General Motors plans to add a second shift worth as many as 1,000 jobs to its Detroit-Hamtramck plant late this year, as the automaker prepares to ramp up production of its Chevrolet Volt extended-range electric car.
Current plans have second-shift workers arriving for training late this year and starting production in earnest in early 2012,
Now, it makes sense that any “more assembly jobs are coming” story would play big in Detroit, but does this mean GM has its suppliers lined up for a second shift of Volt production? Can the market support the increased volumes GM has been talking about (25k instead of 10k this year, 60k+ instead of the planned 45k next year)? As it turns out, those questions haven’t actually been answered yet…
As General Motors Co. gets closer to emerging from government oversight, the automaker is trying to hire Bob Lutz, its former chief of vehicle development, as a consultant…
The U.S. Treasury has opposed Lutz’s appointment on the grounds that, since he left the company last May, paying him so close to his retirement could look like a sweetheart payout. The government could soften its opposition in three months, once a year has passed since Lutz’s retirement.
Could it be true? Could the man credited with all of GM’s success and none of its failures really be coming back for more? More to the point, as a consultant? Bob’s current gigs are advising an electric scooter company and the Lotus “revival”… does GM really want to put itself in that company? Oh, who are we kidding? We want Lutz back. The industry just seems so damn boring without him…
In order to build the Chevrolet Sonic subcompact in America, the UAW agreed to a deal in which Tier One workers earning $28/hr could be forced to take a 50% paycut to keep the Sonic profitable for GM. Because the union membership never voted on the deal and can not strike against it, the agreement has rubbed salt in the wounds opened by the two-tier wage system. Some 40 percent of Tier One workers at the Orion Township plant where the Sonic will be built were supposed to be bumped to Tier Two, but thanks to strong truck sales, the Freep reports that all of the workers facing a cramdown have been able to transfer out of Orion and keep their Tier One status.
nearly 470 of Orion’s 1,100 first-tier workers have accepted GM’s offer to transfer to Flint, which is adding a third shift by the third quarter to help build heavy-duty pickups, the person familiar with the planning said. Another 71 have elected to stay at other factories where they’ve worked while Orion was idled to retool.
That means the rest of the first-tier workers at Orion will be able to return to the factory at their original pay.
And the good news keeps on coming: the NLRB appears to have rejected the complaints filed against the UAW by its members, and GM’s profit-sharing bonuses are said to be the biggest in the company’s history. In a few months, the UAW appears to have beaten back one of its biggest challenges since the bailout. Of course, if HD Pickup demand declines, the workers who transferred to Flint will be looking for work again, and they may be forced to accept wage cuts to go back to Orion. Meanwhile, the two-tier system will likely continue to create tensions on shop floors around the country. For now though, it seems the crisis has passed… just in time for a new negotiating session.
Ford introduces something totally new and unexpected at NAIAS: Jobs! 7,000 of them. The Freep has it from “a person familiar with the planning.” (Read More…)
As the biggest week in the American auto industry, the annual North American International Auto Show in Detroit regularly attracts a sideshow of protesters bent on sending a message to the hordes of executives and analysts who cram Cobo Hall. In 2009, UAW members marched against the possibility that the auto bailout (then still a work-in-progress) would require union concessions. Last year, Tea Party groups rallied to protest the government’s ownership of GM and Chrysler, while UAW members counter-rallied in support of the bailout (apparently those concessions weren’t so bad). This year will be no exception to the trend, as dissident UAW members will be protesting the union’s two-tier wage system, a pre-bailout concession that has created considerablecontroversy of late. And they’ll be getting support (if only in word, not action) from across their friends from the North, as the Canadian Auto Worker boss has recently called for an end to the two-tier system, saying
That has to be a strategy of the UAW to gradually get out of the two-tiered system. I don’t know if it can happen overnight, but they’ve got to start sending signals to future employees that the low, tiered wages are not something that can sustain families long term
With some 60k Italian jobs and a $20b investment at stake, Fiat’s “Fabbrica Italia” renovation of its home-country production plans are crucial to the integration of Fiat and Chrysler. And rather than negotiating a national labor agreement with Italy’s fractious unions, Fiat has been revamping its Italian plants on a case-by-case basis. This strategy has already backfired at the firm’s Naples-based Pomigliano plant, where the Italian metalworker’s union Fiom decried Fiat’s plans as “discriminatory.” Since then, Fiat has moved onto its Mirafiori plant in Turin, where Fiat wants to build the next-generation Compass/Patriot models for Chrysler and a derivative SUV for Alfa-Romeo on the firm’s new “Compact Wide” platform. And once again, Fiom is up to its old tricks. The WSJ reports that every other union has approved the new Mirafiori deal with Fiat, except Fiom, which has been banned from representing workers at the plant, pending a January vote by workers. However, Fiom represents some 22 percent of Mirafiori workers, and the union has announced an eight-hour strike for January 28.
If there’s a face of Toyota’s overinvestment in the United States market, it’s the company’s Blue Springs, Mississippi assembly plant. Construction on the billion-dollar plant was begun in 2007, but was halted in 2008, when plummeting demand for new automobiles forced Toyota to cut back on is US manufacturing capacity. For the past two years, Toyota’s 170 workers at the Mississippi plant have been doing their best to stay busy, but the Wall Street Journal reports that hiring has now been restarted and the plant will begin producing Corollas next fall. But will demand be high enough for Toyota to justify its eighth production plant in the US? Not everyone seems to think so… (Read More…)
Automotive News [sub] reports that Mitsubishi Motors North America has reached a deal with the workers of UAW Local 2488 to keep its assembly plant in Normal, Il open for the foreseeable future, building vehicles based on a new platform. Mitsubishi previously missed a deadline to assign new products to the Normal plant, forcing the firm to increase base wages there. With wages increasing and no new products in the offing, many have speculated that Mitsu would exit the US market, a move its CEO has strongly rejected. In fact, it now appears that Mitsubishi will cut back or abandon its European production rather than exit the US. But the new deal with its US labor force hasn’t shed any new light on how Mitsubishi will achieve its goal to quadruple sales… and until the firm announces new products for US production, this mystery will only deepen.
Bailing out the U.S. auto industry was all in the name of jobs, jobs, jobs, and the recent sales increases in new cars should have made a decent dent into the jobless rate. It just didn’t work out quite as expected. By the end of the year, J.D. Power expects that 11.8 million units will have been made in North America, up 38 percent from 8.5 million units in 2009. And where did the jobs go? They went mostly south. (Read More…)
It’s the most wonderful time of the year, as the Detroit automakers reach for their checkbooks and write out annual cost-of-living adjustment bonus checks, known fondly among workers as the annual “Christmas Bonus.” This year, GM, Ford and Chrysler will pay out $305m in these COLA “bonus” checks… but, in classic UAW style, you can only get one if you no longer work. Yes, you got that right: if you are a salaried or hourly worker currently employed by GM, there will be no COLA bonus this year… or even next year. If, however, you are one of the lucky GM retirees who never had to face the modern challenges of two-tier wages and a near-bankruptcy experience, check your mailbox because there should be a $700 check waiting there to make your Christmas a little brighter. After all, retirees are the future of every company… right? [via Automotive News [sub]]
The recent “Carpocalypse” has not been kind to automotive engineers, as automakers cut back on Research and Development and fired white collar workers with abandon. Now, with sales regaining some momentum, OEMs and suppliers are hiring engineers again… and they’re having to work to make the hires. The supplier Ricardo recently had to take out billboards and radio ads in order to hire qualified automotive engineers… and this in a state with 12.8% unemployment. CEO Kent Niederhoffer tells Bloomberg
We’re all playing in the same sandbox, competing for some of the same talent. It isn’t as simple as throwing a shingle out there and saying ‘Job Opening.’ Attracting this kind of talent has gotten absolutely tougher and we’re trying to raise our head above the crowd.
Automotive News [sub] reports that GM is bringing out its first round of buyouts since emerging from government-structured bankruptcy a year and a half ago. The General is offering skilled trades workers at 13 plants some $60,000 a head to leave the company, as the firm tries to cut down its ranks of skilled trade workers, of which it has “several thousand” too many. Qualifying workers who have already reached retirement age will receive $60k and full benefits, while younger workers will have to give up retiree benefits to qualify for the buyout. The offer is good at 13 GM plants, eight of which are closed, on standby, or scheduled to close, including Orion Assembly, where 40 percent of the recalled workers have been bumped into the UAW’s second tier typically reserved for new hires (or pushed to another factory to piss off yet more workers). GM hasn’t announced how many buyouts it is looking for in the current round, but with nearly half of Orion’s workers alone facing a 50 percent pay cut (and the UAW pushing for buyouts for months now), it seems likely that GM will be able to convince a whole mess of workers to leave their jobs. Especially if there are more “innovative provisions” coming down the pipe.
Unable to provide meaningful representation to its dwindling membership, the United Auto Workers is continuing its post-bailout strategy of poking its nose into everyone else’s business with a protest planned for today at the Hyundai America Technical Center in Ann Arbor, MI. While its own workers face the aftermath of a bailout that saw tens of US plants shut down, the UAW opines on the Korean situation in a release which notes:
Frustrated by their temporary status, auto workers at a Hyundai Motor Co.mpany plant in Ulsan, South Korea, declared a strike on Nov. 15, and one desperate worker set himself on fire in protest of the company’s refusal to offer secure jobs. About 500 workers have since led an occupation of various plants in the Hyundai compound… To anyone interested in workplace fairness, the resolution of the Ulsan Hyundai workers’ strike is critical. It could either speed up progress toward ensuring global living wages, or provide a green light on the race to the bottom the auto industry began years ago – — with Toyota and Hyundai getting a head start.
One must, however, point out that the UAW has made its fair share of contributions to recent declines in auto worker wages. After all, it forced nearly half of GM’s Orion Assembly plant workforce to take a 40 percent wage cut in order to build a politically-popular fuel-efficient subcompact (the next-gen Aveo) in the US. Not only did this represent an unconscionablescrewing of its own union “brothers” but it also directly hurts the Korean workers the UAW now so self-righteously defends by by stealing jobs using the very same “race to the bottom” that it decries. Besides, the labor situation in Korea is a bit more complex than the UAW’s Manichean moralizing makes it out to be… (Read More…)
If you read one thing today, read “Ghosts Of The Old GM” by Paul Clemens in today’s NY Times. At a time of increasing triumphalism over the “success” of the Auto Bailout, Clemens unflinchingly reminds us of the terrible price we’ve paid to bring America’s auto industry back to halting life. From deserted plants, to the world of “surplus industry service providers” (yes, taking apart industry is an industry), Clemens chases down the the truth with tenacity:
For General Motors, divided into its “Old” and “New” halves, there’s an inescapable paradox: the only possible route to future profitability is to create, through plant closings, monuments to past unprofitability. Old G.M. may have gone away for the purposes of the stock offering, but it didn’t go away in what might rightfully be called actuality.
Recent Comments