"What's good for General Motors, is good for America!"

[Cyrus]

Pain is good for you.

[ QUOTE ]
GM announces it will eliminate 30,000 manufacturing jobs, including a production line in Spring Hill, Tennessee, where the Ion compact car is produced. Other communities in Oklahoma, Georgia, Michigan and Canada are also facing a future without jobs.

[/ QUOTE ]

CNN : Automaker ups job cuts to 30,000 jobs

CNN : Shock and sadness at GM plants

[MMMMMM]

That's what inevitably happens when you pay your help too much for too long.

[Overdrive]

[ QUOTE ]
That's what inevitably happens when you pay your help too much for too long.

[/ QUOTE ]

The funny thing is that the people working for Toyota, Honda, Nissan, and other foreign automakers in the US make just about the same per hour as the unionized UAW workers. GM would still be making money if they would MAKE SOME CARS THAT PEOPLE ACTUALLY WANTED TO BUY! Jim Cramer on mad money said GM is one of the worst managed companies in history - and while they are losing all this money the CEO and other higher ups are still making millions upon millions of dollars per year. The faliure at GM was not caused by their workers - it was caused by bad and incompetent manangement.

[jcx]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
That's what inevitably happens when you pay your help too much for too long.

[/ QUOTE ]

The funny thing is that the people working for Toyota, Honda, Nissan, and other foreign automakers in the US make just about the same per hour as the unionized UAW workers. GM would still be making money if they would MAKE SOME CARS THAT PEOPLE ACTUALLY WANTED TO BUY! Jim Cramer on mad money said GM is one of the worst managed companies in history - and while they are losing all this money the CEO and other higher ups are still making millions upon millions of dollars per year. The faliure at GM was not caused by their workers - it was caused by bad and incompetent manangement.

[/ QUOTE ]

Patently untrue. GM's avg cost for health care and pension benefits per car is $1,360. Honda's US plants average $107 per car. There are currently 1.1 million people collecting benefits from GM. Less than 20% of these are actually working for GM today. Japanese companies pay nothing for health care costs at home because of socialized medicine. And this info came from none other than the website Mr. Cramer founded...

[sam h]

[ QUOTE ]
Patently untrue. GM's avg cost for health care and pension benefits per car is $1,360. Honda's US plants average $107 per car.

[/ QUOTE ]

You need to compare across production costs in the same regional markets. The auto sector is not like electronics. You don't make cars in Southeast Asia and ship them over here. Do you have the figures for just North America?

[ QUOTE ]
Japanese companies pay nothing for health care costs at home because of socialized medicine.

[/ QUOTE ]

This will not help them in North America. Japanese firms also contribute a lot of social welfare costs to the state through various matching policies and corporate taxes, so you cannot just make this simple comparison of health care versus no health care.

Further, if the story is all about labor costs, why are the Big Three also getting killed by German car manufacturers? Labor costs in Germany are significantly higher than here.

The bottom line is that the Japanese crushed the Big Three at the level of corporate strategy. The lean-production system was simply much more powerful than the Fordist system and the Americans never really learned. Further, they never changed the nature of their supply relationships. Some costs do hurt the Big Three, but these things are invoked to avoid facing up to the bitter truth: They just got their ass kicked over time because they were too proud or too stupid to fundamentally rethink the ways that cars might be made. End result: The Japanese are more innovative and more nimble.

[Overdrive]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
That's what inevitably happens when you pay your help too much for too long.

[/ QUOTE ]

The funny thing is that the people working for Toyota, Honda, Nissan, and other foreign automakers in the US make just about the same per hour as the unionized UAW workers. GM would still be making money if they would MAKE SOME CARS THAT PEOPLE ACTUALLY WANTED TO BUY! Jim Cramer on mad money said GM is one of the worst managed companies in history - and while they are losing all this money the CEO and other higher ups are still making millions upon millions of dollars per year. The faliure at GM was not caused by their workers - it was caused by bad and incompetent manangement.

[/ QUOTE ]

Patently untrue. GM's avg cost for health care and pension benefits per car is $1,360. Honda's US plants average $107 per car. There are currently 1.1 million people collecting benefits from GM. Less than 20% of these are actually working for GM today. Japanese companies pay nothing for health care costs at home because of socialized medicine. And this info came from none other than the website Mr. Cramer founded...

[/ QUOTE ]

I was talking about the per hour wage, which is what I thought the op was talking about.

[sam h]

[ QUOTE ]
That's what inevitably happens when you pay your help too much for too long.

[/ QUOTE ]

Toyota is not winning because of labor costs. They are crushing the Big Three because they are much better in corporate strategy.

[BCPVP]

Always a good question to ask: so what?

(cue the parade of libs who condemn me for being callous)

[Jdanz]

i'm a pretty liberal guy, but i don't really know what to do about outsourcing and downsizing. They seem inevitable, and it would be pretty inefficent to demand a less efficent outcome.

I think if you really are on the liberal side of things the better area to focus on is a social safety net rather then on specific instances of market self-correction.

Bust the unions up and pay all auto workers a market wage with market benefits. This isn't 1905 and is a pretty simple solution actually.