DETROIT, Sept. 24 — Members of the United Automobile Workers union walked off the job today at General Motors plants across the country after union leaders and company officials failed to reach an agreement in contentious talks on a new contract.
It is the first national strike by the union against G.M. since 1970. That strike lasted for two months. The U.A.W. last struck G.M. at two plants in Flint, Mich., in 1998, in a strike that went on for seven weeks.
“This is nothing we wanted,” the union’s president, Ron Gettelfinger, said at a midday news conference. “Nobody wins in a strike.”
The stalemate apparently arose over the union’s demand for job protection for its work force at G.M., which is one-fifth its size in 1990. G.M., in return, had pushed for the creation of a trust that would assume responsibility for its $55 billion liability for health care benefits for workers, retirees and their families.
GM can shut it’s doors forever and very few would notice. I can’t remember the last decent vehicle produce by General Motors. They must adapt or go extinct and this one can’t adapt it’s a dinosaur.
Unions have killed the golden goose, not only in auto’s but steel and other industries. They haven’t been killing the goose alone though, the management has been right there yanking geese throats with them.
Back in the hayday of unions and American cars, they would strike, get an outlandish settlement with benifits to die for, locked in forever.
Now, when the domestic big 3 aren’t producing products anyone wants, they are still locked into the retirement and health care box.
According to industry research a company like GM has to tack on approx. 1700.00 to the price of every car/truck to pay it’s retirement health care obligations. I tried to find non-industry figures and could only find 1….it showed a 1500.00 tag per auto. This is just for RETIRED employees…..this has nothing to do with what they must meet by union contract for active employees.
UAW employees pay less than 1% of their wages for their health Insurence, some of the best policies in existence. They make approx. 35.00 an hour….starting wage is 27.00 an hour……they are gureenteed 40 hours a week….thats a lot of money, and comes to a whole lot more than 400.00 per car.
At some point the unions have to agree to give up some of it’s benifits and the company has to give them some form of security for doing so. They also need to wise up and produce cars that will actually sell in this country.
If I was a UAW member….I would look at the fact that it just shut down GM and only 70,000 people are on strike…….30 years ago it shut down GM and over 350,000 people were on stike……..even UAW members can do that math……if both sides don’t wise up….in 30 years the UAW will call a strike and 14 people will be on strike.
#4 The other side of this is the Chinese will soon become big players in the compact market. Their average wage benefit package is about $0.75/hr. The UAW is a dying entity.
@13 “Well at least some of the blame for the US cars being crap has to fall to the guys and gals that build them.”
How so? It’s pretty hard to mess up putting the parts together. The problem is the parts aren’t very good and overall design of the cars aren’t great. And even if the cars are good, they still aren’t what people want to buy for the most part. When they do have a winner, like the new Jeep, they don’t make enough of them.
@14 “Enjoy your foreign cars. American cars are far from crap these days,”
Nice try but I drive a Ford and will keep buying North American to keep jobs in the US and Canada. That said my Ford has 95,000 KM (I’m in Canada) and the sunroof opens but doesn’t close, the pass side airbag is always sending an error single to the computer system and they can’t figure out how to fix it, my back up senors stopped working for no reason, the radio cuts out every once in a while and I have to turn the car off and on to get it working again (you should not have to reboot a car) and one day all my lights, radio and the windshield wipers cut out for a couple hours.
Way to make themselves irrelevant. GM’s US operation is becoming less and less important for the company, plus they have about 1 hundred days of inventory in stock. I doubt the union workers can afford a strike that long, though I’m sure the union leaders can handle it with all the money they steal from the workers.
They should have at least launched their strike while the 2008 models were being built. I have a feeling this strike is the result of GM’s management paying off the union leaders.
#4 Chrysler pays an average of $75.86 per hour in wages, pension and health care benefits, while GM pays $73.26 and Ford pays an average of $70.51. By comparison, Toyota Motor Corp. pays its U.S. workers about $48 per hour, according to an estimate from the U.S. automakers.”
It would be interesting to see it broken down by category for all 4.
i.e. how much $$ each corp pays for wage, how much for pension, how much for health benefits.
I’m thinking Toyota hasn’t been in business here long enough to have even a fraction of the pension obligations that the Pig 3 do.
Oh, I’m sorry, thats “Big” 3. 🙂
#36: chances are excellent that most present UAW pension benefit plans are “defined-benefit”, meaning a check for a guaranteed minimum amount arrives in retired members’ mailboxes every month. I’m wagering that Toyota has 401(k) plans that are a whole lot cheaper and do not have a defined benefit amount set in stone. So if the stock market tanks in the future, Toyota retirees would potentially get very little.
Lets review
Bad Management, Lackluster designs, cheapest parts possible, disgruntled workers, and top it off with a “Us versus Them” mentality
Its all humorous, If the UAW were fighting for better worker safety, job training, or responsible management, I might be interested. But, the greed at the negotiating table will be the death of both parties.
I have worked for both union and non-union suppliers. The union jobs are day in day out make money and escalate problems to the union steward. In the non union shops, the start out pay was less, but once you prove you can do the job, the money starts flowing and promotions come quick.
If the big three want to live, the management, unions, and workers better start fixing problems instead of pointing fingers at each other.
I grew up on Chevrolet…Pontiac,,,Oldsmobile…Buick’s. in the 50’s and 60’s. My first car was a used ’52Ford convertible. Before I went overseas in ’65 I had purchased a new ’65 Impala Super sport Convertible. When I came home I got a ’69 GTO.
Each of those cars were memorable. The only problems I had with them were quality related attributable to worker performance. Things were not attached properly…fasteners were left undone…..
I stopped buying GM & FORD products in the 70’s. I would have preferred to buy them but the styling was bizarre…the quality was non-existent and the pricing was completely out of proportion to what was offered. I have driven Japanese…German…. English cars since then. The UAW is complicit in the destruction of the auto industry. They represent the worst in labor economics. The designers of these vehicles were no better. There was a time that a 6ft male could ride comfortably in an American car….the view was not obscured and the roof line did not require opening the sunroof to be able to sit upright.
This is unfortunate because FORD is building some great vehicles that could compete on the world market if they were not saddled with the labor legacy that offsets the quality with an unnecessary overhead on each unit.You can fire”suits” and get rid of designers but you are stuck with union labor. There is no incentive to quality performance when seniority is the sole criteria. If they still taught history in schools not the masticated drivel dispensed by the other union disaster ..the NEA ….students would learn that there was a time when workers actually contributed to building industry in this country. Many of the innovations in the assembly line came from Ford workers. That involvement came to a sudden stop with the UAW…USW…the Teamsters and a host of others that effectively stifled the productivity of American industry.
This is a lousy legacy for generations to come.