When we read over at Automotive News [sub] that GM is asking employees at the Vehicle Engineering Center in suburban Detroit, the proving ground in Milford, Mich., and the desert proving ground near Mesa, Ariz to take December 22nd and 23rd off, we wanted some answers. After all, GM spokesman Dan Flores’ claim that “it’ll give us significant savings in utilities and facility expenses,” is hardly credible. Sure, GM is trying to make $5b in cuts by the new year celebrations, but cutting two days of salaried work surely isn’t a cost-effective solution, is it? Well, we reached for the big red phone and were lucky enough to be connected directly to Rick Wagoner himself. What follows is a transcript of our conversation.
TTAC: At this festive time of year, Mr. Scrooge Wagoner, it is more than usually desirable that we should make some slight provision for the poor and destitute, who suffer greatly at the present time, is it not?
Wagoner: Why? Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?
TTAC: Many can’t go there; and many would rather die.
Wagoner: If they would rather die, they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population. Besides, If I could work my will, every idiot who goes about with ‘Merry Christmas’ on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart. He should!
TTAC: You… you’re not serious, right? Surely you’re better than that?
Wagoner: I’m too old and beyond hope! Go and redeem some younger, more promising creature, and leave me to keep Christmas in my own way!
TTAC: Men’s courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if persevered in, they must lead. But if the courses be departed from, the ends will change.
Wagoner: Bah, Humbug.
I call fool! The real Wagoner would never be as clear, and every word would be MBa’d, CPA’d, and PR’d to death!
I am outraged! I am a distant relative of Scrooge, and I’ll be damned if anyone is going to compare my kin to Rick Wagoner! Expect to hear from my lawyer!
Harsh but true. He doesn’t care.
Many years ago I got laid off on December 23rd, along with two other attorneys and a paralegal.
The managing partner confided that business was a little slow, and he didn’t want to have to pay for a week of paid vacation for each of us. We four ‘terminees’ repaired to the bar after cleaning our desks, and the Scrooge jokes flowed like scotch, er, water.
Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grind- stone, that managing partner! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire…
I know how those poor GM sods must feel.
GM (via the gracious negotiating of the UAW) has 8 days as paid holidays in that period.
Asking the salaried folks to take an additional 2 paid vacation days to make it a full 2 weeks hardly smacks of Grinchiness.
At $14.4-million a year GM can save $1.2-million by giving Wagoner December off, 24-percent of the $5-billion savings goal. It’s probably more than the savings generated by stiffing the little people two days pay.
This is far less nefarious than it sounds. Federal law requires a company to retain payroll owed to employees until payment, and the company cannot use that cash for anything else; borrowing from the payroll is a surefire way to go to federal pound-me-in-the-tuckus prison. This is to ensure that if you work on Monday, the company has the cash to pay you on Friday, even if it goes out of business on Wednesday (a real concern for GM.) This goes for paid vacation days, too. If you’ve earned them, the company has to hold onto the cash to pay you for them, in some locked box somewhere; it’s like Social Security, except in this case not a child’s fairy tale.
So, if you take paid vacation, the company can use that saved up cash that it can’t use for anything else to pay your salary, instead of having to keep allocating funds to payroll. This improves the profit/loss ratio. Now for GM this is asymptotically approaching Zero anyway, but every little bit helps, and if you do this to a LOT of employees, it can help quite a bit. (Hey, two days ain’t bad. My employer is ‘giving’ us three weeks off this winter.)
Another shallow analysis based on a sad lack of knowledge about the company. Using the obscure search engine “Google” I find the . By combining that with a calender I see that GM’s scheduled to work Monday and Tuesday and that this will allow them to close 3 large complexes 4 days early. They are giving up whatever work the 10 people who weren’t already taking that time off would have done. Wow, I’m sure that would have been epic.
“GM can save $1.2-million by giving Wagoner December off, 24-percent of the $5-billion savings goal.”
It would be 0.024% of the savings goal…
You’re right. I misread the savings goal.
It’s almost like Charles Dickens based Ebenezer Scrooge off of Rick Wagoner. Brilliant!
Still waiting for the self-administered $1 paycheck on Mr. Wagoner…
Mr. Wagoner, FOR WHAT HE HAS DONE TO THE COMPANY, SHOULD BE HANGED BY THE NECK UNTIL DEAD.
Seem harsh ? How much money has he lost the company during his tenure as chief ? And how much has he been paid for this service ? Mere wall street thieves whisper in awed reverence at the mention of his deeds ! Destroying General Motors, and being made lavishly rich in the process ! We bow at the alter of the First Church of the Almighty Bean Counter, and await our fate.
And to think I could go to jail for shop lifting a $100 item at the local big box retailer… (I wouldn’t shoplift).
Top level managment has lost billions yet they’ll get all the perks and benefits coming to them…