Re: GM cutting engineering jobs



On Thu, 30 Mar 2006, BroTher zAchary wrote:


Straydog wrote:
On Thu, 30 Mar 2006, Threeducks wrote:

Russell.Martin@xxxxxxx wrote:
GM has announced it is cutting hundreds of engineering
jobs. I guess management figures GM products are
good enough and the reason the company can't compete
is it's spending too much money on engineers. ;-)

Cheers,
Russell


Yup, things are pretty rotten out here. Lots of people are feeling the cuts.
The big problem is that GM is carrying way too much capacity for their market
share. They are going to have to cut everything and everywhere to become
competitive. They are also saddled with the Delphi disaster. It would not
be a suprise if this was the begining of the end for GM.


Wouldn't it be funny if Toyota bought GM? Then just shut it down and wrote
it off the books, then make Toyotas in the GM factories with new Toyota
signs fastened over the GM signs?

They'd still have to deal with the UAW,

If Toyota shut down the plant and terminated GM, I think, legally, they can start from scratch and not even hire the old UAW workers. Technically, this is one of the main purposes of "reorganizations." Especially if the name of the organization is changed. You fire all the old workers, then hire new (different) guys at half the wages and, poof, no union. Usually those union contracts specify what can be done and not done, and if they wanted to kill the union, then it could be done (read Martin Jay Levitt's book "Confessions of a Union Buster"). They might hurt their image, get a backlash, maybe even violence, but if Toyota wanted to do it, they could.

The bigger problem might be the FTC who would see all this as violating anti-trust and there would be a lot of squabbling about it.

which is a BIG part of the
problem.

I will grant that unions can be problems, but unions also protect workers. What the "net" gain or loss to society is, is hard to evaluate. However, when companies have problems, I would like the executives, who actually make all of the important decisions, to own up to their own stupid mistakes (such as sit on their butts, and make stupid mistakes, and fail to introduce innovations and actually improve their products). From what I've read they have three problems: i) the benefit package is too big (company sponsored health plan) for retirees, ii) the company sponsored too many incentives (cost the company their profits) to sell volumes of vehicles, and iii) they wasted resources on products (eg. Oldmobile, which is now discontinued) with less innovation than competitors (eg. Toyota) and another technical issue I can't remember just now. I would also say that having guys (rank and file) sit around doing nothing but getting paid at the same time is not a good idea even though I sympathise with underlings most of the time.

The UAW won't even let Toyota copy the very successful NUMMI
(assembly plant in Fremont, CA) model.

I wonder how much less GM engineers make than the typical linemen and
women?

Could they be union members, also? Or is it limited to actual factory workers?


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