hence the mountain of recalls, the last thing they want is to be accused of delaying another one. they re cleaning out their closets, going through, minding every issue that they ve had in the past that maybe should have been a recall and making it a recall. reporter: so far fixing all those recalled cars will cost gm $1.7 billion this year, and the stock is down 18% year to date. but what might be surprising is that all the recalls haven t made a dent in gm s sales which were 7% higher in april than a year ago. what gm is doing is talking, saying that we re going to be a good corporate citizen, but they ve said the same thing in the past. the proof is really in the pudding. okay. so let s talk about this some more with poppy harlow and automotive expert lauren fix. welcome to both of you. poppy, i think the most surprising aspect of this story is that people are going into dealerships and buying gm products. it really hasn t affected their sales.
employees are over the age of 20. hardly the teenage summer burger flipper. more than one in five have children to support at home. it s a pretty tough task when at best your ages come in at $19,000 per year. that s below the poverty level. we re joined by cnn global economic analyst and assistive managing editor at time magazine, ron nah, and ron sherpa from the american heritage foundation. welcome to both of you. good morning. rona, are these protests working? they haven t gotten a wage hike yet, so i will have to say no. it reflects the growing trend in this country towards labor mobilization and unionization in the low end service sector. this is where six in the ten fastest growing retailers are, mcdonald s checkout people, like tourism. so these areas are really ripe
i haven t had much contact with the families over the last couple of weeks. i just i can only imagine how they feel. you know, as we learn more about this, real reform has to come out of all of this. we re looking at at least 40 veterans that have died allegedly from this scandal. you just pray that their deaths will not be for nothing, that real and meaningful reform will come from this situation. we have a tendency in this country to call for first right away, right? some of those calls for firings right away are justified because this didn t exactly start today or yesterday or the day before. politico is actually calling this president obama s heck of a job brownie moment.
global product development leaving lingering questions about what she knew when about product flaws in gm vehicles. i was not aware that there was this issue until the recall was introduced on january 31st. had gm acted differently, perhaps some of this tragedy might not might have been averted. reporter: gm says that s exactly what it s doing now, hence, the mountain of recalls. the last thing they want is to be accused of delaying another one. they re cleaning out their closets, going through and finding every issue that they ve had in the past that maybe should have been a recall and making it a recall. reporter: so far fixing all those recalled cars will cost gm $1.7 billion this year and the stock is down 18% year to date, but what might be surprising is that all the recalls haven t made a dent in gm sales which were 7% higher in april than a year ago. what gm is doing, talking, saying we re going to be a good corporate citizen, but they ve said the same thing in the
closets, going through, finding every issue they ve had in the past that maybe should have been a recall and making it a recall. reporter: so far fixing all the recalled cars will cost gm $1.7 billion this year. and the stock is down 18% year to date. but what might be surprising is all the recalls haven t made a dent in gm sales, which were 7% higher in april than a year ago. what gm is doing is talking, saying that we re going to be a good corporate citizen. but they ve said the same thing in the past. the proof is really in the pudding. reporter: and brianna, the question is are there more gm recalls ahead. i asked the company that today. they said, quote, we are aggressively addressing issues as they come up, meaning we don t know yet. we re also waiting, anticipating the internal gm investigation report into whether or not there was a cover-up in that ignition switch delay that lasted a decade. why didn t we know sooner. and we re waiting to find out