Inside GM: Holden On for Dear Life

Please keep this email anonymous. I currently work for GM Holden in Australia. This is my second stint at Holden. As you may know Holden is an Iconic Australian brand that unfortunately has GM Cancer. Holden has always been successful in delivering pretty good rear wheel drive cars at good prices. Until, however we got caught up in the GM world with the GTO program. My first time at Holden was in 2000. It was a place were everybody was proud of what we did, knew what had to be done. Now it is a shell of its former self, with people totally beaten into submission. The last 18 months doing Camaro has really smashed Holden and its talented workforce. It replaced just about all of the Australian management with Americans with no experience in the Australian market, and could not be told they were wrong.

I spent my time between my Holden stints at Toyota. I learned a lot, and although I don’t get excited about there product they give everything 100% which gives them an excellent result. They also have what they call a pillar of there mission – Respect for people. GM however is as described by some of your recent articles. Its a mess! I have only ever tried to do what’s best, offering alternative ways of doing things, proposing a different mindset of doing it right once. This has lead now to nothing short of intimidation and harassment by my management.

Pushed into a dead end job, verballed continuously by my bully manager. So I decided to ask for a Voluntary Separation. REJECTED!!! Why, if I want to I go empty handed is the response! Such a shame that something Iconic and something to be proud of has turned into something shameful and embarrassing. The people within my organisation are begging we are sold off, but nobody will speak up as they know they will be harassed and would be fired or worse put into a job you will never get out of and can;t leave due to the rising unemployment rates. I cannot see how GM will survive, it can’t even deliver a employee Christmas party let alone products people actually want to buy. Unfortunately all GM has done to Holden is engineer the Holden out of it.