General Motors starting white-collar layoffs this week

It is Black Monday for workers at General Motors.

These planned layoffs come just after job listings at the company hit all-time lows in the past month, with as little as 26 individual openings at the company being listed.

GM announced that 4,000 employees will be fired.

GM is expected to release its fourth-quarter earnings report on Wednesday. The demoralizing news might lead to a larger than expected drop in the company's stock on Wall Street. GM said the actions - which were roundly criticized by United States and Canadian politicians - would save $6 billion in costs.

Bosses told investors in mid-January the company's full-year results for 2018 exceeded the company's expectations.

"This is about making sure that GM is lean and agile", Barra said in announcing the cuts, adding that the automaker wants to trim back some of its more bloated operations in order to help it fund its aggressive push into mobility services, such as autonomous ride-sharing, as well as electrified vehicles. "These are things we are doing to strengthen our core business".

Other plants slated to close include Michigan's Detroit-Hamtramck Assembly, Lordstown in OH, and transmission plants in the Detroit suburb of Warren, and in Baltimore, Md.

Michigan - Detroit/Hamtramck Assembly: Manufacturing plant for the Cadillac CT6, the Buick LaCrosse, the Chevrolet Volt, and the Chevrolet Impala. The Cruze compact will be discontinued in the US starting this year. Production is scheduled to end at the plants throughout the year.

Canada spokeswoman Jennifer Wright says the salaried employee reductions in Canada have mostly been accomplished already through voluntary incentivized packages.

The GM plant in Lordstown, Ohio, is one of the four USA sites affected, CNN reported. Another 1,500 contracted employees are said to have not been offered an extension or renewal on their contracts.

In all, about 4,000 workers in its North American operations will be terminated, part of a broader series of cuts expected to save the automaker billions of dollars and help it prepare for an expected slowdown of the US automotive market during the next several years. The company said half of the hourly workers are in Canada with the other half in the U.S.

"You know, the United States saved General Motors, and for her (Barra) to take that company out of OH is not good", Trump said past year.