Originally posted by: Dacalo
yea i was discussing this with my management professor
he said american motor companies have placed themselves in a situation that would doom them unless they do something extraordinary (well, the japanese car companies have placed the american companies into that situation
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Well your management professor doesn't know his ass from a hole in the wall, and you can tell him I said so.
If Flint's Buick City were still open, or if Chevrolet Truck and Bus hadn't only recently gone through some sweeping changes, I'd show you first hand exactly what happened to the domestic auto industry.
The unions forced the Big Three to pay some of the highest wages and comprehensive benefits to a massive workforce of fall-down drunks, drug addicts, and illiterates that the company could not get rid of because the union was simply too powerful and had the domestic auto industry solidly over a barrel for about 30 - 40 years.
I know, my whole drunken and illiterate family worked for General Motors, which the union membership 'affectionately' termed 'Generous Motors' because of the extremely favorable concessions, perks, raises, working conditions, and benefits GM offered the union just to get people to come to work sober at least once per week. Not that it really mattered, when they did show up reasonably sober, they were only marginally more productive than the dead.
Just as with the disputed issue during the recent Longshoreman's strike, the powerful UAW bitterly fought tooth and nail over every last nut and bolt of automation and technology that General Motors tried to bring in. So while the Japanese were building state-of-the-art manufacturing plants and firing anyone who didn't want to work, General Motors not by its own choice was still building cars not much differently than it had since the 1920s and was forced to keep the most incompetent employees on the payroll.
Drunks and drug addicts were sent to 'treatment' programs at the expense of General Motors. When they returned to work, they merely had to keep out of trouble for a period of one year, and their disciplinary record would then be totally expunged, so they could start all over at the beginning of the 'progressive discipline' process that the worst employees manipulated at will with the encouragement of the union.
They didn't call Flint's BOC Group "Buick City" for nothing, it was like a city. Not only because it was a massive complex, but because you could find anything under the sun there; drugs, gambling, prostitution, guns, theft, street 'vendors', grand larceny, you name it.
One of the largest drug rings ever known to be operating East of the Mississippi had high level dealers and traffickers operating right out of a General Motors plant in Flint, Michigan, exploiting the I-75 corridor from Florida. The security there was inadequate by design, the union made sure the security guards were union 'brothers', not 'corporate' security guards. There was no need to 'sneak' prostitutes or other illicit things through 'back doors', they walked right through the front gate.
My father, who retired from General Motors, recently went back to his former plant to see some co-workers. He was furious that security wouldn't let him in without a legitimate reason to be there, having never heard of such a thing in the entire 37 years he was employed there. They used to just let anyone walk straight in so long as you could drop the name of an employee who worked there. He actually made a scene and demanded to speak with a union representative, who came to the guard station and remembered my father but warned 'things aren't like they used to be when you worked here, they don't let people in to pay social visits anymore'.
General Motors offered my father and tens of thousands of others like him very lucrative 'buy-outs' to retire. Not because GM didn't want to pay the invariably higher wages and benefit costs of those with high seniority, but because he and tens of thousands of others like him were functionally illiterate and couldn't adapt to the technological changes that were happening around him in the plant, even though those technological and production changes were still 20+ years behind the Japanese.
When the learning curve had just begun, it wasn't so much of a problem, because not only was the pace of this adoption slower than evolution itself, GM just shuffled illiterates to positions that were still sufficiently behind the curve. As time went on, they began to have far more illiterates than positions to possibly put them in. At my father's plant alone, GM literally had hundreds of guys doing nothing and getting paid very well for it. Duplication was rampant, utilizing five workers to do what reasonably could have been done by one.
This became much of a joke to the workers, who would just take turns going to the bar or socializing or sleeping while the other one or two workers would 'cover' their job. They traded-off every so often, some wouldn't even come back to punch out at the end of their shift, so their buddies would punch them out.
At the end of every shift, there was a concerted effort to account for their 'buddies' who didn't make it back from the bar and punch them out so they wouldn't get in trouble. According to the union, if you punched your time card correctly from shift start to end, that means you were there and the company would have to provide hard evidence to prove you weren't. Not that it mattered, it was just a slap on the wrist if you were caught, the progressive discipline process fought for and won by the union enabled a worker to get caught multiple times before facing any harsh consequences.
I could go on and on....just the tip of the iceburg. Its actually somewhat of a miracle that any of the Big Three companies are still in business, General Motors particularly, considering how damaging unionism has been to the ability of these companies to compete. Nothing short of a miracle....
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