A Mustang a minute.....

[Donutblue]

IMO there are several Company and Union problems which have contributed to the tumbling empire:

CEO and Mangement - greed, mis-management and no integrity. To vote themselves these out of site bonus checks, stock options and sign on options is mis-mangement in every language. Your sucking the Company, stockholders and Union workers dry and setting a poor example to the workers. To let 30,000 employee's go and still be in operation clearly states a mis-managment issue.

Unions: While the objective is to ensure a fair wage and benefit package to the employee during their employement and retirement years, we look up to the CEO and management of the company and decide we are entitled to a piece of the pie the same as them - which is proper. However when employee's slack off / goof off or leave with a BS injury and believe they are entitled to a pension the rest of their life someone pays -- either the company pays the legal fees the pension or even both. Fellow employee's need to keep this in check for their own benefit.

Health:- skyrocketing health insurance premiums and increased employee longevity has increased company obligations and obviously extended pension payouts. Great to be healthy, but the mangement teams of these corporations need to plan this in their long range plans.

Just to justify my remarks I have been a Union employee for over 30 years and a past Union president. Yes, several issues can account for mis-management and business failure. But the responsibility always falls on the lead dog and his pack to lead us in the right direction and you start by setting a good healthy example.

[ANDY M]

Sam, Honda is to Columbus what Ford is to Dearborn.
Honda makes cars, motorcycles, engines and components in non-union plants in a state that is strongly pro-union.
The workers in the Marysville assembly plant have rejected the UAW repeatedly since the plant was built in the early '80s. They are fiercly loyal.
I have a freind who is an engineer, left Ford, moved here and at 65 still works for Honda, (and still out runs his younger co-workers). He will retire when he spontainiously combusts and they have to sweep his ashes out from under his desk. OK with Honda.
The Asian car makers learned in the '70s that quality must be engineered into the build, not inspected as was the Big 3 model. One reason why labor costs were high.
They also took the sugestions from the factory floor, listened to the people who were actually building the cars, and became more effiecent and built better cars. The Honda Accord and Civic are the quality standards of the industry.

[69LM1]

Anybody remember the Dr. Deming (http://www.deming.org/) Philosiphy? We kicked his ideas out of America. This is the model that most Asian companies have adopted, and kicked our butts with. See below:

<<<<<<<<<<snip>&g t;>>>>>>>>>>>> >>
http://www.lii.net/deming.html

Who is Dr. W. Edwards Deming?

Dr. W. Edwards Deming is known as the father of the Japanese post-war industrial revival and was regarded by many as the leading quality guru in the United States. He passed on in 1993.

Trained as a statistician, his expertise was used during World War II to assist the United States in its effort to improve the quality of war materials.

He was invited to Japan at the end of World War II by Japanese industrial leaders and engineers. They asked Dr. Deming how long it would take to shift the perception of the world from the existing paradigm that Japan produced cheap, shoddy imitations to one of producing innovative quality products.

Dr. Deming told the group that if they would follow his directions, they could achieve the desired outcome in five years. Few of the leaders believed him. But they were ashamed to say so and would be embarrassed if they failed to follow his suggestions.
As Dr. Deming told it, "They surprised me and did it in four years."
<<<<<<<<<<<<&l t;<<<<<<<<<<snip> >>>>>>>>>>>>&g t;>

[nuch_ss396]

George !

A past union president with an attitude like that - WOW!
That's refreshing to see. Yes, the unions have allowed
worker corruption to get out of hand in some cases and it
is time to change all of that. Not here and not now though.

Regarding Dr. Deming, it was great to see someone here post
anything about his beliefs and his mark on the world. It is
true that our business leaders in the USA threw him out like
a crackpot. Guess he got the past laugh - huh? In the manufacturing
applications, we used to hear his name all the time back when
he was still alive and preaching his sermon. Today, you
almost never hear his name mentioned. That's mostly because
the people that tried to descredit him, due to their inability
to see the future, now want he and his teaching to slip into
oblivion.

One key area that has hurt US companies so much was the
rediculous adoption of Return Of Investment ( ROI ) strategies.
Companies would want to see a ROI within 3 to 5 years for
capital equipment purchases. That's almost impossible!
The Japanese look for ROI in 7 to 10 years. Look at where
they are today, then look at where the big three are and
tell me what makes more sense. Now, it's not as simple as
ROI strategies, but it is another symptom of the illness.

A short, but applicable story. About 15 years ago, while
working as a Mfg. Engineer for a US manufacturing firm, I
made a pitch to upper management for funds to be used to
purchase some equipment to increase productivity. After
many reports, justifications, time studies, bla-bla-bla,
I was shot down. I challenged the President of that company
( my boss ) about his decision and he told me that since the
company was downsizing, laying off employees, changing their
product lines ( sound familiar yet ? ), etc., he needed to
conserve funds. He further added that if he took those same
funds that I wanted and put them in a Money Market Fund, he
could realize a better return ( profit ). I promptly, and
calmly informed him that we manufactured products in our company,
not Money Market Funds. Meeting was over, and so were my
advancement possibilities. BTW, later on, after a management
re-structure, I did get the funds and we exceeded my initial ROI projections.
The sad epilog to that story was that the company did
eventually go out of business due to countless bad decisions.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot! The President of that company
did leave with a multi-million dollar golden parachute.
Before the company closed its doors, they let go 3/4 of
the work force, ruined careers, ruined families. I hope
there is a nice warm place for him in hell when his times
comes.

Off the soapbox now

Steve

[Mr. Duece]

[ QUOTE ]
I do not believe for one minute it is the unions fault for the trouble Ford is in. When Henry Ford started this company his belief was pay the worker enough money so he can afford to buy our cars and it worked Ford sold a ton of model Ts.
The problem is there is a saying be careful who you compete with because you will have to become like them. First the car manufacturers sent all thier parts to Japan then Mexico, China, Taiwan to be made only to take that that savings and give it to upper management while they sat back and lived a good life instead of finding new innovative ideas to better the Ford line. We made the other countrys rich so they could come back and out perform us.
It is also the governments fault for letting this happen this is America and shouldnt have to compete with all the slave labor around the world. The only reason we have to is because of the greed of corporate America worrying about the bottom line for themselves.
I work in the same place in a union in coporate America for the last 30 years. When I started there the part time people working there were paid 10.00 and up an hour but in return they wanted clean cut college students who came in and had some pride in there work. Today 30 years later they start the people off at 8.50 an hour and do not care who they hire the turn over rate is about 70% last I heard at about 500.00 a person to train. Remember this is a company that promotes within do I need to tell you the quality of management we have know. I once respected them now I just have to put up with them. Remember most things start at the top and work down a bad employees are only as good as the management lets them be. I could be way off base here but thats how I see it.

[/ QUOTE ]


Well said, John

[70 copo]

How true. While not a M. Moore fan, I did recently catch his old film "The Big One" he made in the 1990's in support of the book "Downsize This!" For each target Moore researched the incredible $$ each company made (Billions) and then simply to enrich the shareholders closed up shop and moved the plants over seas.

The part of the film about the Nike CEO and the tennis shoes and the people of Flint was a prime example of exactly what is wrong at the top of many US corporations today.

The Nike CEO was 100% convinced that Americans did not and could not even make tennis shoes.

[69LM1]

[ QUOTE ]
How true. While not a M. Moore fan, I did recently catch his old film "The Big One" he made in the 1990's in support of the book "Downsize This!" For each target Moore researched the incredible $$ each company made (Billions) and then simply to enrich the shareholders closed up shop and moved the plants over seas.
The part of the film about the Nike CEO and the tennis shoes and the people of Flint was a prime example of exactly what is wrong at the top of many US corporations today.
The Nike CEO was 100% convinced that Americans did not and could not even make tennis shoes.

[/ QUOTE ]

Phil, if we keep on the road we are on, as a country this will be true. Right now most of the doctors and engineers we are turning out are foreign. Even though my kids have three times the homework that I did, they, at the ages of 7 and 9 know way less in Science than I did at that age. This is at a private school (I went to a public school).

I don't know the answers, but it has taken decades to drag America down as far as we have come, I fear it will take decades to make up for the lost time, if we even can.

[Chris396]

You can't have a whole country that only produces service jobs. You have to have a strong manufacturing base. It seems like we are producing a generation of massage therapists instead of engineers.

[Seattle Sam]

Bingo, Chris! We have to produce competitively-priced, quality products to remain a wealthy nation! I think it's a crime what we have done to our public schools, nowhere near the education today that I received forty years ago. A lack of discipline, student's "rights", and feel-good psychology that doesn't allow teachers to tell students they are wrong because it's bad for their self-esteem. No wonder so many professionals are coming from other countries!

John P (and others), I'm not blaming the unions for the state of the Big Three (although my post could be read that way).

It took management and union leadership working together to create the situation we have today.

Without assigning blame to anyone, it's an unfortunate fact that because of existing and past labor agreements, the Big Three are at a competitive disadvantage. Here's a Business Week article about GM's pension and retiree medical problems, although it's three years old nothing has really changed since it was published.

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine...6073_mz020.htm

It's a tough situation..

-Sam

[nuch_ss396]

[ QUOTE ]
You can't have a whole country that only produces service jobs. You have to have a strong manufacturing base. It seems like we are producing a generation of massage therapists instead of engineers.

[/ QUOTE ]

Chris! Well said!

You are spot on. Manufacturing is what made this country
great. All of a sudden, in the 1980's manufacturing became
a dirty word and most of the engineers I knew wanted to get an
MBA so they could advance into management. That was the
start of the spiral downward. The Clinton's all but drove
the stake in with this NAFTA crap. Remember all the about
retraining the workforce to do other things? Well, what
happened? Many manufacturing jobs went south, but they
weren't replaced with jobs of a commensurate level. As a
matter of fact, most of those jobs flat out disappeared.