So would you buy a new GM truck now?

[blueriver]

May be comletly wrong here, at $35 an hour I would love my job ... if I became unemployed and new I was still be taken care, I would still love my job ... What if, when I became unemployed and I was not taken care of perhaps I would just be happy to take a job!

 

[gemini5362]

You are so wrong about corporate jets. I fly for a living and sell boats for a hobby. I have been a pilot since 1992 and a corporate pilot since 1996. No matter how you cut it you can own your own airplane no matter what it is if you fly aprox 250 hours per year versus chartering or leasing a comporable sized airplane. Less than 250 hours and its cheaper to charter.

You must remember in today's economy time is money. My flight schedule for the next two days is Muncie Indiana to Philly, then on to Atlanta all by noon. On Thursday we fly from Atlanta to Teterboro New Jersey then on to Washington DC. After sitting for 3 hours we are on to Ruston Louisiana then back home to Muncie Indiana all by 6:15 in the evening. It would take a full week to do what we are doing in 2 days if you were to fly the airlines.

We fly our aircraft about 450 hours per year. We employee 3 full time pilots, 1 mechanic and 1 secretary. We also have 2 part time pilots that cover vacations and such and only get paid when used.

Chris

I have to take your word for it or do a bunch of research and I dont see any reason to do that. just for comparison sakes and I am not asking your prices what does it cost on the average to lease a corporate sized jet per hour. I am assuming that covers pilots salary and fuel, fees etc

I also believe that you have to remeber that in todays economy that money is money. and To be very honest about it there are very few things that cannot be done over the internet where you dont need any transportation. I realize that is not going to happen but the technology is there. Occasionally my employer has us take classes over sattelite television rather than pay for us to go to a training center. Buisness meetings are done over the internet a lot more than used to be. Almost every phase of our buisness world now has a good part of it done via email and fax. If times get tight enough those buisness models will get more and more attractive.

 

[jeffster]

Gemini, one thing to add to your post. I spend enough time in meetings and conferences to know that while telemeetings work for most things (I work from home full time and am 2000+ miles from our office), the one thing that high level management will always want is face-to-face meetings. You will notice certain mannerisms that they will have that are hard or sometimes impossible to convey remotely. This is even more true when someone is trying to sell something. Now, the new virtual rooms are sweet, but you need to have them on both ends and they are still extremely expensive...

But I agree that less travel is going to be a priority for almost any company and if you can do a conf call or video conference instead of a face-to-face, that is a huge savings.

 

[Diamondpilot]

I am not going to say what I do, but I have been reading the union comments and have refrained from replying until now. I can tell you that we have union members in some locations and they are the most difficult and often obnoxious people to deal with. The younger guys aren't too bad, but then they are indoctrinated in to the "union" way of thinking and they too become lazy and difficult. I work 60+ hours each week (salary) and don't complain. I get paid well for what I do and being on call 24/7 is just life. I don't get paid when those 2am calls come in, but I also am well respected because of the effort I put out. The union guys, on the other hand, absolutely are inflexible with their schedules and god forbid if they are late getting a break, lest they file a grievance. It is ridiculous. I understand not wanting to be abused, but come on...

My other issue with unions is during financially difficult years, like we are seeing now. Our business went through some rough times a number of years back and layoffs happened all across the board, from the bottom guys to the top brass. While layoffs are never fun for anyone, the union was the one that went ballistic, picketed, etc. While I am sure the smarter ones understand the big picture, the environment they create with this crap is one that fosters ignorance. If a company is going to survive in tough times, you have to trim the fat, and sometimes even some of the muscle. If you don't, NOBODY has a job, and that is the part they absolutely don't want to acknowledge. This is the same at UAW. You HAVE to make severe concessions to make the automakers sustainable so that you have jobs. The American auto industry has been absolutely hobbled by the unions.

I hope I don't come across as a jerk here, as that is not my intent at all. I just have to ask this to anyone who sides with UAW though. I have to be the best at my job every day. I work hard, and thankfully, I have a job that is hopefully not going anywhere. My drive to deliver quality work is a combo of my own pride but also knowing that if I don't do a good job, it doesn't take much for me to be replaced with someone that will. Now, let's look at a union guy who knows that if he can skate by with average work, he knows that he is going to be set in most cases. If that INDIVIDUAL does not have the drive to produce the best work he can, what motivation is there?

I could have not said it better. What ever happened with doing the best you can do and getting rewarded for it? People feel they are entitled to things but I have always had to work for them.

Anyway I applaud you for your outlook on things. My home town had a business that did metal plating and I had many friends who worked for them. They were union and hit hard times. The company told them to get rid of the union, keep the same pay and the jobs would stay. Guess what happened to the 700+ employees? Yep they picketed, fought, and ended up loosing the jobs and the plant simply moved away to a local where they could reopen with no union.

It was a lose lose situation for everyone.

Chris

 

[gemini5362]

I am not going to say what I do, but I have been reading the union comments and have refrained from replying until now. I can tell you that we have union members in some locations and they are the most difficult and often obnoxious people to deal with. The younger guys aren't too bad, but then they are indoctrinated in to the "union" way of thinking and they too become lazy and difficult. I work 60+ hours each week (salary) and don't complain. I get paid well for what I do and being on call 24/7 is just life. I don't get paid when those 2am calls come in, but I also am well respected because of the effort I put out. The union guys, on the other hand, absolutely are inflexible with their schedules and god forbid if they are late getting a break, lest they file a grievance. It is ridiculous. I understand not wanting to be abused, but come on...

My other issue with unions is during financially difficult years, like we are seeing now. Our business went through some rough times a number of years back and layoffs happened all across the board, from the bottom guys to the top brass. While layoffs are never fun for anyone, the union was the one that went ballistic, picketed, etc. While I am sure the smarter ones understand the big picture, the environment they create with this crap is one that fosters ignorance. If a company is going to survive in tough times, you have to trim the fat, and sometimes even some of the muscle. If you don't, NOBODY has a job, and that is the part they absolutely don't want to acknowledge. This is the same at UAW. You HAVE to make severe concessions to make the automakers sustainable so that you have jobs. The American auto industry has been absolutely hobbled by the unions.

I hope I don't come across as a jerk here, as that is not my intent at all. I just have to ask this to anyone who sides with UAW though. I have to be the best at my job every day. I work hard, and thankfully, I have a job that is hopefully not going anywhere. My drive to deliver quality work is a combo of my own pride but also knowing that if I don't do a good job, it doesn't take much for me to be replaced with someone that will. Now, let's look at a union guy who knows that if he can skate by with average work, he knows that he is going to be set in most cases. If that INDIVIDUAL does not have the drive to produce the best work he can, what motivation is there?

I have a few comments and questions about your posts. First of all what is the union mentality. Most of the union people I associate with work hard and get a quality product out. I dont know what you do and I have not mentioned to often who I work for. But our workers are monitored more than any other worker in the United States. Our computer systems are probably within the top 5 in complexity in the US. Any manager any where in the united states can get a readout on any machine that we operate. They can tell when any mistakes are made and a simple email to a manager can tell them who was operating that machine. So I am very aware of what the average employee in my organization puts out in performance. Since I am a union member and employee I would love to hear what my work mentality is. I think I have a pretty good work mentality. I take a lot of pride in making sure that when a machine is broken down I get it operational in the minimum amount of time. My co workers make sure that their jobs get done in the alloted amount of time because other people are depending on them. I will agree that there are always those in any field. I know we sure have them. It is very frustrating to have to dela with them. Usually other workers pick up the slack for them out of the 130 members in my local ( small local) 90 per cent of the grievances are for the same 10 people. You know why they are still employed. My local president says it the best of anyone i know. Management makes the rules and they still cant follow them. You dont know how many times I have been tempted to go to a supervisor who was going to discipline someone and tell him to let me write the discipline up for him because i know he is going to do it wrong and someone like me will win. I am not joking one little bit. If you want to get rid of union personnel get managers that can read and write and follow the dang rules. If I wanted to be a manager I could be one tomorrow because upper management knows I would know how to get rid of people and make it stick. But I want to emphasize this the union members I see that are problem children are by far the minority. Now lets look at the number of managers that get fired. How many managers in your company have been fired ?

Managers get by with bloody murder. Let me give you a personal example. A couple of years after I started with my company I had some very strong personal problems, family dieing other family committing suicide and my wife left me all within a month. I just good old fashioned overloaded I used one of my benefits ( negotiated by my union I believe) and was seeing a therapist to help get my life back on track. My therapist talked to my supervisor and told him I had a chance to leave the state for a couple of weeks and it would do me good to get away for a while. My supervisor agreed to this. I took a couple of weeks and went to visit a friend in another state and just relaxed without seeing a part of my world that collapsed around me. Before I left I submitted a written request for vacation and left in the hold out for those. I dont see my boss at night a lot of times because we dont have a night shift supervisor for maintenance so we leave paperwork for him. My boss had told me that it was ok for me to go. Everyone at work knew where I was going and why. It was no big secret. The next afternoon I caught a 2:30 pm flight out of the airport. My boss had my leave request when he got there at 8am. He disaproved my leave and never called to tell me that he had disaproved it. I left for two weeks which was just the medicine I needed I came back home, relaxed in a much better place my life back on track and ready to pick up the pieces. When I showed up for work my boss called me in his office and said he wanted to have an investigative interview with me. I asked why and he told me that I had been awol for two weeks and he wanted to know why. That is when I found out what he did. A week later I was fired. 5 months later at my arbitration hearing (paid for by my union. I did not have to pay a penny to be defended) My boss was asked if he knew I was leaving and he said no. He was asked if he had ever talked to my therapist about me leaving and he said no he never had. When we brought out the therapists notes that showed him talking to my boss for 20 minutes and my boss agreeing it would be a good idea for me to take that trip. My boss lieing was one of the main reasons I won that arbitration. I won full backpay, full sick leave and full vacation benefits for the time I was off. That set the company back around 50,000 +. What do you think happened to my boss over that. Nothing. The sad thing about that is that I can recite stories like that all the time. Managers fire workers when they know they cant fire them the worker is off for months or even years. They are brought back to work with full back pay and nothing is done to the manager. I ask again how many managers in your company have been fired. Two that i know of in mine. One was in a small office just him and a assistant. The assistant and the manager the manager (who gets 5 weeks of vacation a year. ) was taking vacation and having the assistant put him in as being on the job he got caught and fired. The other was not a manager she was a labor relations rep. She stole a 5000.00 check for an hourly employee that was a EEO settlement. Then she made up a fake 5000.00 grievance settlement for that employee and had a check made out for that. The way she got caught was the employee got w-2's for 10,000 more than she had made and she started saying what is this all about when they told her she said she had not gotten any of those checks. those are the only two salaried employees that I know of who have been in my 16 years of employee with this company in the last 4 months of this year and jan of next I will have or will defend 5 employees who have been fired. and there are a lot of union advocates that defend employees who have been terminated. One of the cases I had was in el paso. The stupid union employee there stole 139.00 and returned the money was fired and we lost at arbitration. That sounds fair until you compare him to the manager in that plant she is number three from the top in the management ladder for them. She stole 4000.00 off of her corporate credit card. She was fired. She made restitution and was rehired and promoted at regular intervals. Now that doesnt seem quite fair to me.

I know I get on these rants but everyone seems to be blaming the UAW workers for the problems that the big 3 has and I will agree they deserve part of the blame but there is a lot of blame to go around and management deserves their share also but no one seems to be wanting to talk about that.

 

[California]

Just a couple more pieces of the puzzle; I'm not sure where they fit:

1) I read that nearly a third of the big SUV and sport-truck purchases were financed by the customer refinancing the appreciation in value of his home. This source of funds has disappeared. There went a third of the market.

2) The big profit margins on big SUV's and fancy trucks were the only thing carrying the Big 3. Their smaller models were sold at cost just to maintain market share. If big vehicle sales disappear, they can't survive building small vehicles. You can't make a $20,000 margin on a $16,000 car! No profit, no survival.

3) I wonder if the $15 billion bailout is simply a $10,000 subsidy per vehicle sold so they can now sell a $55,000 pickup for $45,000 and claim they are profitable. Until the money runs out.

4) If they go bankrupt and abandon their obligation for pensions and health care, the retirees will then get lifetime support by the taxpayers (welfare) and get their only health care at the local community hospital Emergency Room. (Also taxpayer supported). While the taxpayers scream for tax relief. My take on this: in the past they should have sold the cars for more, to cover the eventual retirement cost of the people building them. Now those cars are out there on the road but there are no tax funds available to pay these new (in case of bankruptcy) welfare and health care costs out of public funds. Simple! Raise the gas tax, so that the existing cars on the road, that those folks built, are paying for their retirement care! That allocates the under-recovered cost of building those cares, across the people who bought them at less than full cost. As a side benefit the import drivers have to pay their fair share of supporting these retired American auto workers so this is an indirect way of continuing to subsidize the American auto industry. It's fairer to spread this cost by a fuel tax than by the federal income tax, and surely those abandoned retirees will be supported by the taxpayers one way or another if the bankrupt manufacturers are allowed to escape responsibility.

Or maybe this large pool of abandoned auto retirees is the beginning of nationalized health care. Tax everyone to pay the costs that the manufacturers have abandoned. Let other employers abandon their employees into the taxpayer-paid health care pool too.

I think we are in for some wrenching times.

 

[Diamondpilot]

I have to take your word for it or do a bunch of research and I dont see any reason to do that. just for comparison sakes and I am not asking your prices what does it cost on the average to lease a corporate sized jet per hour. I am assuming that covers pilots salary and fuel, fees etc

I also believe that you have to remeber that in todays economy that money is money. and To be very honest about it there are very few things that cannot be done over the internet where you dont need any transportation. I realize that is not going to happen but the technology is there. Occasionally my employer has us take classes over sattelite television rather than pay for us to go to a training center. Buisness meetings are done over the internet a lot more than used to be. Almost every phase of our buisness world now has a good part of it done via email and fax. If times get tight enough those buisness models will get more and more attractive.

A airplane like a King Air 200 can fly 800 miles with 6-8 passengers for under $1500 per hour at 300 mph.

A airplane like a Hawker 800 can fly 2400 miles with 6-8 passengers for under $3200 per hour at 530 mph.

Put 2-3 people on the aircraft and it is equal or less than business class seats bought 2 weeks in advance. The airlines serve about 200 airports in the US and corporate aircraft can serve 5,000 plus airports getting the passengers closer to the destination versus landing spending a hour getting a car, driving 2 hours to the town, ect.

We use airline travel for 85% of our companies needs. The corporate airplanes are only used when it makes since due to location or time restrains or sometimes its just plain cheaper.

Chris

 

[gemini5362]

A airplane like a King Air 200 can fly 800 miles with 6-8 passengers for under $1500 per hour at 300 mph.

A airplane like a Hawker 800 can fly 2400 miles with 6-8 passengers for under $3200 per hour at 530 mph.

Put 2-3 people on the aircraft and it is equal or less than business class seats bought 2 weeks in advance. The airlines serve about 200 airports in the US and corporate aircraft can serve 5,000 plus airports getting the passengers closer to the destination versus landing spending a hour getting a car, driving 2 hours to the town, ect.

We use airline travel for 85% of our companies needs. The corporate airplanes are only used when it makes since due to location or time restrains or sometimes its just plain cheaper.

Chris

good arguement the airlines need you to argue for them in washington when congress complains about the jet fleets

 

[gemini5362]

I could have not said it better. What ever happened with doing the best you can do and getting rewarded for it? People feel they are entitled to things but I have always had to work for them.

Anyway I applaud you for your outlook on things. My home town had a business that did metal plating and I had many friends who worked for them. They were union and hit hard times. The company told them to get rid of the union, keep the same pay and the jobs would stay. Guess what happened to the 700+ employees? Yep they picketed, fought, and ended up loosing the jobs and the plant simply moved away to a local where they could reopen with no union.

It was a lose lose situation for everyone.

Chris

Chris maybe I am not understanding what you and jeffster are saying but it seems to me you both feel that just because you are union that you feel like you dont have to do the best you can do. On a lot of jobs maybe you can do more than the guy sitting next to you but you both have the same jobs. On an assembly line do you think it matters if one guy can work twice as fast as the guy he is standing next to. The line moves at a certain speed. In your own industry they have union pilots. What do you do better than they do. Do you take off better, Do you land a plane better, Do you pilot better. I would think in your industry that there is a level of perfection that everyone has to meet or it is disastrous. So because you do your best you should get a bigger reward than the union pilot who just does an ok job of landing or taking off or piloting

 

[Dargo]

I know I get on these rants but everyone seems to be blaming the UAW workers for the problems that the big 3 has and I will agree they deserve part of the blame but there is a lot of blame to go around and management deserves their share also but no one seems to be wanting to talk about that.

I know unions quite well because my father has been a union member for over 40 years. At one point in time I too was a union member. What I feel is accurate is the generalized vocalization of how terribly bad unions are for not only companies but for consumers and workers. I say 'generalized' because there are always exceptions to any broad statement. However, having said that, the UAW is a huge parasite that hasn't had the intelligence to stop drawing blood from it's host even as it's host is in it's death throes. Even a deer tick knows to drop off a deer it's full and when the deer is dead. The UAW is the single largest problem with the domestic automakers at this time. A valid argument may be made stating that the engineers for the domestic automakers have gotten lax and ceased being innovators in their field. That has caused some design issues and quality/durability problems, but I do not see the huge void in quality between domestic made vehicles and Asian made vehicles. With that being the case, that basically leaves the union worker at the center of the equation with the union, and not necessarily the worker, at the epicenter.

The biggest mistake the domestic automakers have made is not shedding themselves of the burden of a corrupt and unreasonable union. I've mentioned the case of the UMWA (mine workers) in the past and I think the comparison is still valid. In my home state of Indiana the UMWA is extinct. They have lost over 20,000 union jobs in Indiana alone in the last 25 years. However, while this has happened, coal production in Indiana is higher than ever before. That is a direct reflection on the price of the product and the availability to produce the product. Mine safety is certainly no worse than when the union had a stranglehold of the companies in the state. Applicants willing to work for the non-union mines number higher than when unions were in control. Surveys show that the attitude of mine workers is higher than when the union had them worried about their "rights" to basically not work while at work. The same surveys have shown a lower percentage of mine workers desire to attain another line of work. How can this be without a union; happy workers who are more productive working for companies that are profitable??

Right now the UAW has the opportunity to continue to exist but not with their current demands. As I see it, if the domestic automakers do end up filing for bankruptcy it will be mostly to rid themselves of the parasite known as the UAW. Many of the suppliers who provide parts to the automakers also have their workers under the UAW. They too are looking at going under. The UAW is doing everything possible to prevent votes at suppliers to get rid of the union. When votes do occur there are massive numbers of complaints of intimidation by the union against the workers if they vote the union out. The workers know that the threats are very real and very possibly would be carried out. Even the thug Governor of IL has been caught on tape talking to unions trying to make sure he gets a very high paying job doing nothing after his term ends in exchange for certain 'favors' for those unions.

Because of their power, particularly in the auto industry, unions are going to cost all of us plenty as they finally become extinct. It's unfortunate that an entity originally envisioned to help the average worker is what is ultimately hurting them. The thin line between organized labor and organized crime has become blurred lately. When viewed as a whole, taking all aspects into consideration, I have to say good bye and good riddance to the UAW. I just don't think they will go away fast enough to save all three manufacturers. Anyone who believes the UAW will just dissolve doesn't know how much money and political power they still possess. Even so, in relative terms, the end is near for them.