Category:Former General Motors Employees

General Motors was incorporated in 1908 and spent most of the twentieth century as the largest automaker in the world, with its own in-house engineering college in Flint, Michigan, and a labor relationship that helped define American industrial unionism. Two events dominate this category rather than a steady stream of executive biographies: the movement of GM executives directly into senior federal office in the middle of the century, and the 2009 bankruptcy and government restructuring. The membership is unusual among corporate rosters for how much of it is made up of people who held cabinet rank.

Charles Erwin Wilson spent more than three decades at General Motors, rising from engineer to president and chief executive, and then became Secretary of Defense under Eisenhower in 1953. His 1953 confirmation hearings produced a remark on the conflict between his GM stockholdings and his new duties that has been quoted, and misquoted, ever since. Edward Stettinius Jr. rose through the General Motors executive ranks, moved on to United States Steel as one of the youngest chairmen in American industry, and finished as Secretary of State, with a central role in the founding of the United Nations at the 1945 San Francisco Conference, before becoming the first United States Ambassador to the United Nations in 1946.

Charles Evans Whittaker ran the traffic in the other direction. He sat on the Supreme Court of the United States from 1957 to 1962 and became chief counsel to General Motors after leaving the bench.

The labor history enters through a governor rather than an employee. During the Flint sit-down strike, when workers occupied GM plants for forty-four days demanding recognition of the United Automobile Workers, Frank Murphy deployed the National Guard to keep order while mediating rather than clearing the factories. The company agreed to negotiate, and industrial unionism established itself as a permanent feature of the American economy.

Rick Wagoner joined General Motors in 1977, rose through its finance ranks and its international and North American operations, and was chairman and chief executive from 2000 until 2009, a tenure that ended in the worst crisis in the company's history. Dan Akerson arrived from the Naval Academy by way of telecommunications and private equity, and served as chairman and chief executive from 2010 to 2014, running the recovery after the bankruptcy and the federal bailout.

Mary Barra succeeded Akerson in 2014 and became the first woman to lead a Big Three automaker. Her connection to the company predates her career: her father worked as a die maker at the Pontiac division for thirty-nine years, and she entered the company at eighteen as a co-op student, rising through engineering, manufacturing and executive roles over more than three decades.

Devin Wenig was appointed to the General Motors board in April 2018 while still chief executive of eBay, and also served as a director of Cruise Automation, the company's autonomous vehicle subsidiary. The rest of the automotive membership sits at competitors rather than inside GM: Alan Mulally and Jim Farley and Jim Hackett at Ford, and Carlos Tavares as the founding chief executive of Stellantis. Michigan's congressional representation is present through Dan Kildee and Haley Stevens, the finance side through Kyle Bass, and the wider industrial-turnaround literature through Sam Palmisano of IBM. Harsh Bhatt worked as a controls engineer at General Motors in 2012 before founding a robotics monitoring company.

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