With all due respect, my personal comment . . . long as it was . . . WAS car-related
Because I’m a mechanic, and was talking about my professional experience, both as a worker in the private sector, and as a worker in the public sector
I was speaking about the various perceptions about unionized workers . . . which includes workers in the automotive industry
So I don’t think we’ve veered very far off course
“As the ancient Greeks believed…Everything in moderation…
Once anything goes to extremes, it is not a good thing.”
Oh, I don’t know about that…
extremely high quality craftsmanship displayed on those new Chinese built Buicks seems like a good thing for China, GM, and the U.S consumer. 
CSA
“Oh, I don’t know about that…
extremely high quality craftsmanship displayed on those new Chinese built Buicks seems like a good thing for China, GM, and the U.S consumer”
Would that it were…
From your lips to God’s ears…
And keeping this automotive… Boxes of auto parts from long established manufacturers are often not what they seem. Bearings and seals especially are imported from China where they are manufactured by or for the American corporation whose label they are sold under. Domestically produced wheel bearings can be difficult to buy and to identify them the box must be opened and the bearing removed from the sealed wrapper to read the markings on the races. For years I insisted on domestic bearings and seals only but gave up when I found myself chasing my tail looking for them all too often.
I do agree that union leadership seemed to get drunk with power in the late 50s.
I live in Mexico, as I have said many times. Several years ago, in Tecamachalco there were some small cars for sale in a store. I went and looked. They were Chinese.
The engines were Toyota licensed. I would expect no less, or the equivalent, for Chinese cars to be sold in the USA. And, you can be sure the rest of the car will meet US safety and smog standards or they won’t be sold in the USA.
Most union members in the USA do not make big Auto company wages and benefits. Electronic workers in California normally made twice what we did. We had a union because both office and management routinely referred to highly skilled production workers as “low lifes” and did not let their kids play with our kids. In most cases, when a company gets a union, they deserve it.
You want to drive your company into a union, publicly direct personal insults at the employees, or mistreat the employee’s kids,
Of my four kids, one graduated from med school; one is a university math research professor; one has a Masters in Science Ed, and one is an R.N. Their refusal to let their kids play with mine kept my kids from being dragged down to their level, heh, heh.
One thing most folks do not realize is unions do indeed protect drones. They also protect the super competent who are always fired long before the drones when there is no union.
@VDCDriver Yes the auto unions and incompetent and arrogant management nearly killed the North American car companies in both Canada and the US. The biggest victim was the state of Michigan.
Mexico now makes more cars than Canada, a country that has plants dating from the early 1900s. The “Giant Sucking Sound” (Ross Perot) was not due to NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) but union greed and management constantly caving in.
The year the Big Three closed 5 plants in Canada, Toyota and Honda opened two new ones.!
Know why there is a Labor day, a day of support of unions and workers rights was created? in case you do not,
“A labor movement in Chicago in 1894 left 30 Pullman workers dead, and later spurred Congress and President Grover Cleveland to pass a bill creating Labor Day. But the history of this holiday is rarely taught in schools, and there are few full-time labor journalists to write about working class communities.”
So workers protesting indecent standards were shot and killed. In order to pacify the hostility, labor day was created, now things were not that different than they are now, temp workers, just lucky to get a job, ceo’s pay increasing rapidly, workers pay stable or falling, sure i have an upcoming pension, but kids today face a really bleak future, privatize social security is another scam to make the rich richer and everyone else poorer, cannot do more than write my congeressman, reminds me of mad as hell, but it does not change.
Yes the auto unions and incompetent and arrogant management nearly killed the North American car companies in both Canada and the US.
I have several relatives who worked in the auto industry for decades. Some just laborers…others in executive positions. They ALL agree it was 90% management that killed the jobs.
I wholeheartedly agree that it was 90% management that killed the jobs in the automotive industry. And that includes the labor union management, who eventually exploited the workers in the last half of the 20th century as much as the managers exploited the workers in the first half of the 20th century.
But there are also tremendously poor decisions made by automotive management totally unrelated to labor. Things like scheduling volume based upon the numbers that made the individual manufacturing plants have the most “efficient” production figures as calculated by volumes vs. capacity and then offering incentives to dump excess inventory that didn’t sell. They got away with it during the period of prosperity, but when the market sank they ended up with huge parking lots full of thousands of unsold vehicles… vehicles that they’d already spend the money to build. Had they scheduled build quantities based on market demand and made regular adjustments to production output on an ongoing basis, they wouldn’t have ended up with anywhere near the negative cash flow and probably wouldn’t have gone bankrupt.
People stopped buying American cars because they weren’t very good, not because they were too expensive. Quality is almost entirely a matter of competent engineering, not whether the guy assembling the car is a unionized worker in Michigan or someone in Mexico. The Toyotas and Hondas made in the US or anywhere else are of the same quality as those made in Japan. The UAW got carried away at times, but they didn’t design the junk they assembled. The profits would have been a bit higher if the US companies weren’t paying union wages, but ultimately their problem was a massive decline in market share. They would have been in bad shape sooner if they didn’t have steady truck sales to rely on.
Engineering is definitely an element of quality, but I would argue that good quality is almost entirely a matter of competent management. Engineers take their orders from management.
In the '70s, domestic auto manufacturers went so far as to hire “value engineers”, whose sole function was to ensure that every single part of every single design was made as inexpensively as possible.
Speaking of engineering at the Big 3, can anyone with hands on experience with the Vega engine find a positive innovation in that boat anchor? The Chevette engine was significantly superior. A Teledyne Continental street sweeper engine was superior. Ross Perot’s criticism of GM seemed to have been dead on.
I’ve yet to work with an engineer who doesn’t want to do the job right. I’ve worked for companies (and I’ll never work for them again) where we were about 2 weeks behind on shipping a software release out…senior manager came in and said “SHIP IT AS IS”. We complied…and our customer support had to almost triple their staff just to accommodate the added calls and complaints. Several companies dropped us…We had to get out a patch to fix the early release…which really prevented us from doing or normal work. And then another patch…And all that extra work put us behind on the next two projects. 2 months later a senior manager calls a meeting for all engineers…and said he;s very unhappy with all the projects that have been slipping. That was the LAST time I worked for a non technical engineer. I turned down many full-time and contracting/consulting jobs since then because the manager wasn’t technical…but just a business manager who was put in charge of engineers.
Many parts of the auto industry is like that now. Many people in management positions over engineers and manufacturing have business degrees with no technical experience. And in most cases it’s a disaster.
The Big Three resented Edward Deming’s quality programs, which were endorsed and enshrined into the Toyota Quality Programs as well as adopted by may other Japanese companies…
I took one of those “Value Engineering” courses referred to by a previous poster. It was really about “cost reduction” i.e. cheapening things without regard to durability or reliability.
The Toyota way of reducing cost is to first define the required function and quality of the item. Then make it as EFFICIENTLY as possible which will result in a lower cost. but the quality does not get lost in the process. This was apparently totally lost on GM management as revealed by the ignition switch fiasco. Honda has Six Sigma standards quality for all its suppliers.
Honda has Six Sigma standards quality for all its suppliers.
GM, Ford and Chryco all have the Six Sigma certification. I’ve found it to be nothing more then a marketing ploy to make some people very wealthy. Same as the ISO-9000 standard. I know a couple engineers that quit their jobs and started an ISO-9000 training facility. They retired before they turned 50.
Awards are bought and paid for by all types of organizations. My local paper has developed a grand appreciation of meaningless awards by its readers and so there is a constant stream of front page stories of awards for All American City, Malcomb Baldridge, Community Involvement, Greatest Weight Loss, Best Hamburger in the World(that’s really an award), etc, ad nauseum.
Is Mad Magazine still in business? I’m sure they have done a great parody on meaningless awards.
Six Sigma and IOS-9000 are NOT awards. They are certifications. Their intent was to certify that a company is doing manufacturing or design a certain verifiable way. And if you followed these standards it would ensure that your company produces a product at a high standard, Problem is…it didn’t always work. Some companies only followed it until they got their certification…there has also been wide accusations of bribery…and in many cases - even though they’d follow the standard to the letter…they still were producing cr*p. I equate these certifications to Carfax.
Six Sigma means you are allowed one bad item in every 345,000 or so. Prior to Japanese Manufacturers setting these requirements, just about everything was shipped and the dealers ended up correcting the bad stuff under warranty.
Lucas Electric of England (“Prince of Darkness”) had a 30%!!! defect rate on their assembly lines. The ones that got through were not adequately tested and had a predicted short life expectancy due to bad design and bad manufacturing.
The Japanese camera industry adopted statistical quality control as well as thorough testing in order to get international acceptance. The rest is history,
ISO programs on the other hand standardise what you are doing; if you are lousy, it standardizes that. FIAT long ago became an ISO9000 certified company which consistently produced inferior products.
As usual everyone is right. Unions have protected workers and unions have caused decline. Managers have caused decline and workers have performed poorly. There are good unions and bad unions and unions that have lost their way and stolen pension funds and companies that have done the same thing. Good and bad, both are correct but I have heard accounts of what it was like back in the old days in some industries and unions were necessary. Doesn’t it really boil down to the quality of the people involved and what they allow on both sides?
And we did study the history of industries and labor and how our system came to be and how it differed from Europe.
Having owned a Vega (bought new in '72) I can tell you that the problems went way beyond the engine. The fenders were made of the thinnest sheetmetal in the history of the world. The valance panels weren’t even thin metal… they were cheap, thin plastic that crumbled at the slightest hint of a tow strap. The cooling system was inadequate. The idle stop solenoid bracket broke and the solenoid fell into the accelerator linkage. The rear corner of the engine eroded its way through the heater hose. The door hinges were shot after only three years and I had to lift the door to close it. And on, and on, and on.
I finally got rid of mine when the rear axle slid out of the housing. The C-clip in the differential that held the axles in used to fall off. I had it checked at two different dealerships under recall and the axle STILL fell out. After reinstalling the axle I drove straight to the Toyota dealer. Haven’t looked back since.