day. You know immediately. Everyone in IT knows what a 15-minute HR invite with no agenda means in May 2026 at General Motors. You spend the next three hours trying to work while knowing you are probably not employed by end of business.
The meeting starts. There is a person from HR and a person described as a transition specialist. Your manager is not there. That detail matters and I will come back to it. The HR person reads from a script. Verbatim. There is no conversation. There is no acknowledgment of your specific role or what you built or how long you were there. The script says your position has been eliminated as part of GM transforming its Information Technology organization. It says support is available. It says you will receive information about your severance package. It says the meeting is ending now.
Eleven years. The meeting was nine minutes.
Here is what I know about the backend of this that did not make the press. The selection process was not purely performance based. Teams were evaluated against a skills framework that Sterling Anderson’s organization developed over the past several months. If your role mapped to legacy enterprise IT, traditional ERP support, or anything classified as maintaining existing infrastructure rather than building new capability, you were exposed regardless of your review history. People with strong track records went. People who had been flagged in prior reviews survived if their skill profile fit the new architecture. The framework was not shared with employees or managers in advance. Your manager found out who was on the list the same morning you did, which is why they were not in the meeting.
Severance scales from two months at one to four years of service up to six months at twelve or more years. Lump sum healthcare payment between two and six thousand dollars depending on tenure. Unused vacation is forfeited unless your state law prevents it. All of it is contingent on signing a release agreement. They sent a mental health app recommendation in the same package. Lyra. The line in the document reads, experiencing job loss can bring a complex mix of emotions. That is the empathy component.
The AI framing in the press is accurate but incomplete. AI was one input into the skills gap analysis that drove the selections. It was not the only one. The broader context is that this is the fourth significant workforce action at GM since August 2024 and every one of them has come with a transformation narrative that is true in the narrow sense and dishonest in the larger one. They are not transforming. They are repricing the labor cost of a technology organization that was built for a version of GM that no longer exists. The AI framing gives that a cleaner story than it deserves.
I signed the release. I needed the severance. That is how it works and they know it.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​