GM and Ford's demise? Who's responsible? Unions or Management?

[billbuckhead]

The precarious state of GM and Ford is a classic case of bad American management. It wasn't union leaders who told GM to switch all it's cars to front wheel drive and put pickup truck gas tanks in a vulnerable position in case of a crash. The UAW didn't design all those terrible Ford and Chrysler transmissions, head gaskets and defective software down at the union hall. The workers didn't elect to put a bunch of accountants in charge of the company instead of the engineers the Germans and Japanese seem to prefer. I'm sure the rank and file weren't consulted when GM paid 2 billion dollars to get out of buying FIAT, which begs the question, how did GM get put in such an absurd position.

A couple of month's ago a spokeperson for Ford Motor said the problem with hyrid car development in the USA was because there were no suppliers. One can only imagine what Henry Ford would have thought about that excuse.

[solinvictus]

1. Management..

My stepdad and I were discussing this yesterday. GM insists on manufacturing lines of automobiles that they know are substandard because management will not communicate with line workers and design engineers for input on quality assurance. Remember, GM ruined Isuzu, a great brand of car, after they took over the entire operation. Isuzu is now a commercial brand only.

Yes, it's the bean counters doing it to these companies. Cutting costs through inferior designs, parts, and finished products is not good for any company.

[Poppyseedman]

18. Isuzu is now a commercial brand only???

No it's not. I can buy a Isuzu from 5 dealers within 50 miles from where I live.

Granted the rest of your post is succinct.

http://www.isuzu.com/index.jsp

[Coastie for Truth]

Classic Bad Management At GM

1. Those silly "Harley Earle" ads.
2. Bob Lutz's rants about how hybrids were just a passing fad.
3. Frivolous patent law suits against start ups, academicians, competitors to stop development of fuel cells, hydrogen storage, electric motor components and high energy density batteries.
4. Putting all of their eggs in the SUV and Hummer and pick-up basket - as crude hits $56/bbl, and $3.00/gallon gasoline becomes a possibility.
5. Their compacts and econo-cars look like they tried to fail (Chevette, Vega, Corvair, Cavalier).
6. Their passenger car diesels also look like they tried to fail.
7. Their crass political campaigns to eliminate urban street cars and trolleys in the aftermath of WW2. (Sources: "End of Suburbia" and the copies of the San Francisco Examiner and San Francisco Chronicle on display at the San Francisco Cable Car Museum just off of Powell Street).

I lived in "Detroit" when Chrysler was bailed out, when the laid off Chrysler workers killed Vincent Chin because he "looked Japanese", when Michael Moore's nemesis - Roger Smith - was the CEO of GM, when Michael Moore's "Roger and Me" came out -- and when the UAW tried to recall State Senator Jack Faxon because his wife drove a Volvo.

[Robert Oak]

2. blaming the unions is propaganda

GM and Ford are a complete bunch of idiots
in engineering. They outsource everything and don't know enough
technically to realize they aren't asking the right questions, even
to query on progress of outsourced projects and integration, dream
on...their "varied outsourcers" have to figure it all out.

I'm serious, they are so clueless a good engineer can walk in and they
do not even recognize it, complete bureaucracy and absolutely
zero design innovation.

They deserve to go down. Toyota is now more American than GM or Ford
and it shows...

GM and Ford sold out the American people by moving the work to Mexico and so forth so if their quality is now shit and they can't make sales...
they deserve what they sowed.

Plus seemingly upper level management could care less about fuel
efficiency or creating hybrids, just pushing the Ford F-150
gas guzzler and the rest of em.

[salin]

3. Poor business decisions

pushing one area of cars (marketing suvs) because there was a larger profit margin, to the point of investing primarily there and on trucks without remembering the demand of economy cars in the late seventies and eighties that led to their previous big failure of stature. Lack of diversification of products; fueling the marketing trend that pushed one area of their products to the detriment of others - but in a risky area given the up and down nature of gas prices... and given they had experienced this, and failed, once before.

[ScreamingMeemie]

4. Let's see...the average Joe Worker is getting a 2.4% profit sharing check.

The average executive is getting a 200-300% profit sharing check. Do we even need to do the math????

[Warpy]

5. Bad management in the 60s and 70s

sucked profits out of old equipment and designs that changed only cosmetically while the Germans and Japanese poured money into robotics and designing fuel efficient cars from the ground up. Bad management in the late 70s and 80s produced "economy" cars that were stripped down pieces of junk that were unsafe to drive and rusted on the showroom floor. Bad management in the 90s decided not to imitate Japanese and German design in fuel efficient cars but to put car bodies onto truck frames to get around emissions standards for cars and sell the resulting bastardized pieces of junk as off road vehicles to workadaddies trapped in the city and suburb. Bad management produced things like headlights that required the entire front end of the chassis to be picked apart to change them when one burned out. Bad management produced one model of Ford that required the engine be pulled to change the spark plugs.

Bad management holds down salaries and benefits by outsourcing as much of the component manufacture as it can, using union workers only to assemble the final product. Bad management milks the whole system to add a few bucks to the bottom line, bucks that go into their salaries and not to the investors.

Bad management is killing this country, slowly strangling it, and it's not exclusive to the auto industry.

[w4rma]

6. The Republican Party thinking that the managers and owners have been

sing is responsible for this mess. Short sighted, short term, selfish, defunding research and development, wasteful.

How utterly *stupid* could a car company be to refuse to research hybrid technology. ***Stupid***. That technology will be used in just about every single care after a certain point and they have put themselves in a position where they may have to pay royalties to a Japanese company for that research.

Hybrid technology will be useful in all vehicles, no matter what fuel they use. Even Hydrogen cell cars have a use for the hybrid technology.

[Bluzmann57]

7. Bad management

The Unions don't make the rules, we are just trying to make a better life for our membership. Well, I will stand corrected partially. Seniority rules and bumping rights, etc. are mostly Union rules, but they were not given by the corporations. We, the Union members here in America and elsewhere had to fight for them. And its a shame about Ford and GM being in dire straits because in the '80's and '90's, the American automobile was making a strong comeback because car companies got the idea:Make sure quality is up to snuff first and then mass production will follow. I believe most people would still rather buy American than foreign but if the prices are too high and the quality too low, then people will buy foreign cars. And that sucks.

[solinvictus]

13. "Foreign" cars..

Hyundai is opening a plant here in Alabama and is joining Daimler/Benz and Honda in making cars in the South. I understand they are headquartered abroad, but technically, these will be American cars. I own a GM now (Chevy Metro LSI) only because it's a rebranded Suzuki. Unfortunately, GM has burned so many consumers on sub-standard automobiles that a savvy consumer would not touch one. Let's be realistic: in the 2005 Consumer Reports auto buyers guide, every Toyota save one was a recommended buy. I don't believe GM had a single vehicle on the list, except for the models to avoid due to poor quality. Even Kia, the bottom of the barrel, managed to get their SUV on the recommend list. That's sad for GM.

[gizmo1979]

8. The Union will get the

blame and the fallout.They'll end up taking wage cuts and benefit cuts.Gm saying health care costs off the top was an indicator of what their plan is.Bush will float his health care proposal now,and if you think his ssi idea was bad just get a load of his health care plan.

[KlatooBNikto]

9. GM and Ford's troubles are part of the problems that our has-been

economy will be faced with in the next few years.The term has-been economy is coined, not by me but by Paul Craig Roberts who was an assistant secretary of the Treausry in the Reagan Administration, a card carrying Republican Conservative.He says that the Bush administration has trashed our engineering professions to the point where all the skills are now being exported to China and India.The lack of jobs in the IT industry and the other engineering professions is going to decimate the future of our youngsters.The engineering profession is already being hurt by the depression in wages due to the importation of foreign engineers on H1B and L1 visas. I know engineers who are nothing but migrant workers going from one cubicle to another in glass houses.Even that migrant livelihood is drying up.
GM and Ford's managements should ask themselves this fundamental question: How is it that Toyota and Honda can run U.S. based plants paying the same wages as GM and Ford and run their businesses profitably and produce cars their American workers are proud to produce and the American consumers are proud to own?

These managements are a disgrace and utterly shameless.They rightly belong in the Republican Party.

[LdyGuique]

10. Back in the 50s, there was a term, "built-in obsolescence"

There was a lot of press coverage, books, and pundits who explored an on-going manufacturing policy of built-in obsolescence: stuff that was designed to break and cause repurchasing. It has been a long-term policy that now includes just about everything we buy, from clothing (with poor thread used for seams) to automobiles, etc. There is a vast difference between industry products that undergo genuine change and improvements, so that one wants to buy the latest and greatest do-wop gizmo.

There has been such a push for Americans to buy, buy, buy for years that it is taken for granted by most consumers that they "must" buy a new automobile every few years, partially because vehicles need ever-increasing amounts of repair and maintenance once they move beyond the warranty period. It was long believed that if the U.S. were to engineer automobiles similarly to the volvo that it would kill the automobile industry.

Volve ads stated that 90% of all volvos were still on the road after 17 years.

Americans have been brainwashed through advertising to buy, buy, buy. There is absolutely no need for new automobile models to be released annually -- we've been programmed to expect it and embrace it. Most people become downright nervous once their odometer turns over at 100,000 miles -- as though "this ancient piece of shit" is gonna die momentarily and required thousands of dollars of repairs to keep it running. This is not a completely false expectation as most of us have learned that this is what does happen.

When I fought overheating problems with my Pontiac TransSport a few years ago, it turned out to have an initial cause: the motor mount bolts were defective -- two had sheered off. Since it was beyond warranty, it cost me over $2,000 to have repaired. This was not the first time that the repair company had run into the problem.

Naturally, I will never buy another GMC product ever again.

There isn't an American consumer out there who hasn't a similar story, unless they are turning their cars over at about 60,000 miles.

This is an old, old story -- and it falls squarely on deliberately inadequate engineering of both vehicles and parts used.

[solinvictus]

14. Toyota as well...

I bought a 1985 Tercel with 150K miles on it, put 40K additional on it, and then sold it to my dad who's using it as a commuter car. How many 1985 GM vehicles could take that amount of use? I'd venture to say none owing to the terrible quality of GM in that decade.

Similar repair story to yours with Pontiac. A coworker of mine had a starter go out on a 1998 Pontiac Grand Am. $700 job because the motor had to be shifted to replace the starter. She repaired it and had it up for sale within a month and swore off GM forever.

[KlatooBNikto]

11. I think the sad state of our auto industry and the sad state of our

political situation in Iraq are related. They both come from illusions of our uniqueness and superiority.Such arrogance undermines the very essence of good business practice that requires a firm basis in reality;so does war where lack of contact with reality can be fatal.

As our automotive industry is finding out too late that our rivals have surpassed us and no one wants the junk peddled by GM and Ford anymore.Similarly, the world is getting tired of American pretensions of being the sole source of Democracy and Freedom,many are now seeking their own paths and I predict the same fate that has befallen our automotive, steel, computer and IT industries is going to happen to those industries.

[B Calm]

12. It will always be the unions fault. I worked for GM in 1973. I was

an hourly worker on 3rd shift, working as a iron pourer in a foundry. This was very hard, hot, and dirty work. There was over 100 iron pourers working on all three shifts. GM later came in an automated all 7 lines with robots. Now what took 100 people was done by three people who controled the machines. This not only was this done for iron pourers, but all over GM, saving the company millions and millions of dollars in labor costs. The company said this had to be done to remain competive in the market place. You'd think the cost of the automobile to the consumer would have been cheaper, wrong! The cost went up!! Whenever I hear someone bitching about how expensive a new car is and are blaming it on UAW, I blow my top!

[idlisambar]

15. blame American corporate culture

The American auto industry highly visible but far from the only one in decline. There are many specific failures on the part of GM, Ford, and Chrysler to get us in this state, but some apply just as well beyond the oil industry. One is our Wall-Street centered capital allocation system that places a premium on short-term results and discourages long-term investment; in some sense the lack of long-term thinking is a "management" problem but it goes beyond individual people or even individual decisions -- managers face an incentive structure in the U.S. that naturally leads them to poor decisions for the long-term health of a company. Two, lack of a national health care system hurts our auto companies a lot and the pain is getting greater.

[mrdmk]

16. A company is only a reflection of the management

End of story!

[murdoch]

17. Who's responsible for the demise of US textiles?

North Carolina is the least unionized state in the Union, its textile mills were not unionized at all, yet they've been shutting down and moving to Mexico for years (its at the point where mills are shuttind down in Mexico and moving to China). When management can point the finger at unions they do it, in the case of non-unionized factories like North Carolina textile mills it's "global competetiveness" or some other nonsense. I've been reading about this stuff for years and know that everything out of their mouth is a lie.

[Wilms]

19. .