>NHLPA at least provides a service for which substitutes are much harder to find. Some auto worker can be relatively easily replaced. A highly skilled hockey player, that takes a LOT more. Good point. I guess I should have said PA executives.
And Michigan lost to a 1AA school
Here’s an anecdotal story I just remembered that says something about the woes of the American auto industry. A friend of mine went to college for engineering in Michigan. A lot of his classmates were getting some pretty poor grades. So he asked them one day if they were concerned about getting a good job out of college with those not-so-great grades. Many responded that since their dad already worked for Ford/GM/Chrysler, it didn’t really matter. They already had a job lined up.
hey jrumph what is your email?
So I had this student once who was pretty smart but more interested in everything else but school. The graduation requirements are that you have a B- average in your major. At the end of senior year, he didn’t have a B- in his mechanical engineering major and would have taken like 6 courses with A’s to get there. So he sitched to math where he had like a C+ average. And that fifth year he got farther from being able to graduate than at the beginning of the year even though he passed all his classes. He works for GM now. Smart guy, though. If he concentrated on building cars we might have a chance against the Japanese.
CFAdetroit Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > hey jrumph what is your email? joe.rumph at gmail
Put yourself in their shoes. Where else are they going to get a job making anything close to their current wage? If I were in that situation and not (fortunately) a disinterested observer, I would hold out for job security as well - rational behavior or not. It doesn’t matter that the union is dead wrong on this issue - someone is trying to take away their cheese and the rank and file workers either can’t or won’t go find another source of cheese. They seem to prefer sinking the ship to jettisoning some passengers to save the majority. As a disinterested observer, the best thing that could happen to GM, Ford and Chrysler is for the UAW to disband and have the market set wages and benefits. Second best outcome would be for all three automakers to declare bankruptcy and make all of their cars overseas while they restructure. Under both scenarios, the US would ultimately lose fewer jobs than having the big three cave to UAW job security demands.
This is one of the funniest posts I have read in quite a while. I’d say just get rid of GM, but then you wouldn’t have that nice view of its headquarters from the river walk in Windsor, Ontario.
If you really want funny check out the stories in the Detroit news…anytime you read a quote from a UAW worker you’ll get a laugh… ““We’ve really gotten slammed again,” said Mike Thomas, an electrician at the Detroit-Hamtramck assembly plant. “It goes on and on. They want to keep us workers for third-world wages. What we want here is accountability and fairness. It’s our future.”” http://www.detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070925/AUTO01/709250359 there are several more articles on the right side of the page in the link above.
I wonder if Mike Thomas has a clue about the real world.