GM Recalls: How General Motors Silenced a Whistle-Blower
By Tim Higgins and Nick Summers
June 18, 2014
businessweek.com
excerpt:
The “Valukas Report,” named for former U.S. Attorney Anton Valukas, who assembled it at GM’s request from interviews with 230 witnesses and 41 million documents, blamed a culture of complacency for the more than decade-long delay before the company recalled millions of faulty vehicles. It described employees passing the buck and committees falling back on the “GM nod”—when everyone in a meeting agrees that something should happen, and no one actually does it. On page 93, a GM safety inspector named Steven Oakley is quoted telling investigators that he was too afraid to insist on safety concerns with the Cobalt after seeing his predecessor “pushed out of the job for doing just that.” Reading the passage, Kelley felt like he’d been punched in the gut. The predecessor Oakley was talking about was Kelley.
Kelley had sued GM in 2003, alleging that the company had dragged its feet addressing dangers in its cars and trucks. Even though he lost, Kelley thought that by blowing the whistle he’d done the right thing and paved the way for other GMers to speak up. Now he saw that he’d had the opposite impact: His loss, and the way his career had stalled afterward, taught others at the company to stay quiet. “He stood in the doorway of our bedroom with a stunned look on his face,” Beth Kelley, his wife of 23 years, says. “Maybe we’re just extremely naive, but we really thought that since this all happened, that something good would come out of it.”
[....]
Selling for around $16,000, Cobalts were popular with teenagers. The first death linked to its switch came in July 2005, when a Maryland 16-year-old, Amber Marie Rose, crashed her red ’05 into a tree. The airbag did not deploy. Although reports streamed into GM about moving stalls and disabled airbags for years, the company waited until Feb. 13, 2014, to issue a recall.
Now GM professes contrition, promises change, and has ousted 15 individuals for misconduct or incompetence. Announcing the Valukas findings to an audience of employees on June 5, Barra called the report “extremely thorough, brutally tough, and deeply troubling.” It describes a corporate bureaucracy fatally indifferent to mounting evidence its cars were killing people. “Group after group and committee after committee within GM that reviewed the issue failed to take action or acted too slowly,” Valukas writes. “Although everyone had responsibility to fix the problem, nobody took responsibility.”
As bad as that sounds, Kelley’s story shows that the situation was worse—that GM’s problems went beyond diffuse inaction. Management wasn’t just distracted or confused; speaking up was actively discouraged, and workers saw that pointing out safety flaws could derail their careers. When a GM employee did blow the whistle, the nation’s largest automaker shut him down.
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