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Automotive News & Views United Automobile Workers of America (UAW)
16733 messages, Last post on Dec 02, 2009 at 9:47 PM
You are in the Automotive News & Views Forum. Your Hosts are steve_ & claires
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Replying to: marsha7 (Dec 30, 2008 9:52 am) Funny that Japan/Germany/Korea think of America as a third world country with labor markets to be exploited. Walmart, got the message when they saw themselves in the courts. Their actions may have been tolerated in some other countries, but the legal system has them shaking here. Outsource them Walmart jobs! Its only a matter of time for the rebirth of unionism/UAW. Newton's third law of motion has just happened and come 01-20-09 your jaw is going to drop. Just remember how far and how long to the right we were. Just as soon as the masses learned to read they had to invent public relations/spin. Did big business want everyone to read? Now they have consolidated the media and have many a country bumpkin snowed. When will you see that the CEO is but a human as yourself and that these aristocrats don't have your best interests in mind. If it was as you say there would be no UAW cars on the streets and these brilliant CEO's wouldn't be begging for welfare. Maybe their stupidity comes from inbreeding within the same ole country club crowd? |
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Replying to: dino001 (Dec 30, 2008 11:22 am) The lost decade! How long was Japans recession/depression? How much debt did their govt take on due to their superior lean manufacturing? As we go does the world. So they lost ten years and are going to take another beating? Maybe they can have a kaizen event and make it all go away. Or maybe if they close their eyes and click their heels three times the good times will be back. The package, which may be in place as early as March, bears the hallmarks of Japan's last big bank bail-out between the late 1990s and 2005, when the government spent billions of yen on bad loans to keep the country's banking system afloat. http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/dec/30/japan-banks-recession |
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More poppycock using faulty reasoning and ignoring the fact that Ford and GM were on their to restructuring their businesses over the last 7 years until the grossly overpaid gurus in the financial and banking sectors caused the credit crunch. Don't start with old Detroit auto companies and the "deep south" crap. The REAL outrage is the financial sector ( Like AIG, etc) that continues to reward it's hot dog gurus with outrageous bonuses and salaries and no questions asked for $150- $350 - $700 - $800 BILLION. Yes, the "Big Three" could have tried to anticipate the market and get workers to work for less, and yada-yada-yada sooner. But what about the grossly overpaid financial guys at Freddie, Fannie, Lehman Bros. , etc who went bust and got Hundreds of BILLIONS with hardly a question and no congressional 3rd degree. This auto thing is more of a smoke screen to confuse and draw attention away from the greed, stupidity, and irresponsibility of the financial world, and the good old boys in congress who just had to help out those buddies! Go back to school. Everything you learned about business and finance was bogus and designed to let run away greed happen like it just did in the financial sector. Derivatives, credit default swaps, what a bunch of rip off BS! In the end your reasoning only factors unemployment and silly little issues. Restructuring and offering early retirement for years now. All the while there the legacy issue and four letters which will cost the American taxpayer a Cadillac each. Thats PGBC and it most certainly ups the ante to those on the fools errand of doing away with Detroit automakers.
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Replying to: steve_ (Dec 30, 2008 10:41 am) Yesterday you did great on the CEO job hopping. Today you have an interesting observation as well. I envy your abilities. |
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Replying to: dallasdude1 (Dec 30, 2008 6:32 pm) Would you prefer that these countries not have any North American manufacturing presence? Would you rather see all imports built in their respective countries of origin? Newton's third law of motion has just happened and come 01-20-09 your jaw is going to drop. I'm not sure what you're expecting from Obama. I think that he'll govern from the center because that's what smart Democrats do if they want to be re-elected. He's a sharp, savvy politician, & he'll do his best to avoid Bill Clinton's fate in 1994: a Republican Congressional landslide halfway through Clinton's 1st term. My hunch is that the loudest complaints against the Obama administration will come not from right-wing Republicans but from left-wing Democrats unhappy about Obama's middle-of-the road economic policies. Many of these critics will be the same lefties who called Bill Clinton a pseudo-Republican back in 1995-96. But that didn't bother Clinton, who went on to become the 1st Democratic President in 50 years to serve 2 full terms, & Obama won't let it bother him either. We'll just have to wait & see what happens.
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Replying to: dallasdude1 (Dec 30, 2008 7:50 pm) You shouldn't put too much weight on that argument - particularly when you're talking about GM. Even without the credit crunch, GM would have been in deep doo-doo because its product mix was vulnerable to high fuel prices. Gas prices bottomed out in early 1999 & began rising later that year. By 2000, gas prices were already high enough to be an issue in that year's Democratic primary; facing a challenge from Bill Bradley, VP Al Gore wanted President Clinton to bring prices down by releasing oil from the strategic reserve. In short, no auto industry decision-maker should have been surprised by the disappearance of cheap gas.
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Replying to: dallasdude1 (Dec 30, 2008 5:57 pm) CEO earns more because the job requires more skill, more knowledge than a UAW job. It affects tens of thousands of people, probably millions. The CEO's decisions directly affect billions of dollars. I don't disagree however that the CEOs, Wagoner in particular, are grossly overpaid. But the position is still worth far more than a union job. The other problem is that even at a $10M salary, $10M x 1 CEO = $10M. For 100K union jobs, $25K in excessive compensation each (as an example) = $2.5B per year. So while it is easy to gripe about CEO salaries, the real drag on the company is the compensation of the average employees if that compensation is well above the competitors. |
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Replying to: dallasdude1 (Dec 30, 2008 6:32 pm) Unfortunately, productivity tends to differ for different industries. In the Auto industry it is possible that Japan is better (I do not have any specific data to prove this, but I have a friend who works for Toyota and was based in the US for some time - he felt that the factory level labor in the US was not as skilled in the use of numbers as their Japanese counterparts, and this was a critical requirement for Toyota's TQM system, since it is heavily dependent on statistical analysis), but in some other services (e.g. Finance, Marketing, software) Japan lags far behind the US - And thus "imports" such workers from the US. Go to the Financial district in Tokyo, and you will see (a number of Americans in senior positions). By the way, I drive a US made Acura TL, and it is flawless. So even in the Auto industry, US labor is competitive. I cannot say the same about UAW protected labor.....
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Replying to: manegi (Dec 31, 2008 2:29 am) FYI: Chrysler tied Toyota as the most productive automaker in North America this year, according to the Harbour Report on manufacturing, which measures the amount of work done per employee. Eight of the 10 most productive vehicle assembly plants in North America belong to Chrysler, Ford or GM.
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Replying to: dallasdude1 (Dec 30, 2008 9:19 am) I understand your thought here, but can't agree with it 100%.. Bank tellers don't make the wages and bennefits of UAW workers. It has been mentioned several times on this forum that there are many UAW workers with college educations. Seems a bit ironic that a college grad would choose to assemble cars. Unless, of course the money is better. They make about the same wage as my wife with her BSRN degree and countless courses in continued education, and her dealing with human life. Her bennefits are no where close to UAW workers. Biggest problem with the "Sub Prime Mess" started with Jimmy Carter. Another bad idea of his. Seems he felt every person should own a house, whether they could afford it or not. As Americans, they were "Entitled" to the good life. He was and still is a disgrace to this great state. That idea was nurtured by democrats through the years and the republicans did nothing to change it. In the early years of the Clinton administration, mortgage companies were seriously "ENCOURAGED" to do even more to loosen lending requirements, so that low income folks that couldn't meet the requirements were not discrimenated against. Didn't matter whether or not they could afford the loan. So they got the loans through creative means, such as, nothing down, (because they could not or would not save enough to put down) balloon notes, interest only, variable interest rates, and high interest rates. They were set up to fail, by the feds and the lending institutions. In a nut shell, this Sub Prime mess is the child spawned by poor management of our government over a long period of time. The only ones to actually reap bennefits were the loan officers at the banks. Very similar to the D3 situation in that those at the top reap the bennefits while the company/country goes in the toilet. Many loans should not have made, and D3 management should not have signed the greedy UAW contracts that they did. They were setting up the company and the country to fail. Least we not forget that many of the failing mortgages are from UAW workers that lost their jobs, because the UAW leadership as well as corporate management refused to see the light at the end of the tunnel as being a train coming at them. To his credit, George Bush did bring sub prime lending to light in the first part of his first term, and again in the first part of his second term. To his discredit, he didn't do anything about it. Someone said earlier that Obama is upset at the mess he is inheriting from Bush. Obama needs to look at the whole picture of just how this came about.  Kip
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