No bonuses for senior executives

DETROIT (AP) -- General Motors Corp. will not pay annual cash incentive bonuses to its senior executives for 2006, a company spokeswoman said.
The executives last received the bonuses in 2004.
GM spokeswoman Rene Rashid-Merem would not say why the bonuses wouldn't be paid, deferring to the company's annual proxy statement that will be filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission sometime in late April.
But last year's proxy statement said no bonuses were given to the executive team "in consideration of the corporation's financial results in 2005."
GM lost 10.4 billion in 2005 but underwent a massive restructuring and trimmed its loss to 2 billion in 2006, an 8.4 billion improvement. The company also posted a fourth-quarter profit of 950 million last year.
Auto industry executive bonuses have drawn the ire of the United Auto Workers union, which likely will be asked to make concessions when national contract talks officially start this summer. Many UAW members at the union's two-day bargaining convention earlier this week, including some from GM plants, questioned why bonuses would be paid to executives while workers were being asked to make sacrifices.
Rashid-Merem wouldn't comment when asked if the lack of annual bonuses for 2006 had anything to do with the upcoming contract talks.