A General Motors works council’s response to the capitalist global financial crisis: A case study from Germany

Abstract

The 2008-2009 global financial crisis (GFC) has negatively impacted on banks, financial institutions and companies such as General Motors (GM), bringing the latter’s European subsidiary close to insolvency and highlighting some of the US car manufacturer’s long-term problems, which were solved through a partial takeover by the US government. In Germany, GM’s strongest presence in Europe, the company had a close encounter with bankruptcy in the spring of 2009, narrowly averted when the sale of GM’s Opel subsidiary (GMO) was actively sought. This paper is about the conflict between one company’s management and one works council, in one location. The empirical field research focuses exclusively on the position of GMO’s works council, reporting its views and perspectives on GMO’s management and the GFC. On this basis, two arguments are presented: first, that the relevance of GMO’s works council was reflective of a version of capitalism that has been associated with the model of a ‘coordinated market economy’ (CME) rather than an Anglo-Saxon model of a ‘liberal market economy’ (LME); and second, that despite the eventual cancellation of the sale of GMO by GM-USA (2010), the case highlights how key labour actors coordinated their activities in order to prevent GMO’s bankruptcy.