For those pondering the decline and fall of GM, consider the comment below to this article:
September 16th, 2009
11:45 am GMT
Dear USA
A Flint area resident for over 50 years, born in a house just down the street from the Buick plant, I, like many of you, have seen the rise and fall of General Motors in Flint. As a 12-year old, I remember so well touring the plants and seeing the parade with Dinah Shore. What a thrilling time! GM and Flint: bonded forever, it seemed.
In my early college days I knew many guys that worked at GM. One was proud of putting his cigarette out on the hood of freshly painted Buick from time to time; another carried out a set of valve lifters every day in the false bottom of his lunch box, and still another routinely took sets of engine bearings by taping them to his legs. Some played an assembly line game where they tossed nuts and bolts into the tops of carburetors as cars moved down the assembly line. They routinely bragged about how little work they did. A frequently heard comment was, “I wouldn’t buy a GM car; I see how they are made.” I wonder what a Toyota worker says about their cars?
During the glory years each labor contract meant big pay increases, thanks to the Union. Over time, however, prices rose, diminishing the gains. My mother learned quickly that the price of milk went up overnight at contract time. Unions continued to get the power they wished for from Democratic law makers that passed rules making it almost impossible for GM not to give into Union demands. Today $300 a month is good money in China; it’s hardly enough to buy cigarettes and beer in Flint. Perhaps if in those negotiations with the auto makers the Unions were not given the upper hand, US workers could buy more with less money, and US labor costs would not be so high compared to the rest of the world now.
In the 1980’s a GM training director told me that about 45% of hourly workers did not have high school diplomas. At this same time the Japanese were importing very high quality cars that were manufactured using Statistical Process Control. This is a quality-assuring manufacturing method requiring some fairly sophisticated math skills, techniques most GM hourly workers weren’t educated well enough to use. The Japanese also employed teamwork methods with their workers. When GM tried to apply teamwork methods, the Union successfully blocked their use, claiming that teamwork would weaken the Union.
The Union over the years has lobbied against employment tests, educational requirements, teamwork, and other worker standards. The Union has lobbied for workers rights, civil rights, chemical Right-to-know laws, and labor laws. These ideas have added burdensome restrictions and huge costs to GM for recordkeeping, employee training, legal fees, and allocations of people and time that have nothing directly to do with the manufacturing of cars. Imagine trying to manage the building of a high quality automobile and at the same time having to spend time and money handling the thousands of grievances and production slow-downs created by the Union each year.
One of my friends, a GM line supervisor, complained regularly about struggling to find enough workers to start the assembly line, especially on hangover Mondays. Everyone knew not to buy a car built on a Monday. A good friend and a skilled trade worker at GM said the first thing they did each day was to get a cup coffee and do the crossword puzzle in the Detroit News. In contrast to this, a GM executive told me that at a plant in Poland, the workers, on their own time, arrived early to clean, service, and paint their machines, a practice that would not be allowed in the USA. Needless to say, those workers are ready to work when the starting alarm rings.
In Detroit, I once had a chance to observe an assembly line in operation. Two people sat across from each other listening to the radio, drinking coffee, and reading the newspaper. As the cars neared, each one got up and installed a windshield wiper and then returned to the paper, radio, and coffee. I wondered how a company can pay someone so much money for such little work. The answer, that plant has been leveled to the ground with many jobs lost.
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