Gary Cowger, a former president of General Motors North America who repaired the automaker’s relationship with the UAW after a crippling strike and mentored future CEO Mary Barra, died Friday at his home in Dallas. He was 75.
Cowger had battled cancer for two years before his death, Judy DeMars, his former secretary at GM, told Automotive News.
He retired from GM in 2009, almost 45 years after being hired as a co-op student in his home state of Kansas.
In 1998, Cowger was only months into a stint as chairman of the automaker’s Adam Opel unit in Germany when GM Chairman Jack Smith tapped him as the company’s top labor negotiator in the aftermath of a costly and bitter UAW strike in Flint, Mich.
To help settle the crisis, Cowger chose Barra, who was an executive assistant to Smith at the time, to head up internal communications. Cowger was Barra’s boss for nearly a decade.
He was president of GM North America from 2001 to 2005, then head of global manufacturing and labor relations until his retirement four years later. In that role, he oversaw an effort to build small cars profitably in the U.S. and negotiated major concessions with the UAW ahead of the company’s 2009 bankruptcy filing. Those deals helped pave the way for the emergence of New GM shortly before Cowger retired.
“I was deeply saddened to hear the news of the passing of Gary Cowger,” Barra said in a statement. “Gary made countless contributions to GM. He was an influential leader and mentor to me and so many others. My thoughts are with his family and loved ones during this difficult time.”
In high school, Cowger had aspired to play baseball at Kansas State University, but a counselor suggested he look into GM’s nearby Fairfax assembly plant instead. “You know, you have a lot of technical capability, and you really ought to go down and talk to General Motors,” Cowger recalled the counselor telling him.
So he enrolled in the General Motors Institute — now called Kettering University — and did co-op work at the Fairfax plant, where he molded seats and hung doors.
After earning his bachelor’s degree from GMI in 1970 and a master’s in management from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1978, Cowger’s jobs at GM included manager of the Lordstown, Ohio, assembly complex and Cadillac’s manufacturing chief. At the Lordstown plant, long a hotbed of labor strife, Cowger eased tensions.
“It was unheard of for a plant manager to come over there,” Jim Graham, who was president of UAW Local 1112 in Lordstown, told Automotive News in 1998. “Cowger demanded that management sit down with the union on a weekly basis. We had an open line of communication.”
In 1994, Cowger became president and managing director of GM de Mexico. In four years, he grew GM into the market leader by nearly doubling its share.
As GM’s North American president, Cowger worked with Vice Chairman Bob Lutz to simplify the product development process and invigorate the company’s lineup. He gave his leadership team lapel pins with the number “29” to signify the company’s 29 percent U.S. market share target and renewed GM’s focus on building quality vehicles.
“We have to have every product be ‘gotta have,’ that you walk up to it and you want to own it,” Cowger said in 2002. “Our goal is to make every product that we put out a must-have product.”
Cowger is survived by his wife, Kay, and son, Chris. A daughter, Mindy, died in 2020.