View Single Post - If the big 3 declare bankruptcy are warranties ok?

acruxksa · Rated XXX

Many European and Japanese cars are in fact made right here in the USA so it's not like we as a country can't put out a quality product. It's just that somewhere along the line the big three lost focus. As much as I like the muscle cars and would love to have a Charger, Chrysler/Dodge has some of the worst gas hogs around. GM and Ford are no better either, I've got friends with GM trucks (6.0l gas engine) that literally get 13 or 14mpg on the highway. The Hummers are even worse!

Unions aren't all bad, I'm in a union and have to say I do quite well, although I benefit more from a high cost of entry and certification (in terms of time and money) in my field than the union. In some cases though, they can fail to be reasonable and end up squeezing companies out of business rather than realizing things need to change. The differences in labor contracts can also be partially attributed to location, generally it's much cheaper to live in the Southern US than in the North East. This trend toward the Southern States is also in jeopardy though, because I've read studies done by some foreign auto manufacturers that point to Canada as a better choice because of a generally higher level of education in the workforce at the same or slightly lower overall cost.

It's not all the Unions though because there are literally hundreds of occasions where unions were told they needed to make concessions to keep the company alive and were happy to do so, only to have management take huge bonus's for saving the company money. Continental Airlines was a nice semi-recent example. The pilots took a small wage reduction and management turned around and sent themselves millions of dollars in bonus's and pay raises. Sort of like Congress cutting our pay by raising taxes and then voting behind closed doors to give themselves a pay raise.
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