Just wondering who else is directly affected by this whole economy?

I'm in Engineering and although it hasn't hit me directly yet I'm sure it will soon.

 

I did for many years... I got laid off from CEC
( www.cecwheels.com) when the dollar tanked years ago and just got out of the industry... now I work on cars for fun. Just about every shop around here is hurting bad, many have gone under... wheel stores, fabrication shops, ect... a few guys that do incredible work and deserve too, are doing well... the loss of some of the other "shops" actually is a good thing IMO.

 

I work in the manufacturing sector, not directly related to automotive but I was layed off for about a month. I am back at work now but you never know, manufacturing of just about any product seems to be taking a big hit right now!
I am a machinist working for the same company for 14 years, I have never seen work just disappear like this, it's coming back so I can only hope the new year will bring something better.

 

Keep in mind that suppliers who's core customers are GM, Ford and Chrysler have seen it coming. (Capital was spent based volumes that were never there)
What sucks though, suppliers who are also supporting Honda and Toyota are at risk because of this.

So the question is should our tax $ go into keeping the Big 3 going while they lay off more people and keep paying some of their employees' high wages with the current state of economy?
Maybe they should fold and let somebody else make feasable decisions like building cars that most people would want rather than telling people what they should be driving.



So yeah I was affected by this.

 

http://www.search-autoparts.com/sear....jsp?id=571878

Some good reading up there.

Personally, I haven't seen much of a slow down. But any versatile and small/midsize organizastion isn't going to be TOO heavily affected by this. The world's a growing chaning place, always has been. If you can't adapt - you fail. Thats life.

I'm curious to see what develops though. Personally I don't think a penny of tax dollars should go towards the big three, or any individual corporation in their shoes. However it goes down, I highly doubt that it will be like flipping a light switch and every GM plant, office, etc. will be chained shut and homeless people will run rampant............someone will step in and buy up enough shares to keep it going - only run thigns more effciently this time around.

And for those of you who don't read that article - GM has nearly 70 billion dollars in debt. How will giving the 3-5-10.......12, **** - even 25 billion fix that?? Its accrued over nearly a hundred years, you won't wipe the slate clean by pumping more money into the beast. Look into chapter 11 bankruptcy also.....

 

I work at a local independant repair shop. I haven't noticed a slow down, and I doubt anyone in the repair end of things will, unless the economy gets so bad that people just simply can't afford to fix their cars. As far as the big three go, they killed themselves years ago when they decided that profits came before building a good quality product. It's only really catching up to them now because the general public has finally gotten sick of the big three's bullshit, and they have realized that there are better products out there. If the government's do decide to give them a bailout package, it should be under the condition that they present a business plan to cut costs big time. Get rid of expensive, flashy, non essential items like those huge massive buildings in NY they own. Also the employees need to take some wage cuts. The average person is expected to make a living on $20an hour (if you're lucky), so why do they need the huge wages they get. If times get tough you have to stretch your money, its as simple as that.

 

Not employee's necessairily, but upper management. Click that link I posted, it shows average wages for GM vs. Toyota/honda etc.

EDIT: HINT - if the average is mid 70's, how much are the upper echelon making that get's that average number up so high? Because bear in mind that those averages were calc'd based on EVERY employee - that includes janitors.

 

im in the steel industry. my department is the only one that hasnt shut down yet.

 

They had a good breakdown of the Big 3 UAW employee costs vs. Toyota/Honda costs on the National last week. They indicated $77 vs. $48/hour. The actual wage was $28 vs $26. I believe CAW make more than this because the benefit costs are lower due to universal healthcare.

One of the things included in the "average wage" of UAW employees is "legacy costs." In other words what it cost for the big 3 to pay for people who no longer work for the company divided by the number of current employee hours worked. This worked out to $17/hour vs. $3/hour for the Japanese manufacturers. Keep in mind that the big 3 once had much greater market share, more labor intensive processes (eg. fewer robots) and produced their own parts, etc. Thus the companies employ a fraction of the number of employees that they once did. The Japanese companies haven't been manufacturing in North America for long enough to have many retirees and only some of the vehicles are made over here.

I would argue that Japanese manufacturers over pay their line employees too, but at least up to this point it has been in part to keep the UAW out.

 

The big 3 have been building decent competitive cars recently but a big problem is brand image. Times have changed and domestics are not cool to our generation. GM did a good thing by killing the Oldsmobile brand. Common, Oldsmobile, what kinda name is that? Buick??? = grampa's car. I don't care how great any car of these brands are, I would never buy one due to it's image.

 

The Detroit three are a bunch of dumb asses. They dug themselves a deep hole and they are too stupid to dig themselves out. Tell the unions to go fukc themselves if they don't agree to concessions. Cut wages, cut pensions, cut salaries, cut production. Bitching to the government to impose trade restrictions on foreign cars is going to get you nowhere. It's called competition. I'll give the domestics credit- the quality of their product has been raised to where they can compete head to head with the imports, but the cost it takes to build these cars is way too high.
The CAW says that only 7-10% of the final cost of a car is labour- bullshit. Every product they buy from a union shop is inflated. Every service they receive is inflated. Buy a body panel for $100, how much of that $100 is the steel?

I've worked in a bunch of union and non-union shops. When the manager will get fired for waking up an employee to tell him to do his job- you've got a problem.

When one contractor comes in to do an emergency repair on Saturday and you have to pay every employee their wage for the hours the contractor was there because you didn't run it by the Union- you've got a huge problem.

Unions had their time and they saved us, now their going to kill us.

 

^ Agreed. Unions are bullshit and they killed the auto industry.

I'm an engineer at a aerospace/defence manufacturing company and we seem to be doing well. I hope it stays this way.

 

I'm an engineer working at a lead/zinc refinery (we make way more than just lead and zinc, but those are the big 2), so we are tied in with the steel industy with the zinc (galvanizing), which is tied in with the automotive industy. Lead is somewhat insulated, since new cars need batteries, but old cars need new batteries too. Due to some badly timed moves by the parent company taking on huge short term debt, the reduced demand, and falling prices, we're feeling the pinch. So far they've said that layoffs are not planned and are the absolute last resort, but anything can happen. Luckily for us, we've got a whole bunch of older employees around retirement age, so that should help deal with any manpower reductions that may be required, and hopefully they'll be looking at paying people to retire early, rather than laying off the younger people that they'll desperately need in 10 years to keep the place running when half the current workforce will be retired.

 

grandma car for sure.

 

We enthusiasts can appreciate a car like that but most general public don't have a clue what that is. That car is not a money maker nor does it do anything for its brand image (for the general public).

 

And it was made twenty years ago... what have they done marketable since then???

 

That was also back when the brands under GM were still slightly independant and had some say in what happened. Now it really doesn't matter what you buy from GM it's all the same. For example, take a 2002 Pontiac Gand Am, it's the same as a chevrolet malibu, oldsmobile intrigue, and a buick century. Sure there are slight differences like maybe one has a 3.1L and one has a 3.4L, but it's still the same engine family, the platforms are the same, and generally they all have the same common problems. I know those aren't current vehicle lineups, but they still do this because its a cheap manufacturing technique. Here's the big problem, if one has a flaw, they'll all have the same flaw. The general public may not realize it, but brand means nothing anymore.

 

tire industry is strong.
but the mining manufacturing is suffering.

 

That GN seems to be slightly modified. I don't recall any of the ones I was looking at purchasing some years ago having roll cages, big slicks, monster tachs, missing headlights, wheelie bars and massive front mounts with open dumped wastegates...

It's almost like any car can be modified to be anything, regardless of who made it.

Oh, and thanks for posting a picture so large it makes the thread unreadable due to side scrolling...

(Yeah, I'm feeling a little sarcastic right now)

 

This thread seems like a good way to network and help the economy. Anybody need some fabricating work, sub contract an assembly/sub assembly? let me know....We have one leg to stand on right now and it is the oil and gas industry. Just a thought.

 

With oil prices at below $50/barrel, they're taking a real $hit kicking. Lots of projects on hold causing layoffs in the oil patch.

 

Precisely. Minus a relative handful of Grand Nationals made 20 years ago (and which with stock suspension, still had that "classic" GM AWD/off-road ride height), and you have a division that has basically made nothing but grampa cars since before I started kindergarten (1973). And worse, today's grampas are more likely to want an Accord or Camry anyway. I really have a hard time thinking of what Buick currently makes - a couple of sport-utes, and a big car called the Lucerne, except it's the Lacross in Canada, or vice-versa?

All the domestics have at least some current cars that are actually pretty competitive - Ford has the Mustang and Fusion (thanks to Mazda). Chrysler has the 300/Charger/Challenger (too big and heavy for my tastes, but apparently popular, GM has the new Epsilon platform cars (Malibu, Aura) that have tested and reviewed well - and unlike most domestics, these new GM interiors don't feature hard, cheap looking plastics that make my first car ('73 Maverick) look well-finished by comparison. It's surface level, but the cheap, plastic-y interiors of most domestics is the biggest problem - the perceived quality just isn't there, even though a lot of their cars are decent, if not great.

There's a lot of problems with the domestics - and they go back a long ways. Excessively high labour and health/pension costs are a large and long-standing part. Management that cared less about "product" (let alone being enthusiastic about cars), and more about profit. Which in turn led them to fight the imports back in the 80's not by building better performing, better built cars, but with "voluntary" limits on imports, and focusing on the truck/SUV/minivan market where they still excelled by comparison and profits were high, allowing them to largely ignore their problems with costs, quality and design. But the long term result has been the imports have moved production of popular lines to North America - where they've shown that there's no problem with non-union, lower cost (but still well-paid) workers, and no threat of tariffs or limits. And they've moved into the truck/SUV/minvan markets, and are now competitive, or better there too - just as demand is sagging. So the domestics are caught by a perfect storm of bad planning, bad decisions, and bad management.

Just the same, I'm inclined to think they have to be saved - a total collapse is something our battered economy can't bear right now. But they also need to get more serious about world class products across their lines, not just the occasional Corvette or Malibu.

 

Looks like the industry is getting some relief short-term. 17 billion for the US and 4.2 billion for the Canadian side. This is for Chrysler and GM only. For some reason Ford did not want a bailout. Maybe they are smarter/quicker at restructuring then the other 2.

thewird

 

I really think that a lot of the stuff that GM and Ford have been doing lately is pretty good. The problem is that it's hard to erase 40 years of errors and to be consistent in a business world only concerned with the next quarter. Chrysler needs to be put to sleep.

GM has done a terrific job with a number of recent models that are truely class leaders (CTS, Malibu, etc). I'm seriously thinking about getting a used Cobalt SS as a daily driver in a year or two. While it's wrong wheel drive it's a real giant killer. One problem I think the big 3 have is that they have trouble producing a consistently excellent vehicle. eg. The Focus was far and away the best car of its class when it was introduced (albeit unreliable then, not now), but they haven't bothered to keep it up to par. The logic was that they couldn't afford to reinvest in it. Imagine where they'd be positioned now if they had? At one point the Taurus was the benchmark of midsized cars and the top selling car. They let it die a horrible death until they could no longer sell a single unit. One positive review may make enthusiasts take notice, but a reputation takes a long time to establish.

One area Ford has drastically improved on is reliability. For the last number of years Ford has crept up in Consumer's reports reliability rankings. JD Power is an indication of lose **** and bolts. Consumers reports is more significant. For is now on par with Nissan and Mazda which is only a tick behind Toyota and Honda. If you look at resale values they're completely out of wack with this reality. Toyota/Honda's reputation is irrationally strong with their used vehicles compared to their new models. Most domestic resale values are irrationally weak. I'm not trying to say that that a Honda Civic shoudln't be worth more than a Chevy Cobalt.

 

Even though the oil and gas industry is in the dumps, it could be our saving grace with people having more money in their pocket because of the savings at the pumps. It's curbing inflation now at $35/barrel. High oil prices gave Canada the privilige of foreseeing the coming crisis before the money ran out.


As for the bailout, I think they have until March to turn around and start paying back the 'loan'- like that's going to happen. At least the unions are talking about compromising. We're getting somewhere now. These people should be shaking in their boots- it's the only way they're actually going to do anything.