General Motors yesterday reported a $38.7 billion loss for 2007, its largest ever, and said it would offer its unionized workers a fresh round of buyouts meant to remove more high-cost veteran employees from its payroll.

GM, essentially tied with Toyota after nearly 80 years as the world's top automaker, coaxed about 30,000 workers into leaving the company in 2006 through a combination of early retirement incentives and buyouts.

Company officials did not disclose how many employees they hope will accept the company's latest offer and either quit or retire early. GM has about 74,000 unionized employees eligible for the program.

United Auto Workers President Ron Gettelfinger said, however, he thought the number would be fewer than 20,000. The company's latest buyout offer, he said, was expected and in keeping with a landmark labor contract that the union and company struck last year.

"We didn't go into the contract blind," Gettelfinger said in an interview yesterday on a Detroit radio station, according to The Associated Press. "There are certain things we cannot control."

In a statement, GM Chief Executive Richard Wagoner said the buyout "will help us transform the workforce" and bring U.S. labor costs more in line with world standards.

Wagoner said that despite the losses, the company's turnaround plan remained on track, with record sales in Europe, Africa and Latin America helping offset a weakening U.S. economy. GM sells 60 percent of its vehicles overseas.

The buyouts, coupled with last year's labor agreement, aim to reduce the steep labor bill that GM executives say keeps the company from competing with Asian manufacturers.

Although GM trimmed $9 billion in expenses in 2007, it is still losing money. The automaker posted a fourth-quarter net loss of $722 million.

Much of that is because of a one-time change in the company's tax accounting that was disclosed last fall. But the results nevertheless portray a company still in transition as it tries to pare its workforce and tailor vehicles to consumers who have rewarded Toyota's reputation for fuel economy and low repair bills. Excluding the tax item, GM's global automotive operations lost $1.9 billion in 2007, even as the revenue from vehicle sales reached a record $178 billion.

The new round of GM buyouts come during a re-engineering of the U.S. auto industry. Ford has gone through a similar restructuring and recently announced its own buyouts. Chrysler, meanwhile, was bought by a private-equity firm.

GM's "special attrition program" is meant to push the company's cost-cutting to another level by moving more high-wage employees off the books and allowing the automaker to put in place the two-tier wage structure provided by the new UAW contract. The new union agreement, along with revamping GM's costly health benefits, allows thousands of new "non-core" employees to be hired at wages about half that previously offered to entry-level workers.

The buyout program will be available to all of GM's 74,000 UAW employees, a figure reduced by about 30 percent in the past two years.

Under the program, veteran employees eligible for or nearing retirement will be offered payments of as much as $62,500 to retire early. Those who are not eligible to retire can receive payments of between $70,000 and $140,000, depending on their length of service, "to voluntarily quit and sever all ties with GM."

In addition to losses on the automotive side, the company was buffeted by the mortgage crisis that has disrupted the global financial industry, with its GMAC financial subsidiary reporting a loss of $2.3 billion.

GM shares dropped 52 cents to $26.60 yesterday.