At my store the worst employees to work with are the follow the CBA types. They will not even put up a “wet floor” sign by a spill if it is not in their official duties.

Ya know folks. If you would get rid of the 20 million illegals in this country, we all would be making more money and their wouldn’t be a need for unions.
It’s called supply and demand of labor.

That’s crazy talk! Who would clean the houses and mow the lawns of our elected officials?

How many lawyers does it take to read and understand those 2215 pages?? This is totally out of hand on both sides. This just proves that the entire situation is totally out of hand and someone needs to let it die the ignominious death it is calling for.

Karenhasfreedom: you are so correct. Efficiency is NOT encouraged in todays world–it is about power. A Supervisor for every 11 workers was the “norm” that the gov’t was trying to force on their departments 15 years ago what was it in the public sector? My first supervisory position I had 25 employees in the 70′s. I was effective and efficient and in banking. “Management theory” has reduced that ratio over the years which has done NOTHING for the bottom line for any company only created the mega-corps and insolvency we see now.

CONGRATULATIONS on YOUR accomplishments even if your corp was too stupid to keep you. I hope you have taken that initiative and moved to better things.

With the tons of rules and regulations on the industry, put in place by the Gov’t, and the additional tons of rules and regulations, put in place by the unions, the industry has already been effectively “nationalized”

I can’t see how any amount of “restructuring” of the industry, without restructuring the rules and regulations of Gov’t, and Unions, would ever amount to anything.

In 1980, I was hired by GM to be an assembly engineer. I LOVED my job. I was at a plant that assembled the Cutlass Supreme back then. Today that plant makes the big SUV I drive, the GMC Yukon and Chevy Tahoe.

I worked for 3 model years improving the efficiency of my assigned trim assembly line. Through innovation, working with my tooling engineer, and frankly, busting up “settled” off line subassembly jobs, I was able to reduce my direct labor head count from 128 per shift to 95 per shift, and we only shipped 2 jobs down the line to another engineer’s section because of the need for more space when that particular job ended up putting on color trim instead of all black trim.

These “settled” off line subassembly jobs were ridiculous. Because the local union would drive hard bargains and threaten to strike locally (if that happened, the local plant manager and higher ups were usually fired), over time, more and more jobs were put off the assembly line and turned into solo subassembly jobs. The section I inherited when I was hired as an idealistic 25 year old engineer had several jobs where the settlement was barely 30 minutes an hour of work per hour. The average “online” time was about 38 seconds for a line that went by in 61 seconds.

The union played these games of claiming they were working way too hard, and they needed more people, and each section had to negotiate the head count each model year. Thus, the lines got stuffed with more and more workers, creating less and less efficiency.

Well, I took GM seriously back in 1981 when they told us we had to compete better with the Japanese plants and if we performed in our jobs well, they would no longer lay off salaried workers by seniority, instead they would lay off by performance. Since I was in a department of very senior employees who were very jaded by then, and no longer had the “fight” in them to buck these bad union settlements each year, I decided to take on the union in my section and create an efficient section and thus, save my job if there were layoffs.

So, over 2 model years, I was able to re-balance my line, break up these off line sub assembly jobs and put those parts back on the regular line, and get my average job content up to about 48 seconds per 61 seconds a car went by. 50 seconds was considered a “full job” because if a car came by with a lot of options, you had to allow for the occasional extra work for the extra options. The production planners would space those cars out between “regular” cars, so it would balance out for the workers.

For my efforts, I had to fight the union really hard in negotiations with NO backup from management. Management basically threatened me that if I didn’t have my job content grievances settled within 3 weeks, I would be fired. I was instructed to give them whatever they wanted. Remember, this was during a time with the imports were kicking GM’s ass in market share.

Well, I managed to get my union stewards to blink first. I was able to settle the jobs to about what I wanted. I saved the company about TWO MILLION dollars a year (in 1982 dollars) in direct labor costs (we had 2 shifts, I saved the company 66 jobs paying a ridiculous amount of money in wages). I got a high performance evaluation. I thought was had proven my worth to the company in the only job I ever loved in corporate america.

Well, January 2002, our plant lost line speed from 58 cars per minute to 45. We still had 2 shifts. Our department was staffed by the number of direct labor jobs in the factory per shift. So when we lost people per shift instead of a whole shift, then our department lost 4 of its 25 engineers.

Because my performance evaluation was higher than 20 of those engineers, I thought I could believe the company when they said they would layoff by performance. Instead, they laid off by seniority, right down the line. I was out. I knew it would be a long layoff and I would not be able to afford to wait around on unemployment for times to get better and I would be called back. It was a 15 month layoff, and by then I had moved on.

So, this is the cancer that has been pervasive inside GM all these years. They stifled innovation from their lower level employees like me. They rewarded complacency. They cowered to the union. No one at the local level seemed to care about the bigger picture of being globally competitive for long term employement and prospecrity.

That is when I learned my lesson that generally corporate america sucks big time and they basically lie to their employees when they dictate HR policies like “layoff by performance” and instead change the game when it came down to it and made it a “first in, first out”, leaving less qualified and indifferent employees at the job who were satisfied with the miserable status quo.

So I am very ambivalent about this bailout. I am infuriated that the unions won’t wake up and understand how dire their straits are. But why would they? They have never recognized it before. I love my Yukon and will be devastated if I can’t buy a new one when my 120,000 mile 2003 model needs replacement (runs great, great car). I am a totally free enterprise type of entrepreneur now (gave up on corporate america for the last time in 1991, it sucks). I am pissed at Congress for bailing out Wall Street and waffling here, but I don’t support this bailout either.

This is all such a mess, but unfortunately, it doesn’t sound like anything has changed in the 26 years I have been gone from this industry. And to think, if I had never been laid off from that job, I would still be doing it. Buidling cars was so much fun.

auto bailout uaw goodfellas

I’m reminded of the scene in Goodfellas where the restaurant owner becomes partners with Paulie and the wiseguys proceed to loot the place for all it’s worth—selling stolen property out the backdoor, getting loans on the house’s credit they never repay, etc.–until there’s nothing left; credit is gone and there’s not another cent they can wring out of it.

Well, the unions have looted the auto companies for every cent they can squeeze out and now there’s nothing left.

If we bail them out, we’re just subsidizing the above behavior.