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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: SilentZ who wrote (541094)	1/5/2010 7:01:55 PM
From: tejek	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1575431

>Frankly, the level of incompetency must have been pretty high at GM for them to sign union contracts that made it difficult for them to make money That's not it. When they started signing them, they never anticipated having to compete with companies that don't have the same types of contracts. But over the last thirty years, aside from the Japanese/German/Korean automakers getting better and having the benefit of government-insured healthcare in their own countries, we've allowed those same companies to open plants here where they have no legacy benefit burden and in places like the South where unions were weak. The union contracts were not static and were not fixed in concrete. In the last 30 years, there are have been several re negotiations of those contracts. To my knowledge, only in the last two negotiations which took place in the last ten years, did the union agree to cutbacks, and in the last negotiation, those cutbacks were pretty significant. That type of renegotiation should have happened 20 years ago when it became clear that the Asians and to a lesser degree, the Euros were a serious threat to the American auto industry. After all, foreign competition didn't happen over nite and most [if not all] of the first foreign auto plants didn't open until the mid to late 90s. And then there was Saturn...it was suppose to be the answer to foreign competition.....a plant in a labor cheap South. How many Saturns is GM making next year? Oh that's right.....none. They couldn't even sell the damn place. And don't get me started on the poor design of GM's cars and the lack of quality. The American auto industry got some bad breaks most of which were their own doing. So do we blame the unions or mgmt? I think most of the blame rests on the shoulders of mgmt. Show me where I am wrong.