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Automotive News & Views United Automobile Workers of America (UAW)
16705 messages, Last post on Nov 25, 2009 at 6:56 PM
You are in the Automotive News & Views Forum. Your Hosts are steve_ & claires
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those of us car nuts who really love the particular car they buy, will buy, tiny Matchbox and Hot Wheel models of our cars. I recently found one of the 2008 Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution(in Rally Red like my Lancer GTS!!) and pert-near jumped around like Kobe Bryant after Kevin Garnett elbowed him in the head real hard, during the pleasing recent Laker NBA Finals loss. I snapped it up like another Gary Payton steal from Michael Jordan in 1996. I asked the guy stocking at Wal*Mart if they were getting the 2008 Mitsubishi Lancer GTS in any time soon, he took a mental note of my question and told me some more stock was soon to arrive but my car didn't ring a bell with him. Recently in Tucson I went to a hobby shop and spent 20 minutes or so looking hard for my '08 Mitsu Lancer GTS in "Revell plastic type" model form. One of the workers echoed my sentiment that its hard to find imports in these hobby shops. I would order one in a heartbeat on the net if I could find one. Nevertheless, I put my Hot Wheel model Rally Red 2008 Mitsubishi Lancer EVO on top of my computer monitor at home. Just in front of the 1965 Ford Mustang baby blue convertible metal model on there. They're constant reminders to me of my two favorite car body designs of all time. Even though I do slightly favor my '08 Lancer GTS over the '08 Lancer EVO body. Oh, yeah, models are so cool. 
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Replying to: gagrice (Jun 26, 2008 3:20 pm) Smart ones are far out numbered by dumb ones who are still holding on expecting Feds to bailout GM with tax payer dollars from filing C-11.
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Replying to: irnmdn (Jun 28, 2008 4:42 am) When the UAW went on strike this year at the Kansas Malibu plant and the Lansing crossover plant it would have been all out war if I was GM CEO. Those strikes were just retaliatory over the AA strike. The UAW members and leadership are so obsessed with their own importance that they cannot see the impending doom. By contrast Monterey MX is booming. Maybe the UAW should send a team down to see what their secret is. They have Unions also. Maybe it is the willingness to please the employer that is the secret to their success. A short list of American companies doing business in greater Monterrey: McDonald's, General Motors, Caterpillar, Ford, Motorola, IBM, Emerson Electric, Du Pont, Dow Corning, PepsiCo, Wal-Mart, Union Carbide, and Stone Container. Other foreigners with operations in the area include Germany's BASF, Belgium's Bekaert Group, and Italy's Metecno. "We have more visits these days from foreign companies eager to set up a joint venture," says Rafael R. Paez, president and chief executive officer of Grupo Industrial Alfa, a $2.5 billion steel, petrochemicals, and food conglomerate. Ironically Mexicans from Monterey are coming up to TX and buying foreclosed properties. They have money to spend. The money our workers pushed South.
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Replying to: gagrice (Jun 28, 2008 5:10 am) Where have all the UAW wages gone? Well some are coming back to the USA buying back TX. Se Habla Espanol?  Texas Real Estate Slump Lets Mexicans Take It Back June 25 (Bloomberg) -- More than a century and a half after Mexico lost Texas to the U.S., Virgilio Garza wants a piece of it back. A ``Texas for Sale'' sign and cowgirls in boots and white hats greeted Garza at the Convex center in Monterrey, Mexico, earlier this month. A Monterrey developer and investor, Garza was in search of foreclosed U.S. property to buy. ``Texas is like our home,'' said Garza, 45, who joined hundreds of Mexicans poring over lists of Texas properties at the four-day event. Garza, who owns manufacturing sites and other land in Mexico, said he and five partners may invest as much as $8 million in Texas. ``We believe there can be some opportunities.'' A rising peso and an economy growing faster than the U.S. have given some Mexicans the buying power to take advantage of the housing slump in Texas, which the U.S. annexed in 1845 after Texans gained independence from Mexico nine years earlier. A three-year war followed and ended with Mexico ceding about half its territory, including Arizona, Nevada and California, to the U.S. under an 1848 treaty.
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Replying to: iluvmysephia1 (Jun 27, 2008 3:15 pm) 
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Replying to: gagrice (Jun 28, 2008 5:25 am)
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Replying to: fintail (Jun 28, 2008 4:09 pm) My trip to TX in 2006 was to look for real estate. Maybe another retirement home. Where we liked in the Hill Country was a bit over priced at the time. May be less now. The real down side for us was the property tax. It was between 2% and 2.5% of selling price. It was reappraised every couple years. Homes we would consider were cheap by San Diego standards. Nice brick one story 3k sq ft with an acre and view was right about $300k. The taxes on that place was over $7000 per year. We don't pay that much on a $650k home here. And they cannot raise it very much each year because of prop 13. So let the Mexicans have it. Rocky and I will live elsewhere..... PS There are good jobs there with the oil booming. A place that an unemployed UAW member could maintain his lifestyle if he has any usable skills. |
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all good UAW members to swallow their pride and think long and hard about getting retrained as Respiratory Therapists and Nurses and Dental Technicians. Man, the need for these types of workers just doesn't get quenched. Any UAW members out there on this board who have looked in to Uncle Sam paying for your re-training after you...gulp...get laid-off of your UAW job? I mean, let's look each other in the eye and realize something: the Japanese and South Koreans and dare I say, soon, the Chinese have eaten our proverbial lunch in automaking and selling. As many of the hardcores here already know, I had a good-paying Boeing Co. job at the widebody jet plant in Everett, WA. Upon receiving my layoff notice I enrolled in Trade Act job re-training. We put our house up for sale, packed up the Sportage 4X4 and a recently-acquired 4 X 8' utility trailer, sold and gave away a lot of our stuff and moved to Missouri. The Fed.Guv-Mint paid for the books and tuition in full for me to get trained as a Certified Respiratory Therapist and earn an Associate's Degree in that field. Now, they didn't pay for the longer Registered Respiratory Therapist training but did fully fund the Certified Respiratory Therapist training program. U.I. was paid for by the State we moved from, Washington. It worked out. Was it easy? Hell no it wasn't easy! When this layoff in the spring of 2003 occurred I was 20 years in to my Technical Illustrator-Engineering job for Boeing. I thought I was gonna retire at Boeing. This was a huge change, make no mistake about it. But I am living testimony that one can go from building jet airplanes to helping people breathe. I would urge any of you lurking out there reading this to check with GM, Ford, Chrysler and who else about Fed.Aid for Retraining. I didn't see a wealth of other Graphics/Illustration jobs out there to shoot for, so I decided to just head in a completely different direction. Ya gotta admit, that's not a bad deal. U.I., if you keep a 'C' average or higher and all of the tuition and books paid. And there were a lot of books and a decent chunk of change that had to be laid down for this training. Missouri is a hot and humid climate but it did rain a decent amount there, so I felt at home with that. I didn't like the humidity or the springtime threats of tornado's, but, we managed to avoid those, fortunately. It did take me a long way from my family in the Puget Sound area and that was tough, and, feelings of homesickness and sadness over the passing away of my Pomeranian, Abbey, and my Dad from cancer(the dog in late June '04 and my Dad in Aug.'04) were immense to go through. That slowed me down for a while and I really had to buckle down and hit the books hard if I was gonna graduate. Falling down the stairs of our rented townhome in December of '04(with our teacup Pomeranian, Rocky, in my left arm...stocking feet slipped on the carpeted upper few stairs, it happened so fast I couldn't believe it) and breaking my arm was also a setback. The Pom survived the accident just fine(I made sure he was gonna be fine and took the pressure of the fall down on my right arm and broke it in three places near the elbow!!), but, breaking my arm put me out of the hospital clinical rotation for a couple of months. My buddy lent me his Ford Crown V with automatic tranny, because I could not shift my '01 Kia Sportage's manual transmission with the right arm broken! He was a lifesaver that I had to have the help from or I would've had to drop out of school! I could attend regular Respiratory classes but couldn't do the clinical hospital training until my arm healed. So, the arm healed, I graduated with the rest of my RT class in March of 2005, but had to attend class until early May of '05 in order to satisfy my clinical training requirements. My classmates voted me Most Persistent student, no kidding! Not the best student, mind you, just the Most Persistent. That was too much work to put in, getting signed up for training, putting the house on the block, moving to the middle of the country to go to school, doing all of the required courses you have to take before you can even begin RT training, etc. Plus, I gotta be honest with ya, you have to look out for yourself at all times in order to get all of the red government tape taken care of. It was a part-time job getting all of the arrangments taken care of, to be honest. But I wanted it done. I was too young by at least 20 years to retire. So it was worked on incessantly. Setbacks did occur, but, after reading of them, do you feel like you can't retrain for another career? No, of course, you can. Let's either get GM, Ford and Chrysler back to bigtime profitability or let's take our pink slips like adults and retrain. The Big 3 should have Trade Act programs or something like them available for you. The groundwork should already be laid right now on these programs. Check them out and I sincerely wish the best for you that will not make it in the automotive field any longer. There are alternatives for retraining, then good employment out there in America. Healthcare is one of the big ones.
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Replying to: iluvmysephia1 (Jun 29, 2008 8:30 am) It was 15 years ago when I started wondering what would eventually become of my job as I saw many jobs being replaced with robots. "Hey, they'll need people to maintain those things," I thought. Thus, I applied to get into the skilled trades training program. I finished 6th out of over 500 people who took the apprenticeship tests. It took 4 years and a lot of school mixed in with still having to work but I eventually finished it with 10 A's and 3 B's in my classes. With many thousands of additional hours of training on the job I became a journeyman electrician. I simply love working with robotics, computers, programming and the occasional conduit projects. Chrysler pays me to do something I enjoy. They will have to close the doors before I will leave. 24 years is a lot of time to have invested with one company to just toss it away. With 15 years experience in a trade I have a lot more options than the workers still on the line who have just been installing seats or whatever for several decades. I will see what the future holds.
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you sound set. But is Chrysler gonna make it? What do you think? Will they? IMO they need to get the Hornet up and running and put out some fuel-efficient rigs soon. The Dodge Caliber is not winning any converts over with its reliability of powertrain issues. I am always favoring smaller rigs, but now smaller rigs are where its at, with high ghastly prices and all. Yeah, it was nuts to have Boeing send me packing after 19 years and 9 months of employment with them. But this one truly was a lemon turned lemonade for my wife and I and our five pets. We like it better in Arizona and I have a great boss and a small, rural hospital to work at that will only need to offer more services to the community as time moves along. I get paid better than my pay leaving Boeing, though my Boeing health and dental insurance was better than what I have now. The three of us Respiratory Therapists actually work for a sub-contracted RT service company and are in the process of breaking off from them and having the small hospital we work at buy out our contracts from them. We will then be direct employees of the hospital we work at and we hear that their insurance is much better than our contract company's is. I have heard that ER services we receive if we need help ourselves are paid for in full if we need them, for instance. So we shall see how that all pans out. In short, my wife and I are enjoying our lives more now in rural SE Arizona than we did when I was working my Boeing job and living in the crowded Puget Sound area of western Washington. Even though I was born in Seattle and the Puget Sound area is my homeland. We can thank St.Louis for giving us our first Drive-By Truckers rock show. It was in April of 2004 at Mississippi Nights on the waterfront. We gained a lot of enjoyment by seeing that show and finding a great talented rock band to enjoy from then on out. And that huge Arch is a trip to go up in, too. Missouri was a good experience, overall, for us. Well, tedebear, sounds like you'll be fine. I am not so sure about Chrysler, though, at this juncture.
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