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Automotive News & Views United Automobile Workers of America (UAW)
16657 messages, Last post on Nov 08, 2009 at 12:40 PM
You are in the Automotive News & Views Forum. Your Hosts are steve_ & claires
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Replying to: dallasdude1 (Jan 11, 2009 9:27 am) That's nice, but wouldn't you rather see GM sell the whole car & not just the tranny? I grew up in a fairly well-off suburb of NYC in the late 50s & 60s, & I remember clearly how Cadillac completely dominated the luxury market then. If you walked through the parking lots of country clubs where the elite golfed & drank, you'd see a few Lincoln Continentals & a sprinkling of Chrysler Imperials, but most of the cars there would be Cadillacs (or Olds 98s or Buick Electras, both of which shared bodies with the Sedan de Ville). Cadillac's lock on that market segment was hugely profitable for GM. I recall reading in a 1960s business mag that 1 Cadillac sale was worth 5 or 6 Chevrolet sales to the corporation's bottom line. Given Cadillac's importance to GM as a whole, you'd think that the company would pull out all of the stops to keep outsiders - notably, the Germans - from stealing this business. Instead, it kept designing & building cars for the previous generation of buyers while BMW & Mercedes grabbed & the baby boomers. This was a colossal blunder that cost GM billions of dollars. Again, I'm a fan of the new CTS. But it could have been & should have been brought to market many years earlier.
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Replying to: jimbres (Jan 11, 2009 10:31 am) And then let's talk about the "entry-luxury" buyers. I've always liked smaller cars, but not CHEAP cars. For the past 20 years those cars were BMW, Audi, VW, perhaps Lexus, Acura - but NO CADDYS. Why couldn't Caddy have built the A4 rather than Audi in the mid 1990s? The 3-series rather than BMW in the early 1990s? Not only are these smaller sport sedans very profitable compared to a Cobalt or Cavalier, they gain the brand loyalty to more expensive "move-up" luxury cars for the future. GM squandered this market and was left selling rental-fodder cars while most Americans who had a choice bought foreign to get some quality. And part of the issue was GM de-contenting the cars due to high fixed costs brought on by UAW benefits. |
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Replying to: tlong (Jan 11, 2009 11:20 am) Excellent point, but not one that the UAW wants us to ponder. They would rather have us believe that the D3's current predicament is due entirely to forces beyond their control: currency manipulation, trade barriers, sunspots, Waco, etc. It will be easier for the UAW to sell us on the need for a no-strings bailout if they can get us to see the D3 as helpless victims. But once we understand that the D3 are their own worst enemies - that their blundering got them into this mess - then what little sympathy there is for a helping hand from the taxpayers will evaporate.
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Replying to: dallasdude1 (Jan 11, 2009 8:43 am) Just when would that have been? I believe someone posted statistics showing that Wagoner was way behind the average CEO compared to the high paid UAW workers. If it weren't for the bail out, capitalism would have failed. I think you are very confused. The bailouts are a sign of failure. You will not find a true fiscal conservative that was in favor of ANY of the bailouts. Any good conservative will tell you that you do not reward failure. The liberals have pushed to bailout the banks, GM and their UAW millstone. They did it to cover up their failure to rein in their banking cronies that have given BIG donations to mainly Democrats. Don't kid yourself. If not for the politics of the UAW, GM would be out of business today. You can believe what you like. You are not convincing in your arguments for the UAW. Maybe your UAW local and bargaining unit are responsible and cognizant of the health of your Company. The UAW locals that are tied to the auto industry are totally out in LEFT field. |
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Replying to: dallasdude1 (Jan 11, 2009 8:43 am) You do not understand capitalism at all.... In short - capitalism provides freedom to take risks, freedom to succeed and freedom to fail. The bail-outs are cutting off the "freedom to fail" part of capitalism and replacing it with the notion that the government will save you if you fail. THIS IS VERY WRONG. The failed ventures MUST be allowed to die so newer-better ideas can take over. Otherwise, our grandkids will be paying taxes for more and more losing ventures which our goverment was too corrupt to allow to die. The inevatable end to this spiral is a FAILED GOVERNMENT!!! This logic would be obvious to anyone who steps back a looks at things with an open mind.
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regarding the conditions of the GM-Chrysler-UAW bailout. Might Obama hire some knowledgeable auto industry consultants(many of us would fill that spot admirably, IMHO  )to help him keep tabs on how the UAW intends to get their grubbly paws on...uhhh...I...I mean work nicely with Daddy GM and Chrysler towards building product that the public actually feels like parting cash with? I read some of his latest comments on this and that sounds like his intent. But who is he actually going to hire to watch over this 14B large, eh? Valid question?
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Replying to: iluvmysephia1 (Jan 11, 2009 2:25 pm) It is a good question. I just don't think any executive worth a hoot would take on the GM mess without the benefit of bankruptcy. They need the latitude to shed all the waste, UAW contracts and monstrous debts they have incurred. I think as in 1979, Chrysler would be easier to save than GM. They need a Jack Welch type that will streamline the operation, into a money making entity. I see it becoming a nationalized industry that ultimately fails to produce anything the consumers will want. Just think about a car designed by Pelosi, Reid, Obama and Barney Frank... 
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gets the mind imagineering, don't it? I say it was already time to punt, but apparently enough important others feel otherwise. 4th down and about 99 yards to go with a bunch of Guv-Mint cash. Can anyone smell raspberry jelly donuts warming in the Company microwave? I noticed my old buddy's at The Boeing Company are finally joining the rest of the nation's manufacturer's and are layoff off some 4,500 workers. Here we go again. Boeing smells rotten socks with the sensivity of a hound dog. Anything close to tight pocketbooks anywhere in the world and they're brewing up the Starbuck's and buying the raspberry jelly donuts for those long, extendo excruciating Big-Boy meetings. With announcements following like this week's one.
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Replying to: gagrice (Jan 11, 2009 3:55 pm) |
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Replying to: tlong (Jan 11, 2009 11:20 am) Thats a rare breed today. Any car buyer is rare and I posted all the imports parked in lots off the ports yesterday. Maybe we could stack them to save space? Isn't it bad enough that the transplants can't sell theirs? Why do they import them to park them here? http://www.newser.com/story/44666/us-ports-awash-in-foreign-cars.html "This is about power. And the business community is not going to give up power willingly." Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott said as much to a meeting with analysts in October. "We like driving the car," he told them, "and we're not going to give the steering wheel to anybody but us." Throughout his run for president, Obama was explicit in his support for Employee Free Choice and his understanding of the forces arrayed against it. "If a majority of workers want a union, they should get a union; it's that simple," he told union members in Pennsylvania in April. "Let's stand up to the business lobby." Nationwide, some 86,000 workers have been fired over the past eight years for trying to unionize (countless others have been threatened), and only a fraction of these get reinstated by the NLRB. So Lawhorn's return to the forklift is what passes for a victory these days, under the shredded protections of the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, whose intent was not merely to protect the right to collective bargaining but to "encourag[e] the practice." But unionization rates have been crashing for decades. "Historically, unionization basically created the middle class," says economist James Galbraith. "First, by its direct effect on the wages and benefits of unionized workers; second, by its indirect effect on the wages of workers who weren't unionized; and third, by the impact unions had on the creation of the social institutions that underpin the middle class, such as Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid--the very structures of the New Deal and the Great Society." Since the election, the business community has savvily retooled its campaign. In a November 21 letter to Congress, the Chamber wrote that passage of the bill "would have a particularly devastating impact on small employers who, as the primary source for new jobs, would be counted on to reverse the current economic downturn." The bill, the letter went on, "is an awful idea in good economic times and a catastrophic idea in the difficult economic times now upon us." Days later, the Chamber presented new research claiming that unionization is a drag on GDP--an assertion that Galbraith and other economists find laughable. And the Chamber used negotiations over the auto bailout to claim that unionization bankrupted the industry. In fact, labor makes up a tiny portion of a car's production cost, but in a tense economic environment with spiking unemployment, such talking points easily gained traction in the media. As UC Santa Barbara labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein points out, the New Deal was not just a series of reforms that stabilized banking or stimulated the economy. "Those reforms," he says, "were backstopped by the organization of the working class, and those reforms continued for two generations." Any Obama-era reforms, he adds, "can and will dissipate" unless unions form an institutional bulwark against retreat. Then, unions were more than twice their current size and less allied with progressive causes, and so it was easier to frame the battle as a parochial fight between big labor and big business. "Labor's decline helps recast that dynamic," he says. "This time around it isn't about two special interests; it's about economic recovery and restoring the middle class." http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090126/kaplan/single |
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