Looks like someone at GM is finally waking up:

G.M., staggering under the weight of $10.6 billion in losses last
year, said it would offer buyouts and early-retirement packages ranging
from $35,000 to $140,000 to every one of its 113,000 unionized workers
in the United States who agreed to leave the company.

At the same time,  Delphi,
the nation’s biggest automotive parts maker and a unit of G.M. until
seven years ago, will offer buyouts of $35,000 to 13,000 U.A.W.
members, of 24,000 on its factory floors.

If the business is to survive at all it simply has to get its labour costs under control. Quite how insane they currently are is shown here:

On average, U.A.W. members at G.M and Delphi cost the equivalent of $67
an hour, including pay of about $27 an hour plus pensions and health
care expenses.

Better financial market minds than mine might be interested in looking at what happens to GM’s bond and share prices. Analysts should have already priced the costs of these into those prices. If the GM prices fall as a result of this announcement then perhaps they hadn’t realised how much the costs were. If they rise, then perhaps GM is offering the workers a bad deal….ie, the cost to GM of the deal is less than already implicit in the prices. And if the prices don’t move at all then we have both an efficient market (ie, everything already in the prices) and a reasonable deal for both sides.

Or maybe the prices will just carry on in some random walk.