With this I disagree. Naked competition with foreign labor, thanks to free trade, is killing these companies. Wages are in a race to the bottom.
not totally. i have been a gm guy all of my life but i must admit that outside of their trucks they made some real crappy cars. their economy cars were total crap.
You are right, not totally. But I submit that given fixed high wages, something had to give. In your experience, that was quality.
This article explains some of the details that are often left out by the union/labor-hating crowd. Note at the bottom that labor costs are about 10% of the total cost of a car. http://www.factcheck.org/askfactcheck/do_auto_workers_really_make_more_than.html I do agree that foreign labor is cheaper and that is an macro-economic fact that we can do nothing about short of erecting trade barriers. That is not on the agenda of most 'liberals' including myself. I stand by my original statement that MANAGEMENT, a bloated, short-sighted management is the cause of the auto makers woes. GM has 8 different divisions; they had over 250 Vice Presidents. They failed to see the movement to smaller cars: twice ! They sacrificed quality for short-term profits. They expanded into businesses that they knew nothing about and failed to re-invest in their main business: making cars. If 'auto-making in the US was too expensive' then Nissan, Toyota and Honda would be having the same problems as GM and Ford. (Of course, ALL producers are having trouble now due to the recession but GM, Ford, and Chrysler have been sinking and struggling for air since the 1970's.
It doesn't matter which Bush supporters have used the exact same argument. It doesn't matter because they would look just as dumb as the Obama supporters because the argument is a joke. It is not a hard concept to understand.
Not really in disagreement here (I am not a "union hater" btw), but I do think we are talking about two somewhat different meanings of labor. Total compensation (including those legacy costs) is more to my point. I certainly did not mean that management had no role in the problem. Don't discount the effect of brand loyalty when comparing the domestic performance of the big three vs. the domestic performance of the other three! The Japanese really won the quality initiative back in the 70's and 80's.
"It doesn't matter which Bush supporters have used the exact same argument." Yes, it does matter, and it also matters that you can not produce even one Bush supporter who made the exact same argument. Try showing the argument is a joke...something apparently you are unable to do.
Sorry, Lucrum, still not heard anything of substance. I listened to a couple of the videos and watched a blundering, populous-spouting Mike Church try to turn seriously deep issues into bumper sticker retorts. They weren't clever or insightful. Selecting sentences and even partial sentences out of a person's speech or statements will never make for convincing arguements for me.
I don't think Lucrum really needed to present anything to counter your claims using "all" and "never", such claims are typically easy to shoot down. That said, it may well be that you have never met such liberals, particularly if you have simply not met many liberals.
You don't think the situations are symmetrical because you agree with the far left more than the far right. Why is it so hard for you to understand that the far left and far right follow ideologies? The far left thinks Bush ruined the economy. The far right thinks Clinton and the Democratic Congress ruined the economy. They are both to blame because neither party saw the need for an improvement in financial regulations. You think more on the right want America to fail because you only look at the worst parts of the far right and not the far left. You have basically brainwashed yourself. In a way you are the complete opposite of Glenn Beck. If you actually had the ability to get rid of your bias you would be able to see that both sides have radicals and both sides increase in intensity when they lose power.