Political brinksmanship with Congress to secure taxpayer bailout funding? Or just a prudent business decision caused by forces outside of their control? If Congress fails to act on a bailout measure in the next few weeks, and/or the Bush administration doesn’t free up TARP money for a bailout, is this measure by Chrysler the straw that breaks the camel’s back?
Any bets on what the stock market will do tomorrow? Will GM and/or Ford sit in silence or play their hands the same way?
My own answer is Chrysler blinked and is betting Congress or the Administration is being forced into a decision. The countdown clock has started. The beginning of the end, or the beginning of a new economic model.
This is another reason that I say to hell with them. Do any of you work in a private industry that completely shuts down for 12 straight days? They have made a deal with the devil in their UAW contract, and need to drive a stake through the heart of that damned thing before the government gives them a penny.
The company probably has no choice with salaried employees. If it doesn’t pay them, they can sue. If it then claims it laid them off, they won’t come back. Which is probably not true of the hourly.
The problem is consumer credit – people that need car loans can’t get them. GM sold off GMAC and now GMAC is being cagey with car loans, requiring a credit score of 700 or over.
That would depend on local labor laws or employment contracts, if any. In the dot com bust, my CA employer shut down for a week at Memorial Day and a week at Independence Day. You could use vacation days if you had them. Otherwise, no pay for no work. No interruption of company paid benefits, though. The great majority of employees were salaried.
GMAC has its own set of problems. It’s trying to raise capital so it can be converted to a bank holding company, and thus eligible for TARP bailout funds.
What are you complaining about? Obviously you’ve never worked the management side.
Most of the salaried people will continue to be needed in the various department. Some will be on call as needed. Some will come in anyway to work on projects just for the hell of it.
A lot of these people know that when they go on vacation a shit load of work piles up when they are gone.
A lot of these people occasionally work long hours for no extra pay, and never get the big overtime checks the union guys do.
A lot of these people know that you just can’t be replaced tomorrow
They know one thing though. The plus side is that you just feel a little secure because you know that you aren’t being overpaid. You’ve gained what you have on your own merits and the employer agrees. You won’t be lightly severed like the mercenaries. If you were overpaid, you wouldn’t have the job for long.
Actually, automotive plants shut down for 2 weeks, twice per year (the other time is in June/July) for maintenance. MOST of the employees are out of the plants during that time, but guys like my dad (before he retired) would only take off Christmas Day and New Year’s Day; the rest of the time was spent essentially de-gunking the machines and doing all of the preventative work on them that was necessary. His reward for doing this work was that he got to take his vacation whenever he wanted.
I don’t work for Chrysler, but I do know that many plants and other facilities undergo a maintenance-fest where various machines and other equipment are worked on from top to bottom. The shutdowns are the only time that major maintenance can be performed.
You expressed my sentiments in words that I don’t think I could have written so well.
Everyone is being hit by all this. Don’t think all “white collar” people are crooks that got us into this sewer. There are plenty of white collar people who went through school to pursue a career and sweat it out everyday. Many of them are salary and work many more hours than their salary requires.
I wish we could get past the line in the sand that exists today in America. A lot of Americans have lived high on credit and enjoyed all the consumerism that plastic could provide. Plenty have seen the American dream blaze by over their heads as they toiled at good jobs, but were priced out of housing and even the basic commodities, not to mention the healthcare nightmare.
I kinda hope we’re all so screwed that we all come together and fix it all as Americans and get this country back on track.
When Chrysler turned off the tap ,I was one of the employees at a parts manufacturing who got the news today that we would be laid off until at least the 19th of january.
My thoughts are that the legacy automakers have gotten what at least a bridge loan to see them through the next 120 days , but it wont be finalized for some time. In the mean time suppliers like us get paid 45 days after shipment, so a month shut down is pretty much fiddling with the books.
I do like Toyota’s claim that they want a competitive enviroment with the legacy three, as one of the side effects of a fire sale would be.
It would be funny hearing about toyota needing to bring salaries into compliance because of over paid workers
From 1988 to 2001, I worked in the Final Assembly and Test department of Beckman-Coulter, performing final pre-delivery testing of diagnostic consoles. We did shut down between Christmas Eve and the first Monday following New Year’s Day. It was my understanding that operations on all other devices, such as spectrophotometers and gene sequencers were also shut down, as well as the R&D labs.