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Strategies & Market Trends : Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: SouthFloridaGuy who wrote (21961)	1/21/2005 9:32:00 PM
From: mishedlo	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 116555

From Oji on the FOOL on Visteon Visteon close to default? Several friends of mine work at a major Visteon plant, and things are not good there. One friend, for example, with more than eleven years seniority has now been "laid-off" for almost a year, and this is the third lay-off of six months or more in the past four years. When guys with 11+ years are out for a year, you know business is not good. Also, he said a union vote is coming up soon-- within a couple months, I think-- which will decide whether or not to strike, and also whether or not to allow him (and others) to receive union strike benefits, despite being laid off. He believes the former to be a strong possibility, but does not count on the latter happening. BTW, management has consistently told employees at this site that this plant is one of the few profitable Visteon operations, but even they are barely keeping above the waterline. Second bit of news. My wife works for a Toyota supplier. One of the Japanese admin. tells me they have put into place 2-yr and 5-yr plans to begin supplying Ford as well. They will, he tells me, be taking market share away from American-owned suppliers. This is a rather small operation, however, so it's not likely to hurt Ford's current suppliers much, by itself, but it makes me wonder how many other Japanese-run suppliers are out there eating into American market share. The ironic thing is how they are doing it while operating on American soil, with American workers. The difference is that the Japanese-run suppliers are rather new operations--less than ten years old-- so unions have not been an issue, and wages are quite low on the floor. However, I also suspect management is an issue. The Japanese managers and engineers at my wife's workplace tend to work 60-70 hour weeks, take business trips without extra pay, and even spend much of their so-called "free-time" thinking about their business. It's not so much that they are "robots" or anything, but that these are middle-age and older Japanese men, socialized to treat the company like a family committment. And, of course, it doesn't hurt that many of them did not bring families to the U.S. with them, and do not have much of a social life outside of each other either. Oji