General Motors: Life Inside the Factory: One Blue-Collar Worker’S Journey

The premise of this book was the authors story of rising from factory worker to management. The story does a good job of illustrating the distrust between management and the hourly employees. It also is a great documentary on how hard it is to go from factory worker to management. What interrupted things a bit were the authors detours away from the story interjecting memories of events in his life that occurred away from the story. Some of these detours were a little long. I found myself wondering when we were going to get back to the automotive story. Overall a decent read just be patient through the "detours" the author takes.

Author writes with short choppy sentences which I found mildly off-putting,I found characterization of people wonderful. This was especially true of family members and holidays past. People came alive and brought back childhood memories for me.I would hope memories from GM are outdated, but the current group of car recalls is disturbing. Hope they're not confirmation.Read it for the happy family nostalgia of the sixties and seventies. The GM stuff is a lot darker, but I unfortunately recognized a lot of ghosts of bosses past. I never worked for a car company, maybe good reading for current managers. His suggestion to use brainpower of workers is right on......... It works.

It was interesting to read about life on the plant floor by an hourly grunt. As a manager I took a lot his advice to heart. GM still has a long way to go.

This book is one of the many I have read on people working assembly in the auto industry. The author is kinda green at writing buy the story is interesting. It reads well, and certainly is not short on interesting stories of what life is like on a assembly line and working for GM. If you want to know how bad things were take a look at this book.

This is the most authentic account of working in a GM factory beginning in the 70s that you will ever read. If you worked in a factory it will bring back all the memories both funny and outrageous. If you never worked in one then this will explain it in a way that you'll understand that "shoprats" earned every dime they ever made. A good read, you won't be disappointed.

I purchased this book to learn about the author's perspective working for GM as the title suggests. Too much of this book deals with the author's unremarkable life. Many people have made the same life journey he has made and can tell the personal story just as well, if not better. This book would best be called "Life Inside of Richard Gall" but that wouldn't sell as many books. At a point, I laid the book down and walked away because the book became too much about the inside of the author and not what was going on inside GM. The author presents as much insight into what is in his head and heart as he does about his employer. His employer I know. I do not know him and I didn't buy the book to learn about him. I was hoping to get his insights on working at General Motors. It became too distracting to keep filtering out the personal, out of context stuff from the subject matter. Bob Lutz he is not. Bob can get away with this type of self disclosure because he is well known. Yet Lutz spends less time on tangents than Gall. Gall hasn't been influential enough in the industry for me to care about all the details of his personal story.If you're looking for a book discussing GM plant operations and history, there are better options out there. If you want to learn about the author, you've come to the right place.

Good read, no wonder people did not want to buy cars that were either built on Monday or Friday. Gives you the real inside story on how G.M. actually built their cars.

OK

Very much enjoyed the memories of the factory, and while I understand the writers life is important and quite valid to the story, there were places I could skip a paragraph or two and still be on course, that’s never a good sign. That being said, I’m glad they wrote the book.

Although I have owned mostly GM vehicles because of their history and innovation, I have always been slightly skeptical of their business including the dealership salesman, the service advisors and the business managers, after reading this book, I come to realize that my skepticism is more deeply rooted in the GM culture than I thought. I always thought the mechanics at the dealership tried to do the right thing, but like their colleagues on the factory floor, their hands are tied by the bumbling management above them. If you ever wondered why the work at the GM dealership is 60 percent compared to Toyota at 15 percent...read this book.