Originally posted by: GTKeeper
Originally posted by: winnar111
Originally posted by: GTKeeper
Originally posted by: winnar111
Originally posted by: GTKeeper
Why not cut advertising by 50%? Thats huge money right there.
How do you plan to sell your cars without advertising?
Did I say eliminate? I said CUT. If sales are off by 30-40% anyway I don't see how more advertising helps. There is a point of deminishing returns when it comes to advertising.
What makes you think they are at that point?
Better to kill the labor union and move to automation.
Ok, August sales are down 20.7% for GM. Did they reduce all their other spending by 20.7%? I seriously doubt it.
Its time to get lean, meaning shut down plants for things like SUVs Hummers etc, cut all the management of those plants, reduce advertising. Yea it will hurt overall sales etc. but the strategy right now should be to survive and avoid bankruptcy.
People buy SUVs and hummers. I myself plan to buy a new midsize to replace my Honda Pilot soon, and now that the ridiculous gas price phobia is gone, I'm guessing more people will too. I don't know why they should cut out a profitable product.
GM has been dumping money into idle workers for years. This was from 3 years ago:
http://www.detnews.com/2005/au...0510/17/A01-351179.htm
WAYNE -- Ken Pool is making good money. On weekdays, he shows up at 7 a.m. at Ford Motor Co.'s Michigan Truck Plant in Wayne, signs in, and then starts working -- on a crossword puzzle. Pool hates the monotony, but the pay is good: more than $31 an hour, plus benefits.
"We just go in and play crossword puzzles, watch videos that someone brings in or read the newspaper," he says. "Otherwise, I've just sat."
Pool is one of more than 12,000 American autoworkers who, instead of installing windshields or bending sheet metal, spend their days counting the hours in a jobs bank set up by Detroit automakers and Delphi Corp. as part of an extraordinary job security agreement with the United Auto Workers union.
The jobs bank programs were the price the industry paid in the 1980s to win UAW support for controversial efforts to boost productivity through increased automation and more flexible manufacturing.
As part of its restructuring under bankruptcy, Delphi is actively pressing the union to give up the program.
With Wall Street wondering how automakers can afford to pay thousands of workers to do nothing as their market share withers, the union is likely to hear a similar message from the Big Three when their contracts with the UAW expire in 2007 -- if not sooner.
"It's an albatross around their necks," said Steven Szakaly, an economist with the Center for Automotive Research in Ann Arbor. "It's a huge number of workers doing nothing. That has a very large effect on their future earnings outlook."
The jobs bank was established during 1984 labor contract talks between the UAW and the Big Three. The union, still reeling from the loss of 500,000 jobs during the recession of the late 1970s and early 1980s, was determined to protect those who were left. Detroit automakers were eager to win union support to boost productivity through increased automation and more production flexibility.
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