Doom is good. (I guess)
So this is a cheery little article. The bullet points are: GM is Doomed. Ford is Doomed. Doom is actually a good thing. The workers deserve Doom. The workers want Doom anyway. Here’s the best (worst) part:
As GM’s fate reaches its terrifying conclusion, workers will get all the attention. The moment the axe falls, whether by a slow strike or a lightning default, the spotlight will shift to “the little guy.” Needless to say, the media will depict them as victims. They’ll highlight the most desperate cases and blame their fate on management incompetence, outsourcing, the Japanese, the Chinese, foreign trade policy, currency manipulation, oil prices, George W. Bush, the anti-GM press, anyone and anything other than the workers themselves. Never mind that a huge number of these workers performed two hours work for eight hours pay. Never mind that thousands were willing to receive full pay and benefits for doing nothing whatsoever. It will always be someone else’s fault.
I won't harp on the lack of consistency in the article. I'll just say that I don't agree with a lot of what he says but it's a good read. They're not into pulling punches. There’s lots of good reviews in the rest of the site. I like what he says about the new Eclipse.
posted by Garble at 9:09 PM
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2 Comments:
One point of his in which I agree is that there are good people that work at GM. But why he's so sure that "most of them can't wait for the company to file" is a mystery. Does he regularly poll GM employees about their feelings about the company's financial future? It sounds like he's talking out of his ass mainly.
I (unfortunately) was able to witness GM inefficiency firsthand when I worked in the (now closed) old V-8 plant in Flint. I was in the crankshaft department, and the machine floor was the most laid back area of the plant (whereas the motor line was always bustling). We were fully capable of producing enough crankshafts ourselves, but we had so much down time due in large part to a phrase I heard repeatedly, "It's not my job", that the plant had to buy crankshafts from Romulus. Which was totally retarded since I think Flint and Romulus both received unmachined cranks from Saginaw. So GM would ship cranks all the way to Detroit so that they could be machined, then sent back north to Flint. How much time and money was wasted on such a debacle is beyond me. This was just one of many examples.
He’s definitely talking out of this ass. But that’s what you get when you’re reading a “from the hip, pulls no punches, not going to sugar coat it, unvarnished truth” type. This was from GM Deathwatch Part 60. He’s written 60 articles about GM’s doom. That’s a LOT of doom. So I view it more as speculative fiction than anything else. The idea that a GM bankruptcy would push ford under hadn’t occurred to me. It makes sense though based on what happened with the airlines. Continuing cycles of bankruptcy until you’re where the market would have taken you anyway.
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