https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/sources-gm-offers-2-raises-in-uaw-contract-ends-health-care/ar-AAHqRV8
Having just taking apart the fruits of your labors and noting how much of it is VERY easy to assemble even if it's a bear to get back apart...
Cars are definitely designed to be clicked together by someone with little to no upper body strength and little more than positive body temperature differential vs ambient.
What that means is $10 an hour will get the job done from any mouth-breathing high-school graduate.
I've seen the tooling at several plants too. Many of the fixtures are robots with a handle and deadman switch that a "highly skilled" union employee hangs onto while the program runs. A strip of tape can do that job.
It wasn't always this way. My dad used to work at Electromotive in the '70's and the skilled labor then was actually skilled and necessary to build those herking big engines.
But I love how the union guy cites the bankruptcy and how things haven't gotten back to the way they were...
No shit Sherlock!
Ain't ever going to be either.
The market changed and you guys are the last ones who can't accept it.
So, enjoy your $250 a week and COBRA coverage.
Maybe GM will hire some engineers who understand the words "tool clearance" and "make wear items accessible," with the money they're saving during the strike.
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The bosses at GM are offering an additional $2.00 an hour.
ReplyDeleteMe? If I was top head at GM? I'd ride the company into bankruptcy like a cheap horse before I'd appease those union thugs.
Or, better yet, move everything to the South, where people actually want to work. Would give the opportunity to fix some practices, get rid of long-term pains-in-the-asses, and get new workers and management.
Same goes with any Union Heavy shop anywhere. Close them down, move em out, hear the whining and crying from both ex-employees and the politicians who made money off of them. Screw unions. I can't think of a single industry, except maybe, maaaaybe coal miners, who benefit at all from unions in these modern times.
Come to think of it, was watching a show about employee-run coal mines in WV and, yeah, unions not needed there either.
Maybe GM will hire some engineers who understand the words "tool clearance" and "make wear items accessible," with the money they're saving during the strike.
ReplyDeleteWho do you think changed things so that this part is true?
Cars are definitely designed to be clicked together by someone with little to no upper body strength and little more than positive body temperature differential vs ambient.
What that means is $10 an hour will get the job done from any mouth-breathing high-school graduate.
Like everyone, engineers work on the problem they're assigned and they can't work on everything. Since there's no such thing as perfect way of doing things that everyone knows about (if there was, everyone would always do it that way) there's always a trade in how they do things.
Not concentrating on tool clearance and making wear items accessible means management hasn't made that a priority. Whenever there's a choice between easy assembly and easy maintenance, they'll choose easy assembly to bring costs down. If they made money on easy maintenance, it would get more attention. To them, maintenance means the dealer makes money, not the factory.
Actually, shitty access to parts can cost them money too. Warranty work.
DeleteA few things about the design of The Precious are blindingly obvious.
It's designed to be very easy to assemble without regard to disassembly: to get more out of the expensive union labor.
Access to parts which were expected to wear out is abysmal: Decades of laying off the white-collar engineering workforce (because the union labor is devouring all the money) means the people with the most experience have departed for good leaving relatively inexperienced, but talented, engineers unfettered to create.
The kind of engineering talent that could avoid the issues with working on it and make it easy to get assembled avoid the auto industry's hire/fire cycle like the plague.
The UAW is to the automotive industry what Spanish moss is to a tree. (Spanish moss looks very picturesque, but it's slowly destroying the tree.)
ReplyDelete