For what it is worth, I DO think that most CEOs and top execs are overpaid. But even if they worked for free it wouldn't fix the overall cost problem that's built into the union contracts and the competition from the Asian manufacturers who are not stuck with these problems. The last time I checked I think that Toyota (in the U.S.) only had about 1,000 retirees while GM had nearly 1,000,000 retirees. Toyota can service that pittance. GM can't. This might have something to do with the fact that Toyota's capitalization is about 17 times that of GM's. GM is sitting on enormous debt that it can't service and especially if its business is going down the tube.

 

No matter what, you will always blame the UAW for GM's problems even to making up a false comparison. Instead of comparing total Toyota and GM retirees, you limit the Toyota retirees to just the USA without comparing it to GM retirees in just Japan. Furthermore, you continue to give GM engineering and management a pass and only blamed the UAW for causing GM products to be too expensive. Yet you are making this claim in a forum that has a large number hybrid owners who have paid the "hybrid premium".

Hybrid-electric owners have shown by significant financial investments, thousands of dollars, that we are driven by technical, not just purchase price. The equivalent GM products even with UAW costs, are still cheaper than any of our hybrid-electics. This is why your anti-union rant has little to no merit. This is a forum filled with hybrid-electric owners who paid more than GM product prices for our superior technology vehicles.

In another forum, the GM discussion never touched on labor because assembly labor has nothing to do with the vehicle design. For example, we were discussing GM's technical problems and I made this observation:
" . . .
> This is not a "spare time" effort. All manufacturers
> of any size will purchase their competition's products
> (usually off the shelf) and reverse engineer them.
> You need to fully understand the competition before
> you can begin to market against them.

Driving in this morning, I was thinking what a study in contrast
between GM disassembly and counting Prius parts versus our studies of
working Prii. I had been mulling the stateful nature of Prius warm-up
and realized that without extensive dynamic testing, GM remains
clueless about the dynamic characteristics of Prii and the control
algorthms.

In contrast, a recent program about German car engineering showed an
electrical system workbench that was operating while being checked
with local instrumentation. We also have the UT-Battelle report where
they took a Prius apart and put the engine and transaxle on dynameters
to measure the electrical and mechanical characteristics. Members of
this group have posted CAN/OBC bus data dumps that have given insight
to how Prius systems work. The common thread is gathering engineering
data on operating systems.

GM may have a real lab somewhere where dynamic characteristics are
analyzed. But this article made GM sound as technically skilled as
their financial health. Given GM marketing of 'eye wash' hybrids,
that lab must be isolated from their product engineering department.

As for my musings about Prius startup, I have the impression . . ."

It doesn't matter whose hands build a car or their wages. Christians know
from Matthew 20:1-16, someone elses wages are none of our business. We should
no covet our neighbor's wages. What is our concern is whether or not the
product they make is worth having at any price.

GM's problems remind me of the old joke about the GM dealer contest to bring in
prospective customers:

- First prize was a brand new GM car
- Second prize was two brand new GM cars

Bob Wilson

 

Look, I'm driving a Ford Escape Hybrid; a UAW built vehicle. Let's not forget that. This is my second Escape and the vehicle I wanted to own. I didn't buy it out of any primary environmental concerns, although that is a desirable aspect of the purchasing decision.

As to Toyota's retirees, what is going on in Japan is irrelevant. The U.S. political system is not going to copy Japan's social safety net with its higher taxes. And BTW, Japan's national debt is about 165% and the U.S. about 66% or so to GDP.

I'm talking about Toyota's competitive cost advantage here in the U.S. with U.S. built vehicles. Toyota doesn't use UAW workers. That's the bottom line and it's just that simple.

If GM or Ford don't make money, they go out of business and with it the UAW worker's job.

 

Number of retirees doesn't matter. You could have a trillion retirees and not have it effect you in the slightest. How? Change the benefits plan from defined benefit to defined contribution and discontinue health coverage after retirement. Every other company in the US has gone to defined contribution (usually in the form of a 401k plan) because it's the only way to keep it manageable.

 

If GM and Ford had a printing press in their basements they could print all the money they need to fund these benefits. Unfortunately for them, those presses are held by the federal government.

What you suggest won't happen because the UAW will never agree to it.

 

Not quite, The Federal Reserve (neither federal, nor a reserve) controls the printing of money, and the Fed is owned by it's member banks, so your government has nothing to do with printing money (they are only allowed to mint coins) except that the Fed lends the government money... but anyways, it's not GM, Ford or the unions, true.

I'd like to see unions be a thing of the past, but the ONLY way you can completely rid the world of unions is to include the ordinary workers in the corporate decision making process, otherwise corporations will walk all over workers like they do wherever they setup shop in 3rd world countries and that's what they really want to do to America. They couldn't care less about the wellbeing of their employees, heck if one gets sick or dies there's thousands more where they came from.

Eventually neo-liberal capitalism will have to give way to a more humane economic system, something like a participatory economy. I suspect that won't happen until the US dollar collapses and people are forced to re-think their whole social-economic framework. GM may need to go bankrupt to change, but the same thing is looming over the whole globalized economy, it's totally unsustainable and will eventually have to evolve.

 

Somehow this has the ring of "Workers of the World Unite" to me. I think that was tried in the Soviet Union. Ironically, Walter Reuther who got the UAW to where it is today worked for several years in the Soviet Union and didn't much like what he saw. Unfortunately he died in 1970 and it has been downhill ever since. I think he would have had the good sense to have made needed changes to keep the domestics viable. He was one of the more enlightened labor leaders in his era.

This business of the collapse of the dollar has as much validity. Any country that wishes not to do business with the U.S. can certainly do so. Just stop exporting to the U.S. Heck, I say go for it. (I won't hold my breath)

 

Actually, the problem with corporations, the USSR and today's worker unions is that they all have a top-down centrally controlled framework. A participatory economy avoids those pitfalls by using a framework based on a system of participation. If a decision only affect you, then naturally you control 100% of the decision making power, but if a decision affects more than just you, your 'vote' in that decision making process would be proportional to the degree that it affects you. That sort of framework is quite natural to humans, but we've been conditioned to believe that only 'qualified' people are capable of making certain decisions, even if they have a huge impact on our lives. Communism and corporations share a lot in common, and I don't like either because they both represent forms of unjustified totalitarian rule. Things will improve, I'm sure that the human spirit can overcome all forms of tyranny because a better world is always possible and I think everyone knows it deep down... Ethics will become the dominant force of the 21st century, you can already see it happening.

 

Allow me to give my perspective to this subject. I have held many positions in my working career. I am now retired. I've worked as the lowest of the peon (picked cotton, washed dishes and scrubbed toilets) and up to managerial ranks. What I have found is that what appears to be the case with respect to workers and management is that many workers (line employees) are of the belief that management is out to put the screws to them. (some are). But there is no evidence of this at the domestic manufacturers. One can simply throw out all of the rhertoric of the "working class" and "management" and concentrate on the bottom line. The bottom line is that unless the fixed and ever increasing costs of funding the pensions and especially medical care costs are somehow reined in, the domestics are doomed. One can't put a nickle into the vending machine and expect to get a dollar's worth of candy out of it. The next contract (if the domestics survive that long) will simply have to squeeze a good deal of these costs out or they will go under. That's the long and the short of it and it's just that simple.