The most challenging and stressful assignment of my journalism career was covering an annual weekend convention of the Michigan Bankers Association at the historic Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island. As a newly hired Detroit News reporter, I was still on probation, and I was expected to fill a big chunk of space in the Sunday business section reporting on the state of Michigan banking. There was no news to report, which meant I had to manufacture some.
I opted for the easy journalism copout – a mood piece about the convention and the seeming optimism with which bankers viewed the world. I noticed that the bankers were pounding drinks, and the hotel’s food and beverage manager shared that they consumed a record volume of alcohol in the hotel’s history. I included that detail in my mood piece, not intending it as any judgment but rather an interesting bit of color.
When I entered the newsroom the following Monday, I was told that Eugene Kuthy, Michigan’s banking commissioner, was holding on the phone and that he was rip roaring angry. He fumed that the bankers were pillars of their communities and I portrayed them as a bunch of drunks. Kuthy advised me that I didn’t have much of a future covering Michigan banking.
The annual Davos forum is very much akin to covering the Michigan bankers’ convention. Sure, the rich and the powerful attend the event, and it’s an opportunity for bit players on the political stage like Canada’s Mark Carney to attract some attention calling for a new world order. But nothing of lasting consequence ever happens at Davos that results in any material changes for working people.
At the end of the day, Davos is ultimately a glorified Seinfeld episode – a show about nothing. Business Insider even had its own variation of my alcohol consumption story. It featured an article about the private jets the world’s elite used to travel to the event.
In recent years, certain themes have been sounded from Davos. A once popular one was stakeholder capitalism, a concept that a company’s obligations weren’t just to its shareholders but also its employees, suppliers, and the communities it serves.
Addressing climate change is another biggie, a discussion undermined by the transportation mode most of the participants used to have it. We can take comfort in Davos’s Airports of Tomorrow initiative, bringing together experts, people working in the airline industry and policymakers on how to increase the use of sustainable fuel in aviation and other solutions for aviation to be at net-zero emissions.
And, of course, wealth disparity is always a topic of concern because the planet’s richest persons are deeply concerned about the less fortunate.
GM’s Factory Zero on the Detroit/Hamtramck border is some 4,300 miles from where the Davos spectacle is held, but unfortunately for the beleaguered current and displaced workers at the factory, the U.S. media doesn’t care much about them. For that matter, neither do Detroit’s local publications.
To the local media, GM firing more than 1,110 Factory Zero workers was merely a 2025 footnote in what CEO Mary Barra said left the company poised for another year of “strong financial performance.” Barra underscored that confidence by authorizing another $6 billion to be spent buying back GM stock to support its still uninspiring share price. Wall Street has squealed with delight, driving GM’s stock price to its highest levels in recent years.
So much for Davos’s stakeholder capitalism.
Factory Zero, formerly known as Detroit Hamtramck Assembly, derived its name because it represented Barra’s “zero crashes, zero emissions, and zero congestion” ambitions, which GM still lists on its website. This remains the case despite the company’s renewed focus on selling gas-guzzling trucks and SUVs and allegations that GM knowingly sold vehicles with V8 engines that are in danger of premature failure even at high speeds.
Factory Zero is where GM builds the monster electric Hummer, which a climate group deemed more harmful to the environment than most gas-engine vehicles when the energy required to produce its raw materials is considered. Multiple reviewers have warned that the vehicle has insufficient braking power for something weighing more than 9,000 pounds. Factory Zero also builds the GMC Sierra EV, Chevrolet Silverado EV, and the electric Cadillac Escalade IQ.
The market for high-priced electric trucks and SUVs is limited. Ford has exited the market despite its electric Lightning being the No. 1 electric truck in the U.S. That’s why I’d be surprised if Factory Zero has much of a future, at least producing electric trucks and SUVs.
The only publication with an ongoing interest in Factory Zero employees is the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS), a Trotskyist publication I’m loath to cite because its overt anti-Israel stance crosses into antisemitism. Nevertheless, its coverage of labor is formidable, and if its quotes are from real workers — and I have no reason to believe they aren’t — they are often very insightful.
WSWS quoted one unidentified “young” worker who offered an economic perspective I’ve yet to hear discussed at Davos.
Noting GM’s surging stock price and the massive taxpayer subsidies the company has received, the worker opined: “I thought the whole point of trickle down was for the money to trickle down. Stock prices are going up, and it’s not trickling down.” He added that there had to be a way to “tax people that are getting rich off of stock buybacks,” and said younger workers were increasingly alienated from both corporate-backed political parties.
“My generation, we are just tired; and we’ve only been doing the adult thing for a few years now. There has not been a single good president in my lifetime … we’re looking for an alternative.”
WSWS also reported a detail I’ve yet to read in the mainstream financial media that routinely fawns over Barra, whom Fortune editor Alyson Shontell has declared one of America’s best CEOs. According to an investor note published December 12 on the financial website Trefis, “In the last decade, General Motors (GM) stock has returned $45 billion back to its shareholders through cold, hard cash via dividends and buybacks.” This represents 58.4 percent of GM’s current market capitalization — more than double the median payout ratio for companies listed on the S&P 500.
WSWS said it had received a letter from a Factory Zero employee with this impassioned plea:
“I work here at Factory Zero and it’s disappointing that we do so much hard work to keep up with quality and demanding numbers just to end up not knowing how we’re going to take care of our children,” the worker wrote. “These people show dedication and compassion for this place, and we are being set aside like old shoes.”
Like many American workers, Factory Zero employees live paycheck to paycheck.
“In January, I’ll be laid off indefinitely. I’m mad about it,” an unidentified worker told WSWS in December. “Right now, my boyfriend is paying for things. I’m pregnant and trying to move but I can’t. I need to verify my employment to get a new place but I can’t with the layoffs.”
WSWS said it spoke with a Factory Zero worker who drives two and a half hours each way from Fort Wayne, Indiana, every day to keep her job while seven months pregnant.
Factory Zero employees also cite serious safety issues.
“I was there when one of the cars exploded on the line,” one worker said, referring to a fully autonomous vehicle built at the plant in December 2023. “It caught fire and blew up in the middle of the line.”
That same month, a stack of batteries erupted in a major fire. Workers were evacuated repeatedly, including during a blizzard when they were forced to stand outside for hours before being sent back into the plant.
“They cleared the fire and then put us back to work,” a worker told WSWS. “They had to get rid of the smell, so it was OK for us to breathe.”
A local Detroit television station reported on the fire, which it said is a recurring occupational hazard for the workers.
The more than 1,100 jobs already lost at Factory Zero represent a major blow to Detroit. According to WSWS, the city’s poverty rate already stands at 35 percent, and more than half of Detroit’s children live in poverty.
Adding insult to injury, GM relocated or fired at least 4,000 salaried workers from its former landmark Renaissance Center headquarters in Detroit. The automaker was once required to employ at least 4,000 headquarters workers in the city as a condition for receiving $3.5 billion in taxpayer subsidies, but Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer relieved GM of that obligation to entice the company to build electric vehicles in Detroit.
GM won’t say how many employees will occupy the four floors it rents in a luxury building called Hudson’s Detroit in downtown Detroit and will pay Detroit’s nonresident tax on their wages. Hudson’s Detroit itself received massive subsidies on the promise that it would attract new companies to the city. So far, that hasn’t happened.
GM is also seeking $250 million from taxpayers to renovate its former Renaissance Center campus as a condition for not tearing it down.
WSWS has posted sustained critical coverage of the United Auto Workers and its president, Shawn Fain — coverage that The Detroit News has also admirably provided.
Over the past year, the UAW has shown growing signs of institutional breakdown at precisely the moment its members most need representation. While the union’s leadership has celebrated headline-grabbing contract wins and Fain enjoys celebrity corporate media status, rank-and-file workers at plants like Factory Zero have faced layoffs, alleged safety hazards, and profound uncertainty and charge they have received inadequate support from the organization meant to protect them. There is a movement within the union to oust Fain.
Internally, the UAW has been consumed by factional disputes, questions about transparency and governance, and the lingering fallout from a corruption scandal that sent multiple former leaders to prison and left federal monitors overseeing the union’s operations. The result is a widening gap between the UAW’s public posture and the lived reality of many of its members.
Despite these issues, the only recent national corporate media attention devoted to the UAW focused on a union member who heckled President Trump as a “pedophile protector” while Trump toured a Ford plant outside Detroit with senior management. The remark referred to Trump’s delay ordering the release of the Epstein files he had promised to make public.
The corporate media embraced the political theater, elevating a union member’s grandstanding while obscuring far more consequential developments inside the UAW. The corporate media has so far ignored the more significant story: a once-powerful labor organization struggling to remain relevant as the workers it represents are sidelined, silenced, or left to fend for themselves.
Davos offers spectacle, access, and the illusion of consequence. Detroit offers layoffs, uncertainty, and stories far less flattering to America’s ruling corporate and political elite, which explains why one is covered obsessively while the other is so easily ignored.
It’s called the corporate media because that’s the agenda it supports and protects.