Just to clarify, when I meant incompetent in the labor department, I meant that as inefficient, not necessarily making bad cars, which is a reputation earned int he 80’s and not necessarily today.
The fundamental problem is the short term view of auto makers. The execs get a huge salary and bonus by giving good numbers to the board on a yearly basis. If they have a profitable year they have to decide whether to invest in retooling for future products or to show big profits. Tooling for future products will result in a smaller bonus and salary. So guess what they have done. I believe in Japan a percentage has to be earmarked for future products. We do not and will not plan for a future until it is too late. It is a systemic flaw.
I’d be interested to see a little bit more explanation of where the union comparisons are coming from. Everything I’ve heard shows that foreign manufacturers, which are largerly non-union, use much less labor to assemble their cars.
I think the problem most people have with the bailout is that GM, Ford, and Chrysler have been unprofitable for a rather long time now. Even when the economy was humming along fine, they were shedding cash. The fundamental question is what is going to be different in 5 years that will make these companies profitable. In my mind, all that bailout will do is put off the day of reckoning for a couple of years at best. Bankruptcy is the only way that these companies will have the freedom to completely change the way they do business. Right now, they are sandbagged by dealership and union issues that prevent the necessary reorganization. If we get those two issues out of the way, I would be much less opposed to a bailout.
The foreign car builders also use subcontractors in the assembly plant, so someone like Nissan might have fewer employees, but they’ve got a comparable number of people in the plant, working on the cars.
According to an NPR story, what the governments bailout of Chrysler in the 1970s did was essentially bankruptcy, but they just didn’t call it that.
I don’t know how the numbers are factored in the original claim, if they include the subcontractors or not. As for the use of subcontractors in Japanese plants, you can do a search on these boards and find the threads where I mention working for them in the Nissan plant in Smyrna, TN.
But how are the numbers reported and recorded and who pulled the statistics? I’ve heard some of the same statistics bandied about as you have, but I have no idea what the source for the original data was or how it was compiled.
Chrysler didn’t undergo the major reorganization GM needs. GM needs to cut legacy costs, slash it’s work force, get rid of a lot of its brands, and close a bunch of factories. I don’t see the political will to force that on GM, and the only way it will happen is if there is absolutely no other choice.
Last night I had a hard time getting to sleep so I went online and started reading the plan submitted to Congress by the AIG insurance company to get that $100 billion in direct money. I must confess that it was pretty dry reading with all those charts, graphs and diagrams and all those really detailed plans for how they were going to spend each and every dollar and how it would benefit the public.
Yes, but my point was, if you believe that analyst’s view of things, wouldn’t it be better to support them now, and let them go bankrupt when the economy is better? Especially since, in the interim, there’s the chance (small, but non-zero) that they could turn themselves around? IOW, what’s the benefit of (again, if you believe the analyst) letting the economy crash/go into depression just to be ideologically pure?
I can’t figure out what the source of most of those numbers are, whether the sales are monthly YoY, or annual. Nor do I see the supposed correlation that the blogger is seeing.
Sinaijon is perfectly correct. Last month pickup trucks still outsold small cars, albeit not by much. The best selling cars in Europe and Japan, i.e. VW Golf/Rabit and Honda Fit, barely sell at all in the US by comparison and are are not much more than curiosities. If there was a profitable market for small fuel efficient/diesel cars in North America, the car makers, including the Big 3, would sell them here - they (well, maybe except Chrysler) all have them in foreign markets like Europe and Japan. There isn’t, so they won’t. That hasn’t changed.
Americans don’t want fuel-efficient vehicles. We want gas at $1.00/gallon and have trucks and SUVs. Is it the big 3’s fault for simply catering to consumer demand? Is it their fault that we allowed oil speculators to drive the price of gasoline to above 4 bucks a gallon this summer?
Is it also their fault that the economy is so bad that only 11 people can get auto loans? So much bitching was done about CEOs flying in private jets, that no attention was paid to the 100 billion (with a B) health care fund that the automakers have for retired workers.
They pay 71 bucks an hour in wages for guys with a high school education. It’s ridiculous. But this time they drove to Washington in hybrid cars. That makes it all better.