Michael Moore Killed All the Jobs
8th December 2009
The first place to look, believe it or not, is to one of the nation’s great windbags: the filmmaker Michael Moore. The first movie Moore made, the one that made him a star documentarian, was “Roger & Me” (1989). The film alternated between shadowing General Motors CEO Roger B. Smith and showing people who had been laid off from GM plants in Flint, Mich. dealing with evictions. The publicity for GM was so painful that Smith had no choice but to resign in 1990.
Well, “Roger & Me” had something to do with it. The release of the movie corresponded not only to Smith’s departure as CEO, but to the inflection point where GM decided to double-down on a future of car-making. The top brass at GM simply could not take the heat Moore was giving them.
Today, Flint employs 20,000 fewer workers than when Smith retired in 1990, and far from being a “mark of excellence,” GM represents the worst corporate failure in modern business history. In the wake of “Roger & Me,” had GM executives toughed out the Moore criticism and kept investing outside the company, GM today might be a big dog in some new-fangled area, in computers, media, medicine, who knows, with lots of employment in tow. But Moore won the day, and the industrial moonscape that now is Michigan is his testament.