Winner, Labor and Employment.
By 2007, General Motors Corporation needed major relief. Having long ago promised to cover every cent of its retirees’ health care expenses, it carried a crippling long-term burden of $51 billion in retiree health care costs. GM had more than three retired workers for every active employee, and on each manufactured car paid roughly $1,500 in health care costs�more than it spent on steel. “It was out of control,” says Thomas Gottschalk, the longtime GM general counsel who is now of counsel at Kirkland & Ellis.
