GM News: GM Korea Plans Job Cuts Due To Chevrolet Pullout In Europe

[William Maley]

As we reported a couple weeks ago, General Motors has decided to pull Chevrolet from Europe to give Opel and Vauxhall some breathing room. But with this pullout comes a problem for GM in South Korea. The continent produced most of the Chevrolet models for Europe. With Chevrolet saying pulling out in late 2015, production volume is expected to drop 20 percent. This has GM thinking about cutting jobs.

Reuters reports that GM Korea is planning to launch a "voluntary retirement" the 6,000 salaried workers by March. A spokesperson says this is the fourth round of job cuts since 2009. GM Korea CEO Sergio Rocha says that no production jobs will be cut.

"Workloads are too light and there is a lot of anxiety about job restructuring," said an employee.

GM Korea is currently working on 2015 Chevrolet Sonic, but reportedly has nothing to work on after that.

"For me, this is the biggest crisis facing GM Korea since 2000 (when Daewoo Motor went bankrupt)," the employee went onto say.

Source: Reuters

William Maley is a staff writer for Cheers & Gears. He can be reached at [email protected] or you can follow him on twitter at @realmudmonster.

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[G. David Felt]

I think GM needs to look at dumping the Euro Union jobs and go with the better built Korean folks. I think this would help them in quality and long term growth of the market.

Sadly, I think GM still needs to shrink departments around the world to deal with the over all world economy issues and over capacity problems.

[Drew Dowdell]

This was all part of the economics of the Chevy pullout in the first place. Australia isn't going to pick up the sales slack.