Tag: General Motors

The Losers Striking at General Motors: It’s time to replace the ungrateful workers with a robot

Here’s the grim reality, and I say this as a person who has three General Motors cars in my garage, the losers striking against the company are out of their minds socialists and it’s a real shame. There is no place in America for a labor union especially in a car manufacturer. The workers are not management, as unions like to believe. A worker is just a worker, they don’t get to share in the risk and reward as some natural right. If you are a pot smoking union worker who calls themselves “middle class” you are not equal to the management mechanisms. What the UAW is doing to General Motors going after the company after a year of decent profits is robbery and every striking employee should be fired and replaced with a worker who wants to work for the good pay and benefits that do come from General Motors. I know most of the workers on that picket line don’t read very much, and they’d be ashamed if they did to read Karl Marx, but what they are doing is straight out of that book on communism and they are presenting themselves as an impediment toward a productive marketplace. This whole business of pitting workers against the corporations that employ them is straight out of the pages of socialism and communism making every worker who participates an activist for that vile, anti-capitalist enterprise. It’s just embarrassing to have one of America’s great car companies saddled with such a limitation.

I just bought a General Motors car and believe me, I looked at everything before buying. Out of all the cars on the market it was only the ones from General Motors that even had a little appeal to me. I wanted to find something besides General Motors because of all the union disputes, and the embarrassing bankruptcy that the company went through ten years ago, but honestly out of all the cars on the market in the 50K plus range including BMW and Mercedes, they weren’t good enough for me. So yes, I buy American cars not just for the flag waving aspect of it, but because I think they are the best cars on the market. However, I felt less good about it because of these strikes that seem to always be in the news, whether last year we were talking about the Lordstown Plant in Ohio or this latest disaster that even involves the Bowling Green plant in Kentucky. Workers in the striking GM plants average roughly $1200 per week in wages so it’s not like they are starving for doing jobs that most anybody could do. Yet they don’t think that’s fair enough because their perspective is so skewed that reality is lost to them. For anybody else in the world, that would be a great wage, but not for the socialist union worker that can never get enough. For all those reasons I almost didn’t buy a new GM car. The reason my wife and I finally did was purely because of the design. General Motors put the best design on the road and the technology that went with it, and that was not a union effort, it was just good market strategy and engineering. Anybody can mechanize an assembly line to put together a car. But to design the car and compete in the marketplace takes a lot more than just showing up for work every day and punching out the time clock at the end. Working and management are not equal parts of the process and the compensation should never reflect such a thought. The GM workers are lucky to have a job that pays so well, I would say it’s too much now, let alone looking for more.

You don’t hear about Honda or Toyota striking like this. The socialist labor unions have tried to penetrate all the car companies to some extent but the foreign competition does not suffer through the same problems as General Motors seems to always have, due to the perception that there is loot for the taking in the American car company due to its rich history. The average worker doesn’t know much about how a company becomes great, or how much government bail out money supports General Motors due to the top-heavy legacy costs that are part of doing business, that are becoming more and more unnecessary. I know a lot of people who work for General Motors and have in the past, I know well the type of people who are walking that picket line. They aren’t the brightest bulbs in the box. They know their jobs. They know their neighborhoods and they know when bread is on sale at the grocer and where they can buy beer. Outside of those parameters you won’t find the next great philosopher working on the line in the Bowling Green plant. I’ve been to that facility, its mostly asleep. My take on the place is that robots should be running everything, and at a typical Toyota plant, it probably would be. In the competitive market of automotive building, every hour of productivity lost can cost up to $1.3 million per hour, and if General Motors isn’t building cars for the marketplace, well then, Toyota and Honda will build them instead. Someone will take those jobs while those idiots are out there chanting on behalf of Karl Marx.

And if I were General Motors management, I’d rather automate then pay those workers to always be a volatile part of the supply chain. There are few things worse than a striking employee, whether it’s a teacher’s union or an automotive manufacturer. When you are at a stop light and most of the cars around you are foreign, and you have to compete directly with them for cost and profitability, you have to mitigate as much unreliability out of your process and in regard to the typical General Motors employee, most of those jobs could be eliminated and replaced with a robot. And given the amount of money that they are demanding, they should be. So what if it costs General Motors $1.3 million an hour? The looters in the union see that number and they rationalize that its cheaper for General Motors to cave into their demands. But these things are not just measured in money. The opportunity cost of having such unreliable workers is far greater and General Motors to be competitive in the future is going to have to eliminate that variability. Its not the job of General Motors to give these people a job. It’s the job of a car company to make a car that someone like me will buy. How it gets put together is a variable that is up to the manufacturer. It doesn’t require some lazy line worker with the IQ of a jellyfish. The union has greatly overstated their value in the matter.

I would be prouder of General Motors if they busted their union. I would still buy their cars. I don’t want to look at my cars and think of a bunch of Karl Marx slugs that aren’t happy with $62K per year just for using a power drill to apply a few screws per car that comes before them on the assembly line. I want to see a company that outmaneuvered the competition and engineered a superior product into the marketplace. In a world where everyone else is working, the GM workers are smoking crack if they think they are going to bring the whole thing to a stop with their stupid picket line. Rather the world will move on as it should. I don’t care how General Motors builds their cars. I just want them to keep doing it, preferably without the labor union losers who think they are the critical process in the construction of an automobile. Management is not owned by the people, it’s a task for people who think, and is not something that can be shared as Karl Marx uttered. And every striking employee should be ashamed of themselves and have their jobs eliminated as a result of this strike.

Rich Hoffman
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Why GM Has Failed: It’s all about restrooms

It is amazing how little people know about basic economic matters, especially in relation to the announcement that General Motors is planning to close its Lordstown plant in Ohio and laying off 15% of its salaried workforce and some production workers with a total of 14,700 jobs lost from that northern Ohio community. Even from people who are supposed to understand these complicated matters I couldn’t find many news outlets that truly understood the problem that GM is facing so I’ll sum it up very easily. It has everything to do with bathrooms. But first, lets study a very interesting Forbes article that made a lot of attempts at pinpointing the problem only to miss in every circumstance. Here are a few of the highlights with a link to the original article presented below. The link to the MSN article is even worse. It is filled with so much socialist rantings that it would be otherwise unreadable if not for the way it reflects the average opinion on the General Motors matter.

General Motors said today it is ending production next year at five of its plants including its last remaining plant in Detroit and its Lordstown plant in Ohio. The reasons: they largely make sedans, which U.S. car buyers are increasingly rejecting in favor of SUVs; and Trump-era tariffs are creating headwinds and higher costs for the automaker.

–Higher costs, due in part to the Trump administration steel tariffs, have already cost GM $1 billion, and those costs will persist and rise as long as they are in place.

Of the plants targeted for an end of production, the Lordstown plant has the best chance to possibly stay open. GM will soon kick off negotiations with the UAW, and the union will likely lobby hard for a crossover vehicle to be located at the plant located east of Toledo on the Ohio turnpike. “General Motors’ decision today… will not go unchallenged by the UAW,” said Terry Dittes, the union’s vice president in charge of negotiations with GM.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidkiley5/2018/11/26/gm-cuts-jobs-and-plants-to-deal-with-changing-tastes-and-trump-tariffs/#654e378e6057
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/gm-layoffs-signal-its-going-to-get-worse-for-the-american-worker/ar-BBQ84Ne?ocid=spartanntp

Here is the basic problem, and I understand why Trump, Mike DeWine, Rob Portman and even the economic buffoon Sherrod Brown want to twist GM’s arm to keep the Lordstown plant open. After all, General Motors took money for a bailout and the government feels it has a right to help manage the affairs of the company. But that is more of an exasperation of the problem than a fix. General Motors is failing and continues to fail because they just don’t have good leadership and unlike the days of the Sloan Management system, do not have people in their organization that can step up and take over at the top CEO job. Everything has become politicized at General Motors and they have grown to feel they are entitled to exist rather than needing to compete in a harsh automotive maker’s market. General Motors main problem is they have weak management largely because their labor unions feel they have shared control of the company which means that the good managers that are out there want nothing to do with General Motors leaving behind a bunch of slack-jawed losers to run the company, because only a fool would want to work with a bunch of lazy, slow, and contemptuous union leaders who think they share the burden of running a company. Because of that General Motors top management have turned to politics for help and that has only made them worse. To hear their current CEO think that by directing the company’s resources toward electric cars and autonomous vehicles is the wave of the future, they have not done their value stream maps correctly. Americans don’t want vehicles that they can’t drive. They love the independence of driving themselves and they want bigger cars that use more gas. Tesla has carved out a notch for themselves, but not to the extent that a company the size of General Motors should follow. The fact that they don’t know how to think for themselves says everything.

The real problem is that the labor union has destroyed the American automaker market. The pensions are too expensive for a declining company. If auto sales from America were still dominating the global market, it wouldn’t be a problem. But when you lose market share, which all American auto companies have, there simply is not a way to pay for an expensive work force that can’t keep the company at the top of their game. The American worker has taken their jobs for granted, especially in relation to auto jobs and they are losing to much more competitive foreign markets. When you travel around the world and the only cars you see are Toyotas, Nissans, Hondas and the like, there is no way that General Motors can afford to compete with top-heavy labor costs and pension commitments that are projected to cripple them for the next 50 years. The socialist fantasy of the big labor unions running the auto companies with shared input has long been over. The government contributions have only prolonged the bleeding, the problem started when America no longer built the kind of cars the world wanted by people who really weren’t passionate about their work.

If you go right now to a typical Japanese factory, whether they are making cars, boats, copy machines, whatever you can think of and a worker on the line would want to use the restroom, they’d indicate they needed relief, a supervisor or co-worker would fill their spot while the worker would lightly jog to the restroom and back again as fast as they could safely. Urgency and passion are part of the Japanese culture in everything they do including simple transactions at fast food restaurants. When they ask to use the restroom, they get to it and return to their work promptly and without excuse as they fully invest themselves into their endeavor. Go to the typical General Motors Cruz manufacturing line and a worker needs to use the restroom, typically a person grossly overweight and dressed like they just rolled out of a trash can indicates they need to relieve themselves. Once their relief shows up to cover their spot, they don’t return for another 20 minutes. If you walk behind the fat slob you’ll find they take an extra five minutes walking to the bathroom, they spend at least 5 to 10 minutes going to the rest room playing on their phone and reading graffiti on the stall wall, then they spend at least 5 minutes walking back talking to anybody who they can manage to engage in a conversation stalling as long as possible before they get back to the imprisonment of their work detail. They don’t love their work and because of the mentality of their labor union they are always seeking to do the least amount of it because they think the vile management system is always trying to steal something from them, so they in turn are always looking to steal time from the company. Usually its obvious in their restroom habits, but if you track the employee throughout their work day you can see it everywhere in everything they do.

Management in these American companies don’t have any form of control of their operations so only the bad ones stick around. The false premise that all socialists have is that everyone is equal, the worker and the manager and that everyone through consensus determines the direction of the group is completely wrong. Nothing could be said worse—such a condition never exists anywhere. Leadership is not a collective endeavor, it’s a very lonely one. Getting buy-in to leadership decisions is a collective enterprise, but the role of management is not. The workers are not in a position to determine strategic relationships between the manufacturing process and the tactical need to implement them. It takes people good at that kind of thing and when unions take over shop management only the fools stick around. And when fools run a manufacturing facility through communist dreams of unity, people take 20 minutes to use the restroom and they build bad cars that the world doesn’t want that are too expensive. It has nothing to do with tariff wars or even changing gas prices, it’s all about bad management which GM even with lots of bail outs and help by the tax payer have shown they are lacking. The future of automobiles are not automated cars and electric-powered ones at that, it’s in independence on the open road of America’s vast expanses of land, and a foreign market that would like to pretend that they live in America. The failure of GM management to see that for themselves says everything that needs to be said about why General Motors is struggling and jobs are being lost. And no politician or any amount of money in the world can fix their lack of vision and leadership.

And if you have any doubts about what I’ve said, just watch the videos on this article.  The proof is quite obvious, especially the last one.

Rich Hoffman

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