Delphi Proposal to Cut Wages in Half!

Backyard Mechanic wrote: "Well..okay... but it's time to raise tax rates on those top guys so they pay their fair share of taxes, instead of putting it all on us poor working guys!"

People making the money Delphi workers are making (28 dollars and hour) are not the rich guys. They are part of the middle class.

40 X 28.00 X 52 = 58240.00 dollars a year base pay. This is middle class. I agree with raise the taxes on the rich but do it by taking away all their tax shelters. Make them pay a bigger share of their wealth in taxes by not giving them tax shelters.

Those that free load and don't work and depend on welfare need top stop sucking on the governments tit and find a job even if it is a minimum wage job. Then the government should assist them with housing. At least this way they will be putting some money back in the system.

Sarge

And a lot of those labor costs include labor from years ago. GM, Ford and Chrysler didn't put enough money into their pension plans. And the cost of insurance for retirees is really hurting them, too. It is estimated that it costs about $1000 per car just for the retirees. The health insurance for current workers is also hurting them. Of course, all of this is part of the labor costs.

Revenues are not decreased all that much. And JetBlue and Southwest still make money. Labor costs are one reason why the other airlines aren't making money. The cost of fuel is another.

Jeff

Unfortunately the biggest force of all is the The Status Quo.

Depressing!

John

Theres is sufficient excess capacity in the world auto market to replace GM's output in short order. If GM actually shut down, it's plants, designs and such would also be cherry picked by remaining companies and it's best bits would stay in production.

I don't expect GM to shut down, but I do expect them to go through a massive Chapter 11 reorganization sometime in the next 1-10 years.

John

No, not at all.

There have always been terrorists ever since governments have existed. A couple hundred years ago they called them "pirates"

But no terrorist organization can exist without a base of operations and funding. The terrorists today in the Mid East are quietly funded by people in places like Saudi Arabia, and by governments like Syria that have an interest in keeping areas destabilized. But, those same people in Saudi Arabia and Syria would not be funding Palestinian terrorists if they had serious business interests in those areas.

Naturally you can never eleminate the effects of one determined man with a gun who is willing to sacrifice himself. But, assassins and such have always been with us as well.

The US population right now is stuck on terrorists because for so much of the countries history foreign terrorists were a rarity due to the US's isolationist stance. But there were no shortage of domestic terrorists. Once the US became entangled in foreign affairs, foreign terrorists became common and the US public is stunned by it.

More people are killed in a year in auto crashes than by terrorists, far, far more.

Ted

That is true, however it is also the case that if you do the paperwork documentation required to get someone fired, whether union or not, and CYA, you will spend all your time on doing paperwork. Thus, the goof-off ends up destroying 2 persons productivity, his own, and his managers.

The real problem, though, isn't in the firing end, it is in the hiring end. Most managers are never trained in how to interview people and a majority of companies never check references or do background checks on people. It is also quite easy to hire a person for a "temporary" period for about 6 months, often from a temp agency, then if they work out then bring them in permanently. But once again, many businesses are too cheapskate to do this, as they don't want to pay the hiring bonus to the temp agency.

Ted

I guess I should know that but I worked in a wild assortment of union shops which are probably not the types you fellows are familiar with. The union shop does give an awful lot of protection to even dumb, bad, dishonest workers. Probably the most dangerous union shop I ever worked at was in the merchant marines in war zones. But that's really a special case. We had guys coming out of prison. Guy dreaming of robbing safes. Even one auto worker from Detroit! He was about as useless as I was! Nice fellow just dumb. Probably rich and smiling now though!

Read? Who do you think you are suggesting we read about the unions and the early immigants who formed the powerful unions to fight the sweatshops on the Lower East Side in New York city? The Triangle Fire anybody?

You're right, of course. It's just my recent personal experience with unions has been very bad. Well, one particular union obviously. But I tried. The really bad-ass union, a local Teamsters, not the sweetheart corrupt one I mentioned before, actually gave me the most time and consideration. I don't know what happened to them. Something with shotguns and holing up to fight the main Teamsters. Kind of nasty.

But you need unions. One leading law firm that does the union work actually uses the UAW to protect its clerk hourly employees from these really nasty high-powered legal types, its own lawyers, who are fighting for labor. That's really ugly but life goes on.

However - the effects (on the economy and other aspects of society) from a successful terrorist act are orders of magnitude greater than the same deathtoll in auto deaths over a given time period. Example: 3000 auto deaths over a given period in 2001 vs. 9/11 - which had geater lasting impact on our country? The effect is greatly psychological - perhaps that's why they call it *TERROR*. (Thats't not to belittle the impact on individual lives of tragic auto accidents.)

Bill Putney (To reply by e-mail, replace the last letter of the alphabet in my address with the letter 'x')

I have some war stories that relate and that can shed some light:

I was an engineering manager for a second tier supplier to two of the then big three.

GM/Delphi had a scheme for dealing with suppliers called PICOS. This was part of the Lopez legacy. Here are two important observations regarding the PICOS excercise that were forever stamped in my brain from that experience:

(1) GM/DELPHI AS PREDATOR The buyers, a couple of engineers, and certain other individuals with smokey job titles and desriptions would arrange meetings with the supplier's counterparts for a couple of weeks. Many man-months were "invested" by the supplier for the whole purpose of cutting cost out of a product that was being provided by the supplier. The "promise" was that any resulting savings from these brainstorming efforts would be documented and quantified in detail, and GM/Delphi and the supplier would split the savings 50/50. Sounds great, right?

Here's the hook: At the end of the process, after all the possible savings were squeezed out of the product, Delphi purchasing would say: "Oh - by the way - did we tell you that we are going to put this part back out on the streets for global sourcing? It's part of the requirements the PICOS process." (Of course they had failed to tell us that.)

For those who haven't thought ahead to the inherent result of that, what it meant was that, to competitively bid against other suppliers, you had to slice off all the savings that you had helped them come up with regarding the part - the savings that you were promised to share 50/50 in. Oh - and the design changes that you came up with on your nickel to reduce the cost? The resulting revised drawings were going to be in the RFQ package being sent to all the bidders/potential suppliers of the part.

BTW - Lopez went to VW and ended up doing hard time in Europe - can't remember what for, but whatever it was for, I'm sure it was deserved. He had codified unethical and fraudulent practices at GM that were carried on long after he left. Whenever a supplier fell victim to those practices (such as with the PICOS process), one was said to have been "Lopezed". Don't know if they still have that phrasing in the auto industry today or not - that was 5 years ago.

(2) GM/DELPHI AS VICTIM

The other observation about the PICOS process was that the union workers were sacred. If, in our brainstorming, we identified a savings that would have made the process more efficient and thus reduced the labor required (i.e., eliminated jobs) at the Delphi or GM plant in processing that part, that particular savings could not be implemented due to unfortunate union agreements that GM had entered into years earlier. Those restrictions did not apply to Ford or Chrysler. Those bad union agreements that GM had agreed to held them back for years. One of the reasons they were less profitable than Ford and Chrysler for a couple of decades.

Bill Putney (To reply by e-mail, replace the last letter of the alphabet in my address with the letter 'x')

You are absolutely NOT wrong, Roy. Pre unions, there was child labor, sweat shop conditions, no benefits, conspired salary controls.

Had not the unions been formed, does anyone REALLY think that American would have been a fit place to work? Not likely.

Yes, there have been excesses. And the attitude of some Americans is toward something for nothing.

But in the past, it was all for the wealthy industrialists, and nothing for anybody else.

Absolutely right. That was in the 1800s. This is no longer the 1800s. Nowtimes, the reason for the unions' existence is to enrich the union leaders at the expense of the rank and file.

You *really* think that's changed? Enron, Worldcom, Tyco, Parmalat, Delphi, every major oil company...shall I go on?

DS

Blah blah sloganeering blahbitty blah blah.

There is no one single answer to that question. It gets even less simple when the question is asked properly: "Where would we be without unions *IN THEIR PRESENT FORM*.

The biggest problem with the UAW, in my opinion, is internal politics. There's no direct election of officers at the International level, they're "elected" by convention delegates, and there's usually only one candidate for each office. Dissent from the "Company line" is frowned on. At the local level, political strife carries over into bargaining decisions and grievance resolution. Up until recently, the officers at the local I'm a member of seemed more interested in power & prestige than anything else. At the last local election, most of the bunch in power lost to independents. Some of the losers promptly retired, others got appointed to jobs at the Regional office.

When the Union started, it was a necessary thing, and they did a good job. Over the last 20 years or so, they seem to have lost their way. They seem to have the attitude a lot of ultra-liberals do: they know what's best for you better than you do, and you should just shut up, do what they tell you to do, smile and be happy.

It's an Ocelot, and he was really annoyed with us being there.

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I worked in a union shop for 40 years. I've seen the union reps toss out good grievances to get someone back to work that was fired for coming to work drunk

18 times in 17 years. I've seen the reps fight for people that repeatedly do not show up on time, have excessive absences, and generally do not do what they were hired to do. Management agrees to bring them back in return for dropping legitimate grievances and other bargaining issues.

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Web Site:

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Hard time dealing with a little history and fact?

Most unions have elections, don't like what a rep is doing, vote him/her out. Been my experience that a union's membership get's the representation they deserve. Remember that the membership is the "union". Then again some unions are filled with members that whine and bitch and do not participate. Then they wonder why things go to hell.

40 years is along time. Enjoy retirement.

Not at all. Present some history and some facts, not just empty slogans, and I'll deal with it just fine.