The Congressional Oversight Panel, tasked with monitoring TARP expenditures, is holding hearings on the auto bailout. Even as you read, Wayne State University is home to serious CYA action. In the blue corner: the post-Rattner head of the twenty-four (now) member Presidential Task Force on Automobiles (PTFOA) Ron Bloom. Big Ron II is expected to hew even more closely to its previous proclivity for a passive/aggressive approach to GM’s non-management management. “Given the emergence of the new GM and the new Chrysler, the involvement of the Auto Task Force with the companies will now change,” Bloom told the panel [via Market Watch]. Once again, Ron proclaims that only “core governance issues including the selection of a company’s board of directors and major corporate events or transactions” will be subject to PTFOA meddling going forward. (After all, they’ve got Advertising Czar Bob Lutz to handle the little things like “crapping on advertising.”) But even though the White House is on hand to show how easy putting your best platitude forward can be, the UAW won’t be joining the testimonial fun.

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File this one under the “stealth bailout” file. GM dumped a number of its own pension obligations onto Delphi when the parts supplier was spun off in 1999. Now, the Detroit News reports that Delphi is abandoning $6.25 billion  worth of obligations to the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation, the second largest such takeover by amount. But the 70,000 affected Delphi workers and retirees will still miss out on an estimated $800 million in payments. And what does GM have to say about all this? The General’s statement (via webnewswire) betrays a guilty conscience:

There have been questions about General Motors Company’s responsibility toward Delphi’s pension plans, given that many of those covered were GM employees prior to GM spinning off Delphi in 1999. General Motors Corporation made appropriate provisions for the plans at the time of the spin-off, and Delphi became responsible for the plans from that point forward.

See how that works? Who cares that GM spun Delphi off as a means of jettisoning pensions. Once the deal was done it was Delphi’s problem. Move along now, nothing to see here . . .

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You know if The Freep acknowledges that union local desk jobs were “an icon of labor patronage, in which jobs were handed to friends of elected UAW officials,” it’s probably true. Now, over 400 UAW workers are being moved from these low-stress jobs to the factory floor, where their union bretheren will welcome hem back to the real world of auto assembly. “These people had cushy jobs,” says one worker at Chrysler’s Warren Truck Plant. “Some of them could use a taste of life on the floor to remind them we still make trucks around here.” Credit for cutting these “cushy jobs” goes to the PTFOA, which has been putting pressure on the UAW to reduce its costs and complexity. “The UAW had little choice but to agree,” explains a GM spokesperson. The savings from cutting these positions aren’t expected to be large, but the PTFOA and GM seem to agree that the symbolism is important. Certainly the UAW members who were already working the line agree. The only downside? Without the ability to hand out do-nothing desk jobs, being elected President of the local may become more difficult.

Bloomberg reports on Toyota’s pickle vis-à-vis Fremont, California-based NUMMI. New GM is leaving its NUMMI ownership share in the hands of Old GM. Thus, Old GM and Toyota together own NUMMI in a 50/50 joint venture. Old GM will be selling off its moribund assets over a period of a year or more as the long slow process of liquidating the discards and paying creditors pennies on the dollar plays out. (Old GM is looking like an economic stimulus program for a small band of lawyers, accountants and realtors.)

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We haven’t said much about the United Auto Workers (UAW) lately. That’s because the union has kept a low profile. And why wouldn’t they? At the expense of nothing very much, their members continue to either draw the same paycheck (on the government’s dime) or cash-out (on the government’s dime). They also get billions in (federal) cash money into their VEBA health care superfund. And stock in both New Chrysler and New GM. Not that they really wanted a stake in their zombie masters, but, hey, it’s better than getting slapped in the face with a wet fish. Still, ’tis the nature of the beast to bitch. On the union’s far left, the The Party for Socialism and Liberation (“a newly formed working class party of leaders and activists from many different struggles, founded to promote the movement for revolutionary change”) has a thing or two to say about the UAW’s New Deal with New Chrysler. Only it doesn’t sound like the stuff of barricade manning.

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One-time Car Czar candidate Steve Girsky has been elected to GM’s board as the sole representative of the UAW’s VEBA trust fund, reports Automotive News [sub]. Girsky had previously worked on the spin-off of Saturn, which was eventually purchased by Roger Penske. He has also worked at Morgan Stanley, and advised the UAW during the ill-fated GM-Chrysler merger talks. Too bad the Harvard B-School boy didn’t end up at Ford; back in the day, Girsky loved him some Blue Oval . . .

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This is a fun one. The UAW has made no-strike guarantees to Chrysler and GM as part of their restructuring deals. This makes a certain amount of sense, considering that the UAW’s VEBA trust holds significant portions of GM and Chrysler’s new equity. After all, it’s hard to both represent labor and look after your equity position at the same time. Ford, however, has not been generous enough to let the UAW have a chunk of its stock, and yet it feels as though it might be fair if the UAW were to make similar no-strike guarantees.

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The Wall Street Journal reports the terms of the United Auto Workers (UAW) deal with the feds re: their payoff to join post-bankruptcy “good” GM. Uncle Sam will “contribute” $10 billion worth of stock to the union’s Voluntary Employee Beneficiary Association (VEBA) health care superfund, paying off half of GM’s unfunded obligations in one fell swoop. The Treasury Department will also give the UAW a $2.5 billion promissory note. GM (i.e., the federal government) will pay off the note in cash, in three installments (2013, 2015, and 2017). And just in case that’s not enough to entice the union to join “good” GM, the UAW will also receive 17.5 percent of the new post-C11 GM (no longer a controlling interest) AND stock warrants for an additional 2.5 percent of the reorganized company. The $6.5 billion in preferred stock includes a nine percent cash dividend—that will pay out $585 million annually. Saying that, this is all subject to a federal bankruptcy judge’s approval.

You may recall that General Motors recently circulated a document amongst their paymasters on Capitol Hill “revealing” that they planned to import 17,335 Chinese-made cars by 2011. At the time, we speculated that the leaked “bailout bucks for Chinese trucks” memo was nothing more than a negotiating gambit by GM, designed to bring the United Auto Workers to heel. Play ball and we build here. After all, what else does GM have to offer, other than threats to up stakes and leave? That said, floating a GM in China trial balloon makes the company no friends, uh, anywhere. Especially with their most important stakeholders: customers. Anyway, Bloomberg indicates that the cudgel may have done it duty. GM CEO Fritz Henderson told them (yesterday) that “using U.S. production instead of imports would pivot on whether the UAW can build the vehicles at a cost GM can afford . . . This is a discussion we’re having with the UAW.” And so, today’s Wall Street Journal tells us that “GM Nears Crucial Deal With UAW.” Which could all fall apart.

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General Motors is is “open to considering moving its headquarters from Detroit, selling off U.S. plants and even renegotiating parts of its restructuring plan with its major union,” CEO Fritz Henderson told Reuters today in a conference call. The possible relocation and renegotiations are part of a last-ditch effort to restructure GM outside of bankruptcy, a move that Henderson admits is likely to fail. “It’s more probable that we would need to accomplish our goals in a bankruptcy,” says Henderson. “There’s still a chance for it to be done outside a court proceeding.”

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The Detroit News has obtained a confidential memo from GM to federal legislators. The smoking gun reveals that the soon-to-be-taxpayer-owned (officially) automaker plans to boost US sales of vehicles built in China, Mexico, South Korea and Japan by 98 percent (to 365k units). In the face of union criticism of the plans, GM claims that the percentage of its imports will remain at 33 percent. By 2014. When its sales recover to 3.1 million vehicles per year. Providing it maintains its current market share. All things being equal. With the wind in the right direction.

At the same time, The General aims to shrink production in Canada, Australia and European countries by about 130k. For a sneak peak at the less tortuous justification for this outsourcing on Uncle Sam’s dime, we turn to veteran Detroit apologist and Washington Post car critic, Warren Brown . . .

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Reuters reports that gunmen shot and killed a union leader at Toyota Motor Corp.’s Venezuelan unit on Tuesday, a few weeks after the Japanese automaker said it might leave the country because of chronic labor problems. “Labor disputes and strikes have become frequent in Venezuela. In January, two workers were shot to death as police broke up a protest at a vehicle assembly plant for Japan’s Mitsubishi Motors Corp. and South Korea’s Hyundai Motor Co.”

Oh noes! The UAW did the math on GM and Chrysler’s newest restructuring plans and it’s not pleased at all. Well, with GM’s plan, anyway. Commence angry letter (PDF) to Senator: [blank]!

“Incredibly, between 2010-2014 GM’s restructuring plan also calls for a 98% increase in the number of vehicles it will be importing into the United States from Mexico, Korea, Japan and China, with the number of imports from these countries increasing from 371,547 to 736,743. As a result, the share of GM’s sales in the U.S. market that will be imported from these countries will increase from 15.5% to 23.5%. The overall number of vehicles GM will be importing in 2014 represents the production of four assembly plants, the same number that GM plans to close in the United States.”

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With up to 1,200 dealers and 16 factories set to be uninvited from “the reinvented GM,” union locals and dealerships with their livelihoods on the line are preparing to fight the future. With the UAW leadership on board for an equity position in the new GM, locals are scrambling to show their willingness to give up once-cherished perks to keep their plants open. Bloomberg reports that workers at GM’s Spring Hill plant have ratified a local agreement that “allows GM to schedule its hourly workers for weekend shifts without paying special premiums, ends the policy of paying overtime based on a daily shift instead of a 40-hour workweek and loosens the work rules so that workers may be used for a broader variety of tasks.” Sadly, since Spring Hill’s Chevy Traverse production is likely to be moved to Lansing Delta to take over Saturn Outlook production capacity, this sudden rash of reality probably won’t save the plant.

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