msnbc.com news services
updated 1 hour, 6 minutes ago
WASHINGTON - General Motors said Tuesday it needs $4 billion in government loans this month and a total of $12 billion by late March to keep operating. The troubled automaker said it plans to slash its numbers of workers, vehicle brands and plants by 2012.
Altogether, the auto giant is seeking up to $18 billion in government funding — including a $6 billion line of credit in case market conditions worsen.
General Motors Corp. would focus on 4 brands — Chevrolet, GMC, Buick and Cadillac. By 2012, the plan calls for 20,000 to 30,000 fewer workers, a reduction of nine facilities and 1,750 fewer dealers.
GM CEO Rick Wagoner is offering to work for a dollar a year and top executives will take major pay cuts.
Detroit’s automakers, making a second bid for $25 billion in funding, presented Congress with plans Tuesday to restructure their ailing companies and provide assurances that the funding will help them survive and thrive.
Chrysler LLC said Tuesday it has asked the U.S. government for an emergency $7-billion bridge loan by the end of the year, saying it needs the funds to survive a brutal downturn in sales that has depleted its cash reserves.
Earlier, Ford said it is asking Congress for a $9 billion “stand-by line of credit” to stabilize its business, but says it doesn’t expect to tap it.
Unless one of Detroit’s other Big Three auto companies goes bust, Ford expects to have enough money to make it through next year without government help, it said in a plan that projected the firm will break even or turn a pretax profit in 2011.
GM, Ford and Chrysler LLC said they would refinance their companies’ debt, cut executive pay, seek concessions from workers and find other ways of reviving their staggering companies.
The Big Three executives also are offering a series of mostly symbolic moves to burnish their images, badly tattered after they arrived in Washington D.C. last month on three separate private jets to plead for a federal lifeline for their struggling companies. All three companies offered separate plans for hearings that will be held Thursday and Friday.
That approach the auto executives took last month led Democratic congressional leaders to declare they didn’t come prepared to justify their pleas and they told them to go back home and ready a new plan.
This week, the automakers are going out of their way to show deference to lawmakers and a willingness to flog themselves for past mistakes. “I think we learned a lot from that experience,” Ford CEO Alan Mulally told The Associated Press in an interview.
Mulally said he’d work for $1 per year if his firm had to take any government loan money. The company’s plan also says it will cancel all management employees’ 2009 bonuses, scrap merit increases for its North American salaried employees next year, and sell its five corporate aircraft.
And for this week’s appearances here, all three company chiefs will skip the lavish travel arrangements. Mulally is coming by car from Detroit for this week’s second round of congressional hearings on government help for the Big Three. GM Chief Rick Wagoner will drive a Chevrolet Malibu hybrid sedan for the 520-mile trek from Detroit to Capitol Hill, spokesman Tony Cervone said Tuesday. Chrysler LLC CEO Robert Nardelli also plans to travel to the hearings by car...........
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28012984
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