The OP seems to be making it clear they want to make a passive political point with the "union" this and "they'll NEVER get a fine" that. We don't know what will happen until the investigation is over. They may get a massive fine. The fact they're unionized has nothing to do with this investigation or its outcome.
Ford and Firestone were negligent in their tires that caused Explorers to flip over and kill people, and hid it for years. For a while they were the "I'll never buy another one of those again" brand. I've owned Hondas, Volkswagons, Fords, Jeeps, Nissans, Toyotas, and GM vehicles, and *all* of them have had some sort of quirk or reliability issue or at some point had recalls over safety concerns.
Vehicles are complicated machinery, used extremely frequently, carrying combustible liquids, that transport people at high speeds across long distances. There is an inherent danger in using them. Traveling used to come with a very high mortality rate - steam ships going across seas, wagons across the country over open terrain being pulled by horses... There has always been an inherent danger to traveling. We assume some risk when we do it, and the risk has been *extremely* minimized in the past 100 years of transportation innovation.
Yes, the companies need to stand by their products and not hide flaws. I abhor the fact that *all* of them have cost analysis of how many lives must be lost / litigation amount necessary to justify a recall. If you're aware of an opportunity to improve the safety of your existing product, do it. For crying out loud, for $.57 cents, I bet if they'd just offered the option of the owner to PAY to have the fix implemented they'd recouped some of the expense (obviously not labor, but still.) Hiding the flaw is never a good option, and continuing to use a design that is known to be flawed is never a good option. Based on what's been revealed *so far,* it does appear that the previous management knew this issue was coming up, and basically retired & promoted the current CEO to face the music for their failures.
There are plenty of products that I won't buy because I disagree with the ethics of the company or how they do business. Samsung is one of them. By all means, never buy a GM again. It's disingenuous, however, to assert that their quality is the same as it was in the 80s or 90s, or even early 2000s. ALL of the American manufacturers make competitive products compared to the imports. Anecdotal tales of poor reliability are just that - anecdotal. For every negative one there's a positive one. My grandfather drove the same Chevy pickup truck for 30 years as a work truck - a 1972 C series. The fact he never had any major problems with it doesn't say anything about GM or Chevy trucks as a whole, but it may influence *my* buying choices.
The GM case is much more nuanced than "unions bad." If the investigation discovers that the previous management covered up negligence, then they should be held personally criminally liable. The organization appears to be accepting accountability for the issue, so the issue really focuses down on the fact they hid the problem for so long, which again comes down to personal choices by previous management.