Their buyback plan was actually kicked off in 2022. They temporarily paused it during the strike and resumed it. There are lots of legitimate reasons they would want to buy back shares - if they are using shares as payment for debt it keeps their interest rate lower.

Regardless, even with the buybacks, their share price is still lower than when the strikes began.

shareholders are laughing all the way to the bank

I shouldn’t have to be the one to tell you this, but the benefits unions fight for, like pensions and health plans, are largely stored on asset markets. Unions are not fighting to destroy the stock market.

They probably have a lot of loans underwritten by stock, so they need their stock price to stay at certain numbers or else their credit rating gets worse and they have to pay more to service their debt.

Unless you are a car company that takes pre-orders, people only pay for cars after they are made. So you either need to hoard cash or take on debt in order to maintain consistent cash flow.

Issuing and buying back shares is a pretty common way to handle cash flow and is really a separate issue to living wages and employee compensation.

Net income attributable to stockholders is not the same as net income either.

Regardless, GM has already done $4.2 billion dollars in buybacks since 2022 so it’s not that far from the normal flow of business for them.

GM’s new guidance reduced expected net income attributable to stockholders for 2023 to a range of $9.1 billion to $9.7 billion, compared to the previous outlook of $9.3 billion to $10.7 billion.

So their previous guidance (how much they predicted for a year) was replaced with new guidance.

The article actually never says the $10 billion is new. It just heavily implies it.

GM is announcing a stock buyback

They are not announcing a stock buyback. They are announcing changes to their existing buyback plan. Including the increased dividend, their new guidance is estimating $1 billion dollars less going to shareholders. So it’s actually a pretty big cut.

GM’s new guidance reduced expected net income attributable to stockholders for 2023 to a range of $9.1 billion to $9.7 billion, compared to the previous outlook of $9.3 billion to $10.7 billion.

The headline is incredibly misleading - they are cutting nearly a billion dollars out of their already existing stock buyback plan.

The median car on the road in the US is 12.5 years old. Comparing new cars to new cars seems like a waste of time.

When we even start to see enough EVs old enough to populate a comparable lifecycle study, wake me up.