Ford and GM say factories in US face axe

Archive - Caveat Emptor!

Moderator: Super Moderators

User avatar
budeone
Pirate
Posts: 380
Joined: 07-06-2007 11:13 PM

Ford and GM say factories in US face axe

Post by budeone » 08-29-2007 09:48 PM

Ford and General Motors have threatened to leave Detroit and take their car manufacturing operations overseas if unions do not agree to a massive pay cut for hourly paid workers.
The threat to quit the city they call Motown because of its rich automotive heritage would be a crippling blow to Detroit, which is suffering amid a prolonged economic downturn and has been hit by the sub-prime mortgage crisis.

Ford and GM are in the thick of negotiations with the United Auto Workers union, the most powerful labour group in the industry. The car makers maintain they must dramatically reduce manufacturing costs if they are to survive in today's global economy.

Their biggest burden is the current labour cost per vehicle - an estimated $71 (around £35) per man hour. Workers earn about $27 an hour with the remainder made up of overheads such as pensions and healthcare costs for the thousands of retirees on their books.
Ford and GM have made it clear that they expect to reduce the hourly cost from $71 to about $50 - a cut of about 30 per cent. The companies are keen not to cut workers' hourly pay, but they insist that other overheads must be reduced.

If a deal cannot be reached, Ford and GM negotiators have said the companies will have no choice but to move their North American operations to countries in Latin America and Asia where manufacturing costs are cheaper.

The current credit crisis is not helping the ailing US car manufacturers to reverse their fortunes. Many senior figures in the industry are calling for action from the Federal Reserve to spur markets and the economy. Bob Nardelli, the new Chrysler CEO, has been most vocal in calling for an interest rate cut to help boost consumer activity.

Alan Mulally, the Ford chief executive, said last week that economic conditions were proving to be a 'big headwind' working against the company's turnaround plan. He stopped short of calling for an interest rate cut but stressed the importance of 'focusing on economic growth'.

A GM spokesman said: 'From a GM perspective, the focus of the talks is on closing the competitive gaps and building a viable long-term future for the company and our people.'

Sources close to senior GM executives confirmed that the prospect of shifting operations away from North America was very real. 'We have seen it in every other industry,' one said. 'There are no sacred cows today. Globalisation means just that, it's a worldwide playing field.'

Dave Cole, chairman of the Centre for Automotive Research, a leading car industry think tank in Detroit, said: 'This threat is very real and the UAW is aware of it. Both GM and Ford have made it clear to the union that you do whatever you have to do to stay in business.'

The car makers are also discussing ways in which they can work together with the UAW to offload billions of dollars of pension and healthcare costs they have amassed. It is understood the talks focus on creating a 'Voluntary Employee Beneficiary Association', which would be part-funded by the companies to take care of retiree health care costs. The talks must reach a conclusion before their current contract with the UAW expires on 14 September.

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/business ... 91,00.html
"BUSH" The Worst President in History...

http://img124.imageshack.us/img124/512/ ... vg4ce3.jpg

Shirleypal
Pirate
Posts: 45448
Joined: 03-06-2003 03:00 AM

Post by Shirleypal » 08-29-2007 09:52 PM

Ford and GM wouldn't be in this fix if they started to make a better more fuel efficient car 20 some years ago when Honda and Toyota started to take over the Market, their heads were and still are in the sand. The SUV's saved thier butts all these years but no more.

ibme
Pirate
Posts: 649
Joined: 11-26-2006 11:42 AM

Post by ibme » 08-29-2007 10:02 PM

If a deal cannot be reached, Ford and GM negotiators have said the companies will have no choice but to move their North American operations to countries in Latin America and Asia where manufacturing costs are cheaper.
No choice. How sad for them. All that are left are going to leave soon. Look out below!

ibme
Pirate
Posts: 649
Joined: 11-26-2006 11:42 AM

Post by ibme » 08-29-2007 10:13 PM

Globalisation means just that, it's a worldwide playing field.'
Sorry, had to come back to this. There have always been countries with slave labor that the US couldn't compete with. That's why there were tariffs and trade negotiations. We are being sold.

User avatar
budeone
Pirate
Posts: 380
Joined: 07-06-2007 11:13 PM

Post by budeone » 08-30-2007 06:18 AM

I work for Ford and have for the last 25 years. Yes, they really let the ball go right by them and now they have big problems.

I have my opinions of the Union and I don't want to offend anybody that may be a Union backer.

I can tell you as much as I DO NOT want these jobs to leave Bush has already seen to it that all our other jobs have left and there just be no other option at this point.
"BUSH" The Worst President in History...

http://img124.imageshack.us/img124/512/ ... vg4ce3.jpg

User avatar
Corvid
Anchors Aweigh
Posts: 5678
Joined: 12-31-2002 03:00 AM

Post by Corvid » 08-30-2007 11:42 AM

There has been a very long history of corporatists and fascists in America.

Here is Henry Ford in 1938 accepting a medal from German diplomats. This medal was Hitler's thanks for Henry Ford's monetary assistance to the nazi party in the formative years.

We should have no delusions about loyalty or responsibility.

User avatar
Corvid
Anchors Aweigh
Posts: 5678
Joined: 12-31-2002 03:00 AM

Post by Corvid » 08-30-2007 11:43 AM

.

User avatar
joequinn
Magister Ludi
Posts: 8282
Joined: 04-25-2000 02:00 AM

Post by joequinn » 08-30-2007 11:53 AM

What we need now is a resurrection of "the evil empire" to put the fear of the Lord into the f'ing capitalist pigs! As long as the Reds were under our beds, these scum would not do a damn thing to antagonize the workers!
"Fuggedah about it, Jake --- it's Chinatown!"

User avatar
Psychicwolf
Pirate
Posts: 5999
Joined: 12-31-2006 12:47 AM

Post by Psychicwolf » 08-30-2007 12:00 PM

I posted about a remark my father made to me when I was young about the two classes of people this country will soon see. Courtesy of the Council on Foreign Relations:

WAGES FALLING, PROTECTIONISM RISING

Over the last several years, a striking new feature of the U.S. economy has emerged: real income growth has been extremely skewed, with relatively few high earners doing well while incomes for most workers have stagnated or, in many cases, fallen. Just what mix of forces is behind this trend is not yet clear, but regardless, the numbers are stark. Less than four percent of workers were in educational groups that enjoyed increases in mean real money earnings from 2000 to 2005; mean real money earnings rose for workers with doctorates and professional graduate degrees and fell for all others. In contrast to in earlier decades, today it is not just those at the bottom of the skill ladder who are hurting. Even college graduates and workers with nonprofessional master's degrees saw their mean real money earnings decline. By some measures, inequality in the United States is greater today than at any time since the 1920s.

http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20070701f ... ation.html
Dance to heal the earth. Not just when you're dancing, but always. Live the dance, whenever you move, in all you do, dance to heal the earth.

User avatar
Corvid
Anchors Aweigh
Posts: 5678
Joined: 12-31-2002 03:00 AM

Post by Corvid » 08-30-2007 12:00 PM

"...... these scum would not do a damn thing to antagonize the workers!"

Except for the pervasive beatings and murders performed with gusto by "private security companies" (hired goons) and (in Colorado) by the US Military.

Just gotta break them strikes.

cherry
Pirate
Posts: 5704
Joined: 05-28-2004 05:15 PM

Post by cherry » 08-30-2007 12:05 PM

Except for the pervasive beatings and murders
performed with gusto by "private security companies"

OnStar :(

User avatar
Corvid
Anchors Aweigh
Posts: 5678
Joined: 12-31-2002 03:00 AM

Post by Corvid » 08-30-2007 01:05 PM

Ford and GM Scrutinized for Alleged Nazi Collaboration

Nazi, Ford
German diplomats award Henry Ford, center, with their nation's highest decoration for foreigners, the Grand Cross of the German Eagle, in July 1938. (AP Photo)
By Michael Dobbs
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, November 30, 1998; Page A01

Three years after Swiss banks became the target of a worldwide furor over their business dealings with Nazi Germany, major American car companies find themselves embroiled in a similar debate.

Like the Swiss banks, the American car companies have vigorously denied that they assisted the Nazi war machine or that they significantly profited from the use of forced labor at their German subsidiaries during World War II. But historians and lawyers researching class-action suits on behalf of former prisoners of war are busy amassing evidence of collaboration by the automakers with the Nazi regime.

The issues at stake for the American automobile corporations go far beyond the relatively modest sums involved in settling any lawsuit. During the war, the car companies established a reputation for themselves as "the arsenal of democracy" by transforming their production lines to make airplanes, tanks and trucks for the armies that defeated Adolf Hitler. They deny that their huge business interests in Nazi Germany led them, wittingly or unwittingly, to also become "the arsenal of fascism."

The Ford Motor Co. has mobilized dozens of historians, lawyers and researchers to fight a civil case brought by lawyers in Washington and New York who specialize in extracting large cash settlements from banks and insurance companies accused of defrauding Holocaust victims. Also, a book scheduled for publication next year will accuse General Motors Corp. of playing a key role in Hitler's invasions of Poland and the Soviet Union.

"General Motors was far more important to the Nazi war machine than Switzerland," said Bradford Snell, who has spent two decades researching a history of the world's largest automaker. "Switzerland was just a repository of looted funds. GM was an integral part of the German war effort. The Nazis could have invaded Poland and Russia without Switzerland. They could not have done so without GM."

Both General Motors and Ford insist that they bear little or no responsibility for the operations of their German subsidiaries, which controlled 70 percent of the German car market at the outbreak of war in 1939 and rapidly retooled themselves to become suppliers of war materiel to the German army.

But documents discovered in German and American archives show a much more complicated picture. In certain instances, American managers of both GM and Ford went along with the conversion of their German plants to military production at a time when U.S. government documents show they were still resisting calls by the Roosevelt administration to step up military production in their plants at home.

After three years of national soul-searching, Switzerland's largest banks agreed last August to make a $1.25 billion settlement to Holocaust survivors, a step they had initially resisted. Far from dying down, however, the controversy over business dealings with the Nazis has given new impetus to long-standing investigations into issues such as looted art, unpaid insurance benefits and the use of forced labor at German factories.

Although some of the allegations against GM and Ford surfaced during 1974 congressional hearings into monopolistic practices in the automobile industry, American corporations have largely succeeded in playing down their connections to Nazi Germany. As with Switzerland, however, their very success in projecting a wholesome, patriotic image of themselves is now being turned against them by their critics.

"When you think of Ford, you think of baseball and apple pie," said Miriam Kleinman, a researcher with the Washington law firm of Cohen, Millstein and Hausfeld, who spent weeks examining records at the National Archives in an attempt to build a slave labor case against the Dearborn-based company. "You don't think of Hitler having a portrait of Henry Ford on his office wall in Munich."

Both Ford and General Motors declined requests for access to their wartime archives. Ford spokesman John Spellich defended the company's decision to maintain business ties with Nazi Germany on the grounds that the U.S. government continued to have diplomatic relations with Berlin up until the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. GM spokesman John F. Mueller said that General Motors lost day-to-day control over its German plants in September 1939 and "did not assist the Nazis in any way during World War II."

For GIs, an Unpleasant Surprise

When American GIs invaded Europe in June 1944, they did so in jeeps, trucks and tanks manufactured by the Big Three motor companies in one of the largest crash militarization programs ever undertaken. It came as an unpleasant surprise to discover that the enemy was also driving trucks manufactured by Ford and Opel -- a 100 percent GM-owned subsidiary -- and flying Opel-built warplanes. (Chrysler's role in the German rearmament effort was much less significant.)

When the U.S. Army liberated the Ford plants in Cologne and Berlin, they found destitute foreign workers confined behind barbed wire and company documents extolling the "genius of the Fuehrer," according to reports filed by soldiers at the scene. A U.S. Army report by investigator Henry Schneider dated Sept. 5, 1945, accused the German branch of Ford of serving as "an arsenal of Nazism, at least for military vehicles" with the "consent" of the parent company in Dearborn.

......more @ http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/na ... cars30.htm


It's all just...........bidness. (And a glimpse of our future.)

User avatar
Corvid
Anchors Aweigh
Posts: 5678
Joined: 12-31-2002 03:00 AM

Post by Corvid » 08-30-2007 01:36 PM

For those who did not read further in the link:

Documents show that the parent companies followed a conscious strategy of continuing to do business with the Nazi regime, rather than divest themselves of their German assets. Less than three weeks after the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, GM Chairman Alfred P. Sloan defended this strategy as sound business practice, given the fact that the company's German operations were "highly profitable."


In this light... the worship of profit... the extermination camps, the millions of deaths of soldiers and the perversion of the Rule of Law is of no consequence.

The "profit" matters...... nothing else (just ask prescott bush).

Our current "administration" is of the same mindset. Anyone who thinks that this crop of assholes are representing America and apple pie are seriously delusional (at best) or (at worst) supporters of fascist aims.

Pour yourself a stiff drink and do some historical research. Then think about it and choose your affiliation carefully...... as if your life depended on it.

User avatar
Corvid
Anchors Aweigh
Posts: 5678
Joined: 12-31-2002 03:00 AM

Post by Corvid » 08-30-2007 01:38 PM

Might as well start here:

showthread.php?s=&threadid=30062

User avatar
spaceprophet
Pirate
Posts: 4052
Joined: 11-20-2002 03:00 AM

Post by spaceprophet » 08-30-2007 03:05 PM

budeone wrote: Ford and General Motors have threatened to leave Detroit and take their car manufacturing operations overseas if unions do not agree to a massive pay cut for hourly paid workers.

They already are moving their operations overseas, who are they kiddin anyway.

Pretty soon, and we'll see it in our lifetime, all manufacturing will be done outside of the country. Most of the service industry will be done outside of the country. Except for waiting tables, bartending, barbers and beauticians, and hotel maids. Those jobs are just being filled by importing labor.

No, Americans will be getting a real wake up call pretty soon. It will be a two class system around here I can assure you. And the whip is going to really start to crack if you slack off at all. Even if you are working virtually for free.

The 1%ers and the Republicans will just tell you to go to college and get an executive job. Fine, but how many executive jobs are there out there for 300 million Americans? Not near enough for every American.

It's been estimated that the average cost for a 4 year college tuition in America in 5 years could exceed half a million dollars. That's half a million dollars folks! Do you think by waiting tables you'll be able to afford to send your child to college at that cost. Dream on.

And health care. Pray that you don't get sick or get into an accident if you don't have health insurance. And you won't have health insurance. Only the ultra-wealthy will be able to afford it. If something bad happens to you it's goodbye house and goodbye everything else you own or ever will own because you'll be in debt for the rest of your life paying that hospital off.

Don't think about declaring bankruptcy either. Bush and the neocons saw to that. Only mega corporations can declare bankruptcy not you. Mandatory payments and wage garnishment for life, that's for you.

No, get use to it. Live with it. It's here. The good paying jobs are toast. And corporate America is going to suck you dry for whatever else you have left.

Just try and save your money. Don't get sick and don't get in an accident. And don't send your kids to college. Maybe you might make it. Unless you can come up with half a million dollars to send you child to a good school somehow. Not gonna happen.

If you do run into bad luck, they'll just blame it on that you ran out of favor with God and deserved it anyway. So you're still f*cked.

Katarina was just a prophecy.
It takes a big man to cry, but it takes a bigger man to laugh at that man. - Jack Handey

Post Reply

Return to “Politics and Government Pre-2007”