GM and labor costs

[TimeLady Victorious]

In todays headlines:

"GM to lay off 21,000 employees and the Government may end up as the majority share holder"

Don't forget about the UAW, too.

Finally, the workers own the means of production! ... Now let's see how they'll fuck it up.

[davann]

In todays headlines:

"GM to lay off 21,000 employees and the Government may end up as the majority share holder"

This is the risk one takes when joining a union.  It would have been sadder if these 21,000 employees continued in their make work jobs. Now they can go out and become productive members of society.

All that talk from grandpa about how his generation faught for all our current workers rights was a lie. What they really faught for and won, to the detriment of us all, was a culture of entitlement. The age of entitlement is on it's last legs and that is a good thing. Time to put grandpapa and his unions down.

[Bill Brasky]

Socialism killed those companies.  And by socialism, I mean UAW and road safety laws.  

Companies ask the government for assistance all the time, its not uncommon.  Even before this bubble bullshit impacted them, they were weak and slumping under their own weight which you can lay blame (or part of it) at the feet of UAW.  If they had more flexibility in their labor and weren't restricted by the government by adhering to design safety standards (which they woulda done voluntarily, nobody wants a car that doesn't perform well in crashes), they wouldn't need any bailout right now, at all.  

Their products would have been much more cutting edge if they had a free hand in the product design and labor of their own company.  Comparatively speaking, they didn't require a whole hell of a lot of bailout TARP funding, especially when you consider how long these problems were brewing.  

If anything, they might have asked for some tax forgiveness or tax restructuring.  Which I think we can all probably agree, tax is destructive to business anyway - so asking the feds to take the boot off their neck isn't really a sin.  But in this case, it turns out to be a loan with big strings attached.  The problem was, in this case, everyone ran to the Gov at the same time, and got themselves in the spotlight for it.  Put this incident in a different time, say, three years ago, it woulda been business as usual.  GM says we have problems, gov writes check, GM pays back with interest.  Thats what they woulda done privately with a different lender anyway, if the lenders weren't fucked up and hurtin'.