The "NEW" GM

The union problems that GM, and Chrysler suffer from is more of a legacy problem than anything else. When times were good at the American car companies, the companies and the unions made some bad decisions.
supervision was lax, work habits went south, quality hit the floor (late 70's to early 90's quality in American cars and trucks just plain sucked).

Along came the Japanese and started to kick *** in the auto market. Not so much that they had a good product, but that they offered a product that didn't suffer from the quality control issues the American cars had, and at a time when America was becoming MPG aware, the Americans offered next to nothing to compete with the fuel efficient imports.

Playing catch up hurt us, and when the companies decided to get more efficient, the unions acted up. Past practice was the catch phrase of the day. When GM decided to crack down on productivity (which was in the basement) the unions pushed back. Since up until that point GM made money in spite of it's poor quality and production practices, and it's lavish pay schedule and labor compensation packages, the unions didn't want things changing.
I remember chatting with a number of UAW workers back then, too. The seemed to full understand the situation, the knew what needed to be done, and they even knew what the consequences could be. However, the union hierarchy was a little slow on the up take, and also was getting used to the fact dues collections of the over staffed assembly lines.

Employees working 5-6 hours a day and getting paid for 8-10 hours a day, paved the road for additional laborers to make up the work load. Again, another 4-5 hour work day, with 8-10 hours of pay. Union dues were on the incline, quality was on the decline. Over staffing, under producing, legacy costs, extensive benefit and compensation packages were driving customers to the imports, while costs at GM were skyrocketing.

Even the GM employees themselves were buying imports. Price, quality, MPG's and customer satisfaction were all much better than the GM product, and that was the fault of poor management decisions, lazy and spoiled labor, greedy union representatives, and poor quality products with ever increasing unit costs.