From the Wool-sack
| Publication year | 1990 |
| Pages | 1857 |
1990, September, Pg. 1857. FROM THE WOOL-SACK
For General Motors stockholders, May 25 was a very special day. That was the day of the company's annual meeting. That was the day stockholders were given the opportunity to show their gratitude to management for its years of paying them dividends. One of the beneficiaries of this meeting's expression of gratitude was none other than the famous movie star, ROGER B. SMITH. Before telling you what happened on May 25, a word to my non-movie-going readers about Mr. Smith.
Smith was the absent star of the movie Roger and Me. The movie purported to show the effects on Flint, Michigan of the closing of General Motors plants in that city. To make its point, it chronicled actual events that occurred, but left the impression that they occurred in a sequence different from that in which they actually occurred. That had the desired effect of making the viewer madder than the viewer would have been had the movie been faithful to history.
Notwithstanding that shortcoming, the movie made one salient point. Roger B. Smith was not interested in visiting with the film's makers (about whose planned distortions of history he could not have known when interviews were sought) to comment on the sad economic plight that afflicted Flint following the closing of GM's plant there. His evasiveness created the impression of unwillingness to explore how GM might help retrain workers affected by the layoffs.
Smith was not only the name in the movie's title. He was its sung but unseen villain. As I said at the outset, it is he who was one of the beneficiaries of shareholders' actions which took place on May 25.
A proposal put before the shareholders requested approval to raise the pension to be paid to, among others, Mr. Smith when he retired on August 1. That an increase was needed is undeniable because, we were told, the makers of Cadillacs were driving the Fords of pensions.
The pensions Mr. Smith and his colleagues would have received (absent shareholder approval of the change) placed GM in the bottom 21 percent of all American companies when it came to pension benefits. The directors asked the shareholders to award an increase of pension payments to Mr...
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