While part of me wants to dance a little jig now that GM has finally filed for bankruptcy, I guess I shouldn’t. This is the part of me that refuses to buy American cars because they suck. This is also the part of me who hates the Red Wings with a passion and thinks that maybe this is finally some karma for winning all those Stanley Cups.
*Stuff* *Squish* Ok, I put my own negative feelings about Detriot in general back into the box from whence they came. But yep, GM is still officially going backrupt. Hmm… but the market is up 2.5% as I write this. Interesting.
I actually have a lot of empathy for the innocent workers and families caught in the crossfire, those to whom GM was a job, a livelihood, or even a culture. But as you know, Crap Will Happen. I can’t speak for everyone, but it’s not like GM’s problems happened overnight. It’s been a slow, steady, totally confident trundling toward the dung heap. I woulda looked for another job about 5 years ago, but I know about that easy 20-20 hindsight.
I’m not qualified to make comments on the nature of the bankruptcy, but then I’m pretty much not qualified to make any comments whatsoever. My hope is that if there is a car company(s) that emerges out of the destruction, I hope it’s one that puts more emphasis on economically feasible cars, sustainable resouces and above all, fairness. And no more promoting brobdingnagian behemoths with crappy classic rock music.
You might say that sure they’ve been doing “better” nowadays (or at least the marketing spin has changed). I think maybe that in the past couple years they have, but, like energy companies claiming they’re all into the “environment” when in truth they’re spending less than 1/2 of 1 percent the research budget on alternative energy sources, this is way too little too late.
Source: CNNnnnnnnn
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June 1st, 2009 at 2:47 pm
I have to think part of the problem is the union. The locomotive plant where my husband works is staffed with UAW, though he’s seperate from the union. They get a huge number of paid days off, including the first day of hunting season, and 2 weeks for July 4th. When the plant was in danger of flooding a second time last fall, they had to hire contractors to put up sandbags because the union people wouldn’t do it in time, they complained to the union that the plant was paying someone else to do work they could be doing, and the plant had to pay ALL the union employees overtime for work they did not do, in addition to paying the contractors who did work. It’s no wonder US auto makers don’t make any money. Toyota plants in the US don’t use UAW employees, and they’re not filing for bankruptcy.
June 1st, 2009 at 5:08 pm
I think GM filing for bankruptcy doesn’t mean what people think it means. It doesn’t mean the company is going to vanish. It’s a legal procedure. They’ll still be around, but they’ll come out of it restructured and under different control.
I have to disagree, at least in part, with Holly about the unions. Toyota doesn’t use unions, but it still lost an immense amount of money last year. American and Japan deal with their labor forces in very different ways. Japanese companies have a social contract with theirs which means they don’t fire or lay people off and that people expect to be employed for life if they are salaried workers. America has unions to provide them with stable incomes and improved quality of life because it has no such social contract. Middle class incomes and life were created in America as the result of unions which in term made America what it is today rather than what it would have been, which is what it has been more and more - a nation that treats and pays its workers poorly forcing them to consume on credit or to not consume at all. Toyota has huge problems in Japan. They just cover it better and they have a workforce willing to enslave themselves if necessary to cover their needs. It’s one of the reasons there is so much suicide in Japan.
Essentially, the whole credit crunch can be traced to slow erosion of working conditions in America. As jobs got sent overseas and people couldn’t live the lifestyle they wanted on their incomes, they just borrowed to keep up, and the whole house of cards toppled.
June 1st, 2009 at 5:15 pm
…which in turn…
Sheesh, don’t type comments before coffee in the morning.
June 2nd, 2009 at 4:04 am
I’m sure Toyota is having it’s own problems, just about all businesses are doing poorly right now, but I do think the unproductiveness that unions foster are making things worse for GM than for non union producers. I agree with you, it’s a complicated problem with many causes, and I believe this is one of them. Unions provided an important protection to workers in the beginning, true. Now I think they are part of the reason companies move overseas. Why pay American workers who demand up to 50 paid holidays a year, not including vacation time, when you can move to Mexico or China and pay pennies on the dollar and work them 12+ hours a day, 7 days a week. Both extremes are wrong, there has to be a balance somewhere in the middle.
June 2nd, 2009 at 11:25 am
Thank you both for your insightful comments! I’m split down the middle about which is the bigger problem - companies or unions. There’s problems with both. I think the specific bankruptcy / reorganization of GM might be a better thing in the end, but I can’t predict the future. I do think that they need to stop thinking of supersizing everything, and I don’t mean only the size of cars - I’m talking the reach of the brand.
Oh, to change the subject a bit - I’m a bit bummed about them dumping the Saturn brand. Not that I have a Saturn, but if there was any part of GM that I would say was at least “ok” (if you put a gun to my head), then I would say Saturn. I heard they dumped it because the “business footprint was not big enough”. There’s that overreach issue again…
June 3rd, 2009 at 3:22 am
Regarding why companies move their business overseas, they are provided with tax incentives to do so and Americans, union or not, can’t compete with wages that are paid in developing countries.
For us to compete with China, Americans would have to be making about $5 a day or less, which is what employers would happily pay if there were no minimum wage laws.
June 3rd, 2009 at 6:20 am
Orchid64- That is also true. I think the government needs to do the opposite, tax the companies until producing in China costs them the same or more as paying American workers, and give them tax breaks for coming back. If that happened, companies would have no incentive to move overseas. Of course, doing that would mean the end of cheap junk. We’d have to stop being such a gluttonous consumer culture and actually take care of the stuff we have. Of course, that’s something we need to do anyway.