Once again, TV's are pretty bad sources of information
I learned long ago anything recommended as good investment by public media or brokers usually is only good for brokerages and commission-maker's pockets.
If you have the answer of how we as a country can lose that many jobs to china/india and not be economically hurt then I will be amazed
I think you are not seeing the big picture. There is a labor shortage in this country. It is only going to get worse. My boss has called twice since April to see if I wanted to come back to work in Alaska. They have had a call into the Union Hall for 6 weeks and no qualified takers. This is not a $14 per hour job. It is a $120k+ per year job. People think we are over populated. We don't have enough young people to take the jobs. Or they think they should start at the top wage. I could not afford a home when I went to work in 1961. I rented for 10 years before I had enough saved for a down payment. I see so many young people driving new cars. Spending all they make on their cars. Living on mom & pop. We are in a mess and I don't see the young generation willing to work and get us out of trouble. Brightness is correct. We have to be smarter than the countries competing against us. We used to be number ONE. I think we lost the Racer's edge.
>There is a labor shortage in this country. It is only going to get worse.
I believe I can describe the attitude of many people about working at the low rate of pay most of the "new" jobs offer and accepting that there's no insurance, no security, no full time work--only 35 hours per week to be sure they don't get classed as full time at the employer's expense of having to give extra benefits once they're full time. They see the company making large profits, the executives with multimillion dollar overt pay scales and huge hidden benefits and the same company is trying to employ the worker bees for $4.75 an hour or whatever is the rate in that state for that work type.
The same companies who pushed to employ younger and cheaper employees in the 80s and 90s now don't like that those same worker bees don't have the work ethics nor the educational background because they didn't value becoming skilled while thy were being paid 'nice' wages and living at home. In real life those low wage rates don't work for living on your own. I'm looking at the fast food type jobs here who actively solicit high school students and in some cases violate labor laws while employing them.
Exactly! Often times I find the generic media channels are being used as dotes to push whatever the powers-be would like to dump on the gullible public (both short and long). Perhaps the journalist schools specialize in producing dotes or people who are good at pretending to be dotes.
Might have been time to buy GM a couple weeks ago. But I believe the time will still come for cheap GM to ride up. It worked with Chrysler when government bailed them out in 80s? I am not sure of year anymore.
Exactly! It's hard to find employees with good work ethics nowadays. Good work ethics is where our high standard living has to come from . . . either that or looting others of the fruits of their labor. . . unfortunately, most people of the world are not willing to be looted for long.
It's hard to be an advocate of the value of worker quality if everyone believes that management decisions alone make a company propser or fail. IMHO, as a cultural we do tend to put a bit too much emphasis on the heroics of individual managers. Yes, the heroes who turn a company around do exist once in a while, not to mention even more entreprenuers who create successful companies out of nothing more than good ideas . . . they do indeed deserve to be richly rewarded. However, for most existing mature companies, what the management can do is often limited. Until that is get through to the public at large, the pay discrepancy is bound to continue. If the shareholders, ie. the legal owners of the company, believe that their company's fortune is entirely dependen on whether Ghosn or Wagoner or whoever else being the CEO, how far do you think they will go to hire "the right man"?
There never was any confusion on my part to begin with. I said, Fit and Yaris are now "being made" in China, just like cheap Chevies and Cheap Fords are "being made" in China and Mexico. I never claimed they are "all made in China" . . . yet anyway. However, I'm sure you see the writings on the wall for those cheap small cars as I do.
Sorry, but that's a shareholder version of Disneyland, not reality. Unless you own a fair number of shares, no one on the Board or executive team is going to particularly care about your opinion.
This isn't fantasy at all. I've never held particularly high positions in any company, but I have had a large impact on long range planning by publicly voicing concerns about quality and business strategy. I've been fired from a small company for telling the VP of a division that the company could save $650 K per year if he cut back non-productive travel by 75 % (only after he berated a sales force for falling 800 K below a sales target). I've never been fired from a large company for politely questioning business strategies and calling poor products as they are. The large companies already have a load of dead weight and they are afraid of frivolous employee lawsuits. The ego-driven high rollers at any large company must eat the rhetoric AND ACT if the rhetoric is laced with fact (as any person bringing a copy of Consumer Reports to the CEO of GM would have). Your statements are simply "bum justifications". The workers of GM are in a fantasyland of high wages. Nobody wants to rock the boat because the ride is so smooth. Guess what. The boat is getting rocked now. The workers have NO PROBLEM publicly complaining about wages and health benefits but couldn't care less about quality. Act like a peasant and you will be treated as such.
Automaking in America will continue to be just as large, if not larger, as time goes by.
HOWEVER, Big 2 automaking will continue to shrink as US-built 'imports' grow. This could be reversed with quality models that appeal to US consumers, but even then; it would take many years of desirable, quality vehicles to overcome the the Big 2's past mistakes.
(Much like it took Hyundai many years to overcome it's bad reputation.)
Auto manufacturing is definitely shifting out of the heavily union dominated areas of the country and moving into the southeast. But I remember reading somewhere that the overall number of cars manufactured in America is still growing, not shrinking.
I've been fired from a small company for telling the VP of a division that the company could save $650 K per year if he cut back non-productive travel by 75 % (only after he berated a sales force for falling 800 K below a sales target).
That's exactly what I'm talking about. Maybe you're a renegade, but most people are going to prioritize the livelihoods of themselves and their families over helping a company that doesn't want their help, anyway.
Well obviously $120K wasn't enough money, and in Alaska that is really only a middle class income. How many hours did you have to work to make $120K ????? Why aren't ya going back ????? According to brightness, and his "fruits of the labor theory" the employer wasn't paying enough money. :P
So what you are saying gagrice, you believe working class folks should make poverty for atleast 10 years before they get a livable wage. :confuse: However it's ok for someone like Rick Wagoner, to graduate college and within his first year clear a half-million dollar salary ? I guess I don't understand that logic :confuse: However many do.
Rocky, you do know that the bars near the plants fill up at lunch? And they are not drinking pop.
I am not saying they all drink but the bars are hopping at lunch time. And most are not getting drunk. Just a couple of quick beers.
I will say that back in the days when suppliers could take out the GM engineers for lunch there was some drinking. I could never do it because it would just make me sleepy for the rest of the day but some did.
I am not saying they all drink but the bars are hopping at lunch time. And most are not getting drunk. Just a couple of quick beers.
In much of the world, this would not raise an eyebrow, and goes hand-in-hand with the business culture. If anyone is out of step with the world's drinking habits, it is us.
How come there was no discussion here all week on what Ghosn would do as the head of GM with the UAW?
First thing he would (after studying for a month or so) is kill a bunch more plants. Next he would cut benefits to everyone. Not all beni's but enough to be equal with his Nissan plants. Any that struck would be out of a job. More plants would close til the UAW was broken.
Is the above possible?
Or would the UAW go on strike until the Nissan plants were unionized? Just think. They would force GM to bankrupt unless he unionized.
With 20% of GM stock it sure would make Ghosn think about the next step.
and in Alaska that is really only a middle class income
You obviously know very little about Alaska and their demographics. The problem is not the money. It is qualified people. We are running out of skilled labor in America. They are not going to hire some kid that does not have 10 years experience and send him out to a remote village to repair complex telephone & Internet equipment. As far as hours you work 3 weeks straight 12 hours per day. Then you are off 3 weeks and can live anywhere you want. All the skilled people on the Union books are working. I just retired after 37 years in the Union, why would I go back? I am 63 and ready to enjoy my time off.
Just as your dad has said about Delphi. They will offer this buyout and the smart will take it and find a better job. Delphi will probably have a hard time filling some of the more skilled positions.
and manufacturing do not go together in this "new world economy". Companies need flexability and unions just don't offer that. Much of the U.S. manufacturing is already gone to China. Most Americans just don't realize it yet. Pretty sad in my book. I feel the UAW will disappear in the next 10 years or just be a paper tiger...
and manufacturing do not go together in this "new world economy". Companies need flexability and unions just don't offer that. Much of the U.S. manufacturing is already gone to China. Most Americans just don't realize it yet. Pretty sad in my book. I feel the UAW will disappear in the next 10 years or just be a paper tiger...
According to brightness, and his "fruits of the labor theory" the employer wasn't paying enough money
huh? Please do not put words in my mouth. $120k in 2006 US dollars is a lot of money for any worker. In fact, if a household makes $120k income, it would be very close to the $145k cut-off line for top-5% income tax filers according to IRS. The average tax filer (ie. the entire household if married and filing jointly) only makes $35k or so, and the really poor do not file tax.
So what you are saying gagrice, you believe working class folks should make poverty for atleast 10 years before they get a livable wage.
How do you define a livable wage? A wage that is sufficient to live with parents and save up for house as the overwhelming majority of the rest of the world do (including Japan and Canada, where even you consider having healthy economies)? A wage that is sufficient to rent a single-bedroom apartment on one's own without having to have roommates? A wage that is sufficient to rent or make mortgage payment on a single-family house? A wage that is sufficient to build oneself a palace? Obviously, someone just starting out has not put forth nearly as much as it takes to build a single-family house and the legal right to exclude others from the same acre of land that it sits on . . . if you definition of livable wage of being able to own his/her own single-family house, someone has to be ripped off, namely the home builders or whoever else' income that is pillaged to pay for the home builders and developers. On top of that, there simply isn't enough land to give each and every new worker an acre within easy commute distance . . . who do you propose to kick off the land to make room for the newbies?
However it's ok for someone like Rick Wagoner, to graduate college and within his first year clear a half-million dollar salary ?
What planet is this Rick Wagoner guy on? Obviously not planet earth of the 20th century. College graduates did not make half million dollar salary fresh out of college in the 20th century. With wage inflation, half a million a year salary may be possible by 2050 (in 1950, $10k a year was executive salary comparable to $100-150k salary today; in another 50 years, $35k a year in today's dollars fresh out of college may just become half a mil). Then again, by then it will take $70-100 an hour to hire a baby sitter, or $150-250k a year, before benefits mandated by law by then. A burger will cost $10. A gallon of gas $30-50. In other words, everything gets a zero tagged on.
Raising nominal wage for everyone is by definition a fool's game. Wasting ink and paper printing zero's while wiping out the personal savings in the process. The real value of a wage is how much of other people's labor you can in turn command based on the recognized value of your own labor. That's how the world works; money in abstract has no value; its value only comes from what it can buy. In other words, money is a relativistic weighing system for all participants in the economy to have a say on the ratio of value for each member's skill and labor relative to each other. That's how the market economy works, allocating and reallocating resources and labor all the time according to individual consumer's demand.
We are not talking about small companies here. GM is a large company (if there ever is one). Please read what John said about large companies and get back to topic.
How does that even remotely relate to the success or failure of GM, if the numbers are less than a drop in a bucket compared to the union labor liabilities . . . in any case, if union defenders believe GM's failure is all management's failure, in other words a good CEO and management team would have made all the trouble go away . . . well then a good CEO deserves to be paid somewhere close to $10 billion dollars a year (the loss last year), not a measely million . . . in case the arithmatics is fuzzy for some (one can never know nowadays), there are 10,000 $1 million in $10 billion. How much is 10,000? If each one is represented by a mile of distance, 10,000 miles is roughly half-way around the entire globe, reaching the west coast of Australia from North America!
It's no less relatable than your endless anti-union rants and perpetual failure to give accountability to cookie cutter MBA clones. And maybe you misread the forum title, this isn't all about GM...
It's not about raw numbers, it's about principle. Ethics. Factors that apparently do not exist the higher you rise in managerial ranks. You whine about work ethic, how about the ethics of those who call the shots?
"well then a good CEO deserves to be paid somewhere close to $10 billion dollars a year"
Amusing...where's the logic in that? I certainly don't disagree that a fantastic exec of any kind deserves a nice salary...but at the same time, a mediocre exec (as most are) only deserves a mediocre salary, and a shoddy example really deserves a kick to the head.
Well I'll tell you one guy who "graduated engineering school" who started out at Delphi Coopersville plant at $676,000 salary. This happened around 99'. He was making a bunch more than the plant manager (little big ED) whom was upset. Granted this guy had more degrees than the sun, but quit after a year because he was so bored and tired of sitting in a office playing solitare and not doing something constructive. If I remember right he went to Herman Miller Office Furniture. The UAW Delphi guys like my father said here we hire this very smart guy and he has to sit in a office with nothing to do because our upper management doesn't use his skills and education. He did go out occassionally and talk with the guys and dad. Dad said he was very like able and didn't like seeing him go.
When he became president of GM Northern Operations in I think 1992 or 93' he was pulling down $1 million a year and as a kid I wanted to be like Rick
I searched for links on his starting salary and couldn't come up with one. He also has a long list of education, which gave rise and distinguished him from his peers. Rick was a 6 figure guy, not some lowsy 5 figure guy. :P
Amusing...where's the logic in that? I certainly don't disagree that a fantastic exec of any kind deserves a nice salary...but at the same time, a mediocre exec (as most are) only deserves a mediocre salary, and a shoddy example really deserves a kick to the head.
Agree good CEO's deserve a good salary. Make tens of millions a year is flat out greed in my book while you ask union workers to cut their pay and benefits.
Make tens of millions a year is flat out greed in my book while you ask union workers to cut their pay and benefits.
Valid point, however, I would like to see some statistics that indicate that sum of GM (Ford or any auto company) executives earn a higher proportion of pay (relative to the labor force) than in any other company or industry. If anything, I would guess that GM executives earn far less than the average due to the presence of the UAW. For example, the insurance industry, telecom industry, cable industry and pharmaceutical industry have some obscenely high executive salaries. Additionally, the $1 million plus salaries are extended to perhaps as many as several hundred people in the company. The workers in these industries are paid much lower than UAW employees.
Do these studies exist? Perhaps a ratio of executive pay / worker pay for each company and then among the industries (auto, chemical, insurance, pharm etc). If GM is extraordinary, then perhaps you comments are valid. I remember reading in the early 90s that "Ben and Jerry's" ice cream had a policy of not having a ratio in pay greater than 10 (ie lowest paid = 10 $, highest = $100). I learned many years ago that trying to create a communistic company (in terms of pay equality) was a pointless idea and beyond my capability. Classism is a human trait and is reflected in pay.
Well I'll tell you one guy who "graduated engineering school" who started out at Delphi Coopersville plant at $676,000 salary.
Rocky, this is complete bull. Please give me the name. Yew he may have graduated from engineering school but will have many years in the field work. he was not some 22 year old. No way.
In '92 Rick may have been pulling down $1,000,000 but he had been working about 20 years or so already.
Slick Rick got his MBA in 77...from there received what can easily be a cradle to grave career, the kind of thing supposed "free market" supporters would say shouldn't exist...
I am sure his journey into the land of 7 figures began when he became CFO in 92.
The validity of my argument is not just limited to GM. Look at the raw numbers indeed, Ford and Chrysler included, executive compensation is not where the money drain is.
Let's indeed talk about principles and ethics. Which brand of ethics dictates a hard "fair" number on the pay ratio? 10, 100, or 1000? Any brand that does is intrinsicly flawed, as there is no way to account for the enormous difference different individuals can make under all circumstances. Making pay ratio itself into an ethics issue inevitably becomes a game of "it's unethical to make that much because I don't make that much." ;-) Let's talk about ethics indeed. Considering that you live in an area where average housing exceeds $1mil . . . it's probably common for your neighbors to hire landscapers. How is it then one day if the landscapers decide to get together and physically occupy your lawns and demand higher pay and permanent contract of job security from you just because you are a bunch of fat cats, and threaten to torch your lawns if the ransom is not paid? What is the ethics in that kind of behavior? That's the essence of how union came to be.
The logic for billion dollar pay derives naturally from the assumption that the superhero CEO can single handedly turn a company around. If both GM and Ford lose billions a year, and a superhero CEO named Ghosn, nah, he can't even cut the mustard, let's call the superhero his real name: Superman! If Superman can indeed turn either company around and save shareholders billions a year, but can only work for one of the two companies at a time, how much do you think shareholders ought to bid up for? How much are you willing to give in exchange for $1 billion? or $10 billion? Hint: it's not even arithmatics. For the record, personally I do not subscribe to this kind of superhero theory of management: there are circumstances under which no humanly possible management solution alone can solve all problems. The pro-union stand of blaming everything on the management obviously has an implicit assumption that if only someone else (namely, Superman) were in charge, the company would not have any of the financial woes . . . and that Superman exists in real life (despite the easily observable fact that all three domestic automakers afflicted with UAW are hurting badly) . . . so far all attempts at prescribing what Superman would do, from union-supporters, have been resouding duds.
Not sure why you have such a deep-rooted hatred for MBA's. I have no idea what cookie-cutter MBA clones are, considering that different B-schools offer very different programs, and they often do not agree with each other on the optimum management approach . . . that's why they are called "schools," dah! ;-) Institutions of competing thoughts.
MBA is certainly no cradle-to-grave career. Very few end up getting tenure as professors, the closest thing to cradle-to-grave career after MBA and DBA. Life outside the schools and in the free market is even tougher. I personally know people not only having their MBA's but doctorials in business administration making less than UAW workers.
People pulling over half $600k in salary have no more to do with what degree they have than dropping out of college guaranteeing a career path to billionair just because Bill Gates dropped out of college. $600k a year demand very special skills and experience. . . no degree in the world can guarantee that kind pay in 2006 US dollars.
The union case seem to be rooted on inability to differentiate between what is statistic norm and what are long shots. I have a money making idea: opening a casino for union supporters only :-)
I'll have to ask "Dad" his name. I don't remember. Dad is working dayshift, and I'm on nights this month. The $676,000 is not BULL. I swear on both of my kids life it was over $600,000 and will ask dad in a couple of days. "62" remind me of this in about 2-3 days again to see if dad can recall his name. He worked at Delphi not quite a year before he quit. The reason why they hired this very intellegent guy was he was very educated, and were going to "groom" him to take over a high position at Delphi which I do recall. He was in his late 20's. He had more than just a engineering degree, but also some buisness degree's etc. I believe he went to Kettering for his engineering degree.
(1) Degrees are not his only, or even primary credential, for such a high pay.
(2) You may as well use Bill Gates' experience to prove that dropping out of college makes one Billionare ;-) After all, there are 100,000 $600k in $60 billion. How much is 100,000? Wrapping around the earth 5 times if counted in miles.
Anecdotal urban legends and statisc outlyers do not make for good arguments.
and I don't mean of the Ford variety. We've got a bad case of topic drift and personal commentitis here, and we need to pay attention to the topic rather than to other members.
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As I said before, it is not about the money drain. The effect on the bottom line caused by bloated undefendable executive compensation is not the issue...it's the principle.
Funny how yet again spin something into an anti-union rant through, amusing. Instead of answering to corporate ethics, you spin it against workers. I must give you credit for that skill. And then comparing landscapers to 1930s autoworkers....certainly employers do nothing wrong to cause employees to organize.
Has GM or big 2.5 management made any errors that are contributing to their demise, or is it ALL UAW?
Of course you don't know, you can't hold management accountable for anything. These suits are all the same, that's why they are all bravely leading their companies to hell while they become very well off indeed. Don't look to these guys for winning ideas.
Wagoner DOES have a cradle to grave career....this had nothing to do with MBAs in general, the focus was Wagoner. Tell those people you know to just become random entrepreneurs, it's the best way to improve oneself. I am thinking of opening up a consulting firm that consults corporations about which type of consultants to hire.
I'm not sure what "the principle" is. Please elaborate. Executive pays are indeed heavily tied to performance . . . like much more than half of their income in good years were performance-based pays. We may argue about what base-line should be used, and indeed I believe the base-line should not be stock performance alone but stock performance vs. a benchmark such as S&P500. However, an empty adjuctive like "bloated" is quite meaningless without specifics.
Of course management at carmakers make mistakes from time to time, just like they make good decisions or even the best decisions under the circumstances from time to time, just like mamagement at other companies and other industries. There's nothing special about that. The UAW, and union in general, however is a common theme in numerous failures of erstwhile monopolies/oligopolies. Unless you can prove that companies do better without management at all or without any MBA's at all, I'm not sure what your argument really is. Please do elaborate what your mean by "ethics" and "the principle."
There was nothing special about 1930's autoworkers. They were paid far above average income of the nation. The companies had to cut back during depression, so the unions resorted to squattering and illegal seizure of property. If there were indeed mistreatment by management, the proper remedy was through the courts. Which branch of ethics gives you the right to seize someone else' property by force even if you are dissed by them?
Okay, then, tell me are you saying management should be wearing jeans instead suits? or that there should be no management at all? (because "these suits are all the same"). I just don't understand what your thesis is behind the dehumaninzing attacks against people you don't even know. BTW, do you also consider "Ghosn" a suit and "all the same"?
More power to your consulting company and best luck with finding willinging paying clients. You have my blessings so long as you do not organize a union of consultants to force others to buy your service at prices that you deem "fair." How can "fairness" even exist without a relatively free market place with many independent participants; free market place is the tool for price discovery.
Wagoner DOES have a cradle to grave career....this had nothing to do with MBAs in general, the focus was Wagoner.
As it should be. Let's remember, this is the very same guy who engineered the FIAT fiasco, which supposedly was largely crafted by Wagoner over a weekend. This would have been one of those times when it would have been better if someone had taken the weekend off...
Like I said, I'm not a believer in management heroics. Management is important, but a successful company takes more than good managers alone. If the cultural belief is such that management takes all blame for failures, it's only fair that they take all credit for success . . . which would amount to billions for a company the size of GM, not measely millions ;-)
It's funny how you spin the $1 dollar thing and fail to mention the $3 million dollar signing bonus. Miller will be fired as CEO within a few years, because he's a idiot !
The quality of Delphi's new temp to hire workforce is nothing less than atrocious and they are running scrap, low grade parts off those assembly lines as we speak.
Signing bonus from years ago is not current salary . . . how hard is it to understand that anyway? $3mil may sound like a lot to you, but it's really not that much compared to the billions of company assets entrusted to him to manage. That's the thing about paper money: you can not eat it, nor wear it, nor build shelter out of it. All you can do with it is passing along to someone else to get some work done for you. Now if you put someone in charge of a billion dollar company with thousands of employees, do you really want him to use his time to drive his own car, cook his own dinner, press his own shirt, do his own laundry, mow his own lawn, clean his own house, baby-sit his own kid, etc., etc.. If you don't, there are two ways of going about saving his time: (1) give the guy a personal staff, like the Europeans and Japanese often do, and all the socialist countries always do; or (2) give the guy some extra money so all the chore can be taken care of. Presumably his time is worth far more managing your company than the value of doing his own chores.
Solution #2 seems to be far more efficient because:
(1) if the guy does not perform, you can take the salary away from him much quicker than yanking the staff;
(2) you do not have to deal with yet another cadre of camp followers on your payroll.
It's really important to understand money as tokens for commanding other people's labor . . . that's how the economy works. If you prefer not to use money as tokens, then command itself becomes the tool for organizing society . . . in other words, serfdom, and those in command would have much less chance of seeing their own power being chipped away incrementally. Money, being fungible and can be divided into small portions, is really what enables gradual transition of power from the incompetent to the more competent, on an almost continuous basis.
Doesn't surprise me at all. As much as I like my Toyota vehicle, I have always been quite skeptical of all the Toyota management-worshipping going on around here in the weeks past. There is a geopolical dimension to the US-Japan relationship . . . the Yen has been kept low as a way to barter consumer goods from Japan in exchange for US military protection.
What is amazing is that much of what is in the synopsis is similar to the experiences an ex GMer that went over to Nissan as an Engineer(15 years ago) is having here in the states.
We must remember that every nation is different. We have different beliefs and ethics. I am sure an american in China would report something just as different as Japan. Heck, we have big differences between regions in our country.
Comments
Rocky
2014 Malibu 2LT, 2015 Cruze 2LT,
I learned long ago anything recommended as good investment by public media or brokers usually is only good for brokerages and commission-maker's pockets.
2014 Malibu 2LT, 2015 Cruze 2LT,
I think you are not seeing the big picture. There is a labor shortage in this country. It is only going to get worse. My boss has called twice since April to see if I wanted to come back to work in Alaska. They have had a call into the Union Hall for 6 weeks and no qualified takers. This is not a $14 per hour job. It is a $120k+ per year job. People think we are over populated. We don't have enough young people to take the jobs. Or they think they should start at the top wage. I could not afford a home when I went to work in 1961. I rented for 10 years before I had enough saved for a down payment. I see so many young people driving new cars. Spending all they make on their cars. Living on mom & pop. We are in a mess and I don't see the young generation willing to work and get us out of trouble. Brightness is correct. We have to be smarter than the countries competing against us. We used to be number ONE. I think we lost the Racer's edge.
I believe I can describe the attitude of many people about working at the low rate of pay most of the "new" jobs offer and accepting that there's no insurance, no security, no full time work--only 35 hours per week to be sure they don't get classed as full time at the employer's expense of having to give extra benefits once they're full time. They see the company making large profits, the executives with multimillion dollar overt pay scales and huge hidden benefits and the same company is trying to employ the worker bees for $4.75 an hour or whatever is the rate in that state for that work type.
The same companies who pushed to employ younger and cheaper employees in the 80s and 90s now don't like that those same worker bees don't have the work ethics nor the educational background because they didn't value becoming skilled while thy were being paid 'nice' wages and living at home. In real life those low wage rates don't work for living on your own. I'm looking at the fast food type jobs here who actively solicit high school students and in some cases violate labor laws while employing them.
2014 Malibu 2LT, 2015 Cruze 2LT,
2014 Malibu 2LT, 2015 Cruze 2LT,
This isn't fantasy at all. I've never held particularly high positions in any company, but I have had a large impact on long range planning by publicly voicing concerns about quality and business strategy. I've been fired from a small company for telling the VP of a division that the company could save $650 K per year if he cut back non-productive travel by 75 % (only after he berated a sales force for falling 800 K below a sales target). I've never been fired from a large company for politely questioning business strategies and calling poor products as they are. The large companies already have a load of dead weight and they are afraid of frivolous employee lawsuits. The ego-driven high rollers at any large company must eat the rhetoric AND ACT if the rhetoric is laced with fact (as any person bringing a copy of Consumer Reports to the CEO of GM would have). Your statements are simply "bum justifications". The workers of GM are in a fantasyland of high wages. Nobody wants to rock the boat because the ride is so smooth. Guess what. The boat is getting rocked now. The workers have NO PROBLEM publicly complaining about wages and health benefits but couldn't care less about quality. Act like a peasant and you will be treated as such.
HOWEVER, Big 2 automaking will continue to shrink as US-built 'imports' grow. This could be reversed with quality models that appeal to US consumers, but even then; it would take many years of desirable, quality vehicles to overcome the the Big 2's past mistakes.
(Much like it took Hyundai many years to overcome it's bad reputation.)
Auto manufacturing is definitely shifting out of the heavily union dominated areas of the country and moving into the southeast. But I remember reading somewhere that the overall number of cars manufactured in America is still growing, not shrinking.
:shades:
That's exactly what I'm talking about. Maybe you're a renegade, but most people are going to prioritize the livelihoods of themselves and their families over helping a company that doesn't want their help, anyway.
According to brightness, and his "fruits of the labor theory" the employer wasn't paying enough money. :P
So what you are saying gagrice, you believe working class folks should make poverty for atleast 10 years before they get a livable wage. :confuse: However it's ok for someone like Rick Wagoner, to graduate college and within his first year clear a half-million dollar salary ? I guess I don't understand that logic :confuse: However many do.
Rocky
I am not saying they all drink but the bars are hopping at lunch time. And most are not getting drunk. Just a couple of quick beers.
I will say that back in the days when suppliers could take out the GM engineers for lunch there was some drinking. I could never do it because it would just make me sleepy for the rest of the day but some did.
In much of the world, this would not raise an eyebrow, and goes hand-in-hand with the business culture. If anyone is out of step with the world's drinking habits, it is us.
If they can't find anyone willing to do the job, then they aren't offering enough money. That's how wages are set in open markets.
As old as he is I would think his starting salary at GM would have been about $15k - $20k.
Today someone with Rick's college credentials would start at about $60-$70k or so.
First thing he would (after studying for a month or so) is kill a bunch more plants. Next he would cut benefits to everyone. Not all beni's but enough to be equal with his Nissan plants. Any that struck would be out of a job. More plants would close til the UAW was broken.
Is the above possible?
Or would the UAW go on strike until the Nissan plants were unionized? Just think. They would force GM to bankrupt unless he unionized.
With 20% of GM stock it sure would make Ghosn think about the next step.
You obviously know very little about Alaska and their demographics. The problem is not the money. It is qualified people. We are running out of skilled labor in America. They are not going to hire some kid that does not have 10 years experience and send him out to a remote village to repair complex telephone & Internet equipment. As far as hours you work 3 weeks straight 12 hours per day. Then you are off 3 weeks and can live anywhere you want. All the skilled people on the Union books are working. I just retired after 37 years in the Union, why would I go back? I am 63 and ready to enjoy my time off.
Just as your dad has said about Delphi. They will offer this buyout and the smart will take it and find a better job. Delphi will probably have a hard time filling some of the more skilled positions.
huh? Please do not put words in my mouth. $120k in 2006 US dollars is a lot of money for any worker. In fact, if a household makes $120k income, it would be very close to the $145k cut-off line for top-5% income tax filers according to IRS. The average tax filer (ie. the entire household if married and filing jointly) only makes $35k or so, and the really poor do not file tax.
So what you are saying gagrice, you believe working class folks should make poverty for atleast 10 years before they get a livable wage.
How do you define a livable wage? A wage that is sufficient to live with parents and save up for house as the overwhelming majority of the rest of the world do (including Japan and Canada, where even you consider having healthy economies)? A wage that is sufficient to rent a single-bedroom apartment on one's own without having to have roommates? A wage that is sufficient to rent or make mortgage payment on a single-family house? A wage that is sufficient to build oneself a palace? Obviously, someone just starting out has not put forth nearly as much as it takes to build a single-family house and the legal right to exclude others from the same acre of land that it sits on . . . if you definition of livable wage of being able to own his/her own single-family house, someone has to be ripped off, namely the home builders or whoever else' income that is pillaged to pay for the home builders and developers. On top of that, there simply isn't enough land to give each and every new worker an acre within easy commute distance . . . who do you propose to kick off the land to make room for the newbies?
However it's ok for someone like Rick Wagoner, to graduate college and within his first year clear a half-million dollar salary ?
What planet is this Rick Wagoner guy on? Obviously not planet earth of the 20th century. College graduates did not make half million dollar salary fresh out of college in the 20th century. With wage inflation, half a million a year salary may be possible by 2050 (in 1950, $10k a year was executive salary comparable to $100-150k salary today; in another 50 years, $35k a year in today's dollars fresh out of college may just become half a mil). Then again, by then it will take $70-100 an hour to hire a baby sitter, or $150-250k a year, before benefits mandated by law by then. A burger will cost $10. A gallon of gas $30-50. In other words, everything gets a zero tagged on.
Raising nominal wage for everyone is by definition a fool's game. Wasting ink and paper printing zero's while wiping out the personal savings in the process. The real value of a wage is how much of other people's labor you can in turn command based on the recognized value of your own labor. That's how the world works; money in abstract has no value; its value only comes from what it can buy. In other words, money is a relativistic weighing system for all participants in the economy to have a say on the ratio of value for each member's skill and labor relative to each other. That's how the market economy works, allocating and reallocating resources and labor all the time according to individual consumer's demand.
It's not about raw numbers, it's about principle. Ethics. Factors that apparently do not exist the higher you rise in managerial ranks. You whine about work ethic, how about the ethics of those who call the shots?
"well then a good CEO deserves to be paid somewhere close to $10 billion dollars a year"
Amusing...where's the logic in that? I certainly don't disagree that a fantastic exec of any kind deserves a nice salary...but at the same time, a mediocre exec (as most are) only deserves a mediocre salary, and a shoddy example really deserves a kick to the head.
Sleep, dude.
So yes Rick has it good here's a link to how good.
http://www.generalwatch.com/editorials/editorial.cfm?EdID=41
When he became president of GM Northern Operations in I think 1992 or 93' he was pulling down $1 million a year and as a kid I wanted to be like Rick
I searched for links on his starting salary and couldn't come up with one. He also has a long list of education, which gave rise and distinguished him from his peers. Rick was a 6 figure guy, not some lowsy 5 figure guy. :P
Rocky
Agree good CEO's deserve a good salary. Make tens of millions a year is flat out greed in my book while you ask union workers to cut their pay and benefits.
Rocky
Valid point, however, I would like to see some statistics that indicate that sum of GM (Ford or any auto company) executives earn a higher proportion of pay (relative to the labor force) than in any other company or industry. If anything, I would guess that GM executives earn far less than the average due to the presence of the UAW. For example, the insurance industry, telecom industry, cable industry and pharmaceutical industry have some obscenely high executive salaries. Additionally, the $1 million plus salaries are extended to perhaps as many as several hundred people in the company. The workers in these industries are paid much lower than UAW employees.
Do these studies exist? Perhaps a ratio of executive pay / worker pay for each company and then among the industries (auto, chemical, insurance, pharm etc). If GM is extraordinary, then perhaps you comments are valid. I remember reading in the early 90s that "Ben and Jerry's" ice cream had a policy of not having a ratio in pay greater than 10 (ie lowest paid = 10 $, highest = $100). I learned many years ago that trying to create a communistic company (in terms of pay equality) was a pointless idea and beyond my capability. Classism is a human trait and is reflected in pay.
Rocky, this is complete bull. Please give me the name. Yew he may have graduated from engineering school but will have many years in the field work. he was not some 22 year old. No way.
In '92 Rick may have been pulling down $1,000,000 but he had been working about 20 years or so already.
I am sure his journey into the land of 7 figures began when he became CFO in 92.
Let's indeed talk about principles and ethics. Which brand of ethics dictates a hard "fair" number on the pay ratio? 10, 100, or 1000? Any brand that does is intrinsicly flawed, as there is no way to account for the enormous difference different individuals can make under all circumstances. Making pay ratio itself into an ethics issue inevitably becomes a game of "it's unethical to make that much because I don't make that much." ;-) Let's talk about ethics indeed. Considering that you live in an area where average housing exceeds $1mil . . . it's probably common for your neighbors to hire landscapers. How is it then one day if the landscapers decide to get together and physically occupy your lawns and demand higher pay and permanent contract of job security from you just because you are a bunch of fat cats, and threaten to torch your lawns if the ransom is not paid? What is the ethics in that kind of behavior? That's the essence of how union came to be.
The logic for billion dollar pay derives naturally from the assumption that the superhero CEO can single handedly turn a company around. If both GM and Ford lose billions a year, and a superhero CEO named Ghosn, nah, he can't even cut the mustard, let's call the superhero his real name: Superman! If Superman can indeed turn either company around and save shareholders billions a year, but can only work for one of the two companies at a time, how much do you think shareholders ought to bid up for? How much are you willing to give in exchange for $1 billion? or $10 billion? Hint: it's not even arithmatics. For the record, personally I do not subscribe to this kind of superhero theory of management: there are circumstances under which no humanly possible management solution alone can solve all problems. The pro-union stand of blaming everything on the management obviously has an implicit assumption that if only someone else (namely, Superman) were in charge, the company would not have any of the financial woes . . . and that Superman exists in real life (despite the easily observable fact that all three domestic automakers afflicted with UAW are hurting badly) . . . so far all attempts at prescribing what Superman would do, from union-supporters, have been resouding duds.
MBA is certainly no cradle-to-grave career. Very few end up getting tenure as professors, the closest thing to cradle-to-grave career after MBA and DBA. Life outside the schools and in the free market is even tougher. I personally know people not only having their MBA's but doctorials in business administration making less than UAW workers.
The union case seem to be rooted on inability to differentiate between what is statistic norm and what are long shots. I have a money making idea: opening a casino for union supporters only :-)
Rocky
(1) Degrees are not his only, or even primary credential, for such a high pay.
(2) You may as well use Bill Gates' experience to prove that dropping out of college makes one Billionare ;-) After all, there are 100,000 $600k in $60 billion. How much is 100,000? Wrapping around the earth 5 times if counted in miles.
Anecdotal urban legends and statisc outlyers do not make for good arguments.
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Funny how yet again spin something into an anti-union rant through, amusing. Instead of answering to corporate ethics, you spin it against workers. I must give you credit for that skill. And then comparing landscapers to 1930s autoworkers....certainly employers do nothing wrong to cause employees to organize.
Has GM or big 2.5 management made any errors that are contributing to their demise, or is it ALL UAW?
Wagoner DOES have a cradle to grave career....this had nothing to do with MBAs in general, the focus was Wagoner. Tell those people you know to just become random entrepreneurs, it's the best way to improve oneself. I am thinking of opening up a consulting firm that consults corporations about which type of consultants to hire.
Of course management at carmakers make mistakes from time to time, just like they make good decisions or even the best decisions under the circumstances from time to time, just like mamagement at other companies and other industries. There's nothing special about that. The UAW, and union in general, however is a common theme in numerous failures of erstwhile monopolies/oligopolies. Unless you can prove that companies do better without management at all or without any MBA's at all, I'm not sure what your argument really is. Please do elaborate what your mean by "ethics" and "the principle."
There was nothing special about 1930's autoworkers. They were paid far above average income of the nation. The companies had to cut back during depression, so the unions resorted to squattering and illegal seizure of property. If there were indeed mistreatment by management, the proper remedy was through the courts. Which branch of ethics gives you the right to seize someone else' property by force even if you are dissed by them?
More power to your consulting company and best luck with finding willinging paying clients. You have my blessings so long as you do not organize a union of consultants to force others to buy your service at prices that you deem "fair." How can "fairness" even exist without a relatively free market place with many independent participants; free market place is the tool for price discovery.
As it should be. Let's remember, this is the very same guy who engineered the FIAT fiasco, which supposedly was largely crafted by Wagoner over a weekend. This would have been one of those times when it would have been better if someone had taken the weekend off...
Like I said, I'm not a believer in management heroics. Management is important, but a successful company takes more than good managers alone. If the cultural belief is such that management takes all blame for failures, it's only fair that they take all credit for success . . . which would amount to billions for a company the size of GM, not measely millions ;-)
The quality of Delphi's new temp to hire workforce is nothing less than atrocious and they are running scrap, low grade parts off those assembly lines as we speak.
Rocky
Solution #2 seems to be far more efficient because:
(1) if the guy does not perform, you can take the salary away from him much quicker than yanking the staff;
(2) you do not have to deal with yet another cadre of camp followers on your payroll.
It's really important to understand money as tokens for commanding other people's labor . . . that's how the economy works. If you prefer not to use money as tokens, then command itself becomes the tool for organizing society . . . in other words, serfdom, and those in command would have much less chance of seeing their own power being chipped away incrementally. Money, being fungible and can be divided into small portions, is really what enables gradual transition of power from the incompetent to the more competent, on an almost continuous basis.
From the Japan Times:
http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/fb20060709a1.html
We must remember that every nation is different. We have different beliefs and ethics. I am sure an american in China would report something just as different as Japan. Heck, we have big differences between regions in our country.