110 HRES 1445 IH: Commending the General Motors Corporation U.S. House of Representatives 2008-09-16 text/xml EN Pursuant to Title 17 Section 105 of the United States Code, this file is not subject to copyright protection and is in the public domain.

IV 110th CONGRESS 2d Session H. RES. 1445 IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES September 16, 2008 Mr. Kildee (for himself, Mr. Dingell, Mr. Rogers of Michigan, Mrs. Miller of Michigan, Ms. Sutton, Mr. Ehlers, Mr. Knollenberg, Ms. Kaptur, Mr. Levin, Mr. Stupak, Mr. Camp of Michigan, Mr. Hoekstra, Mr. McCotter, Mr. Walberg, Mr. Upton, Ms. Kilpatrick, Mr. Visclosky, and Mr. Conyers) submitted the following resolution; which was referred to the Committee on Energy and Commerce RESOLUTION Commending the General Motors Corporation on the occasion of its 100th anniversary.

Whereas General Motors Corporation (GM) traces its history to September 16, 1908, when its colorful founder William C. (Billy) Durant incorporated the company with a visionary idea that several car makers combined under one company umbrella would be more effective and have more growth potential than one brand on its own; Whereas by 1916, the General Motors family included the legendary Chevrolet, Oakland (later Pontiac), GMC, Oldsmobile, Buick, and Cadillac brands and under Durant’s successor, Alfred P. Sloan, Jr. (often called the father of modern management), GM soon adopted the equally revolutionary strategy of a car for every purse and purpose, dividing the vehicle market into price segments ranging from low-price to luxury and targeting each brand and model of General Motors to a distinct segment, something no other manufacturer or marketer had ever done; Whereas this milestone innovation, plus the equally unprecedented innovation of the annual model change, enabled General Motors to become America’s number one seller of vehicles in 1926, a position the company still holds today; Whereas in the 1930s, with the Great Depression, tensions in the workplace spread across America, setting the stage for the historic GM sit-down strike in Flint, Michigan, which led to General Motors becoming the first company to recognize the United Automobile Workers of America (UAW), soon the country’s largest union, and new health care and pension benefits first negotiated between the UAW and GM in 1950 became the norm for all American industry in the second half of the twentieth century; Whereas with America’s entry into World War II, no company converted faster or more comprehensively to wartime production than General Motors, leading to it being called the greatest industrial transformation in history, with more than 200 plants in North America shifting to the production of airplanes, tanks, machine guns, and other military vehicles and goods in a matter of months; Whereas General Motors alone supplied the forces of the United States with more than $12 billion in military goods (several hundreds of billions when converted to today’s dollars), more than any other company, leading the late management theorist Peter Drucker to go so far as to say that General Motors won the war for America; Whereas in September 2001, GM’s Keep America Rolling Program is credited with jump-starting the American economy in a period of great financial uncertainty and anxiety following the terrorist attacks and the worse loss of life and destruction on American soil since Pearl Harbor; Whereas since its inception in 1908, GM has sold more than 308 million cars and trucks in the United States and more than 445 million worldwide and nearly 1 million Americans earn their living either building or selling GM vehicles; Whereas in the past seven years, GM’s capital investments in the United States have totaled more than $31 billion, more than double and triple those of foreign automakers with U.S. operations; and Whereas GM is committed to playing a leading role in providing meaningful solutions to address America’s energy needs and to remove the automobile from the environmental equation with advanced technology and alternate sources of propulsion that will include the first mass-produced extended range electric vehicle, the Chevy Volt, in 2010: Now, therefore, be it

That the House of Representatives commends and congratulates the General Motors Corporation on the occasion of its 100th anniversary.