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Originally Posted by protovack

Nothing like a little corporate restructuring to bring all the GM naysayers out of the woodwork to bash GM and predict its failure. Funny, you'd never know that there are so many intelligent, visionary executives sitting around on Camaro6.com who could solve all of GMs problems in 5 minutes because they're so much smarter than the people running a global corporation that sells hundreds of thousands of cars every year. I appreciate the critical viewpoint, and its important to keep GM accountable, absolutely. But the level of discourse in this thread is grade school level at best. Most people have absolutely no clue what kinds of sacrifices and hard decisions it takes to keep a huge company running and thriving, in a market where there is such insane competition. All the companies have their issues, even the german luxury makers have big issues. VW for god's sake there are hundreds of thousands of VW cars sitting rotting in parking lots right now due to essentially corporate fraud on a grand scale.

People in the US have this myopic view of the world where GM is evil, GM is the only car company in the world with problems, GM is sponging off the american taxpayers which is a load of BS, often spoken by people with an agenda to push. The euro companies have it stupidly simple compared to GM--all their employees live in semi-socialist nanny states and they have healthcare and benefits all guaranteed by the government already. GM has provided huge amounts of economic growth in this country and has stuck around in places where nobody else would go. You don't think the other companies try to play the system? The ONLY reason toyota and others have plants in the USA is because those states basically said we'll give you a free ride. If they hadn't been willing to do that, the companies would be somewhere else too. It's essentially a repeat of history in a different place. Some day, the Toyota plant in Kentucky will close and leave a few thousand people without jobs.

One must deal in economic realities. GM can't stay in Detroit forever, or Oshawa forever. As long as you want to show up on a Chevrolet lot and expect to walk away with a car for thousands less than MSRP every time, then you have to deal with the consequences of those type of expectations. Paying the healthcare costs and benefits for American workers is super expensive. I wonder how many people would actually choose to pay more for their car knowing that it was made in the USA by workers with great stable jobs with benefits. Sure a lot of people will claim of course they would, but when it comes down to signing the papers, people want to pay as little as possible and get as much as possible.

Well now, aren't YOU the superior one! Doing exactly what you're claiming others are doing. Grade school level? And you're qualified to judge everyone... how? It's a forum, not an executive meeting. I wouldn't want to run GM; being CEO consumes you, every second of your life's energy.

You've dramatically over-simplified "people in the US" in order to make your point which isn't actually much above grade school itself. There's a lot to being in business in this country, much of which deals with regulations and legal issues. The costs of keeping lawyers on retainer or actually on the payroll is staggering. If you're in business, especially a large corporation, you're going to get sued; guaranteed. They don't have those issues overseas, so their money doesn't go into that bucket. There's OBVIOUSLY a lot more to all this; just because we haven't mentioned it in here (yet) doesn't mean people aren't aware or understand it.

Originally Posted by fastball

I do not care who he is, nor do I care about being rude. People need to stop being so hurt about comments and look at reality and the facts. Quit being so emotional.

You agree with me. So why defend him or "be nice" when his perception is so out of touch with reality, frankly, only being rude and straight forward may get him to rethink everything?

I am making a very clear point based on what is reality, not what his expertise and experience says. The company I work for never had to crawl to the government to beg for money to keep the lights on, and we're pretty old. To be honest, there's very few people who've worked for GM in the past 40 years that you could say actually know how to run a business successfully. Does Apple run to GM to pick executives? I do not care if he's Mary Barra. His assessment of this is wrong. Not my opinion, fact.

That is part of what really makes GM such an infuriating company. People like him with an incredibly out of touch vision of what reality is.

Not being rude is part of being civil, which goes a long way towards possibly solving an issue instead of inflaming it and making it worse. You are clearly of that newer generation that thinks their opinion is 'fact', and by declaring it so, that must make it true. Number 3's assessment of the situation tells you a lot about what has been going on inside GM, which is an extremely valuable insight. He was with them for a long time.

Originally Posted by Silverado57

Has anyone mentioned the role Unions play in the cost of labor and goods produced?
Asking for a friend...

Yes, I did mention it. It's not just the cost of labor, a huge chunk of the cost of doing business for GM is the retirements they have to pay for; it's in the billions. Retirements are part of the union contracts. That's an expense that overseas labor generally doesn't have to carry. Those foreign companies that are building cars here, do have to consider those expenses, and they also have to deal with the regulations and legal expenses doing business here brings. However since their management is based on the foreign cultures they came from, their attitudes and behaviors are different. They have a different outlook on what to do and how to do it.

There's a lot more to this whole situation than can be discussed in a medium like this, but some of it deals with attitudes and behavior of the working class, but especially the attitudes and behavior of the ruling class; the management.

Doing business in America doesn't automatically mean you're at a disadvantage, but you have to be aware of the differences between American culture, both as customers and workers, compared to what you'll see in other countries; especially the labor market countries like China, Mexico and India. China and India have the advantage of economy of scale; they have more workers available than we have people. China has a population of 1.5 billion, India has reached 1 billion. Even though Mexico doesn't have a large population like those other two countries, Mexico has the advantage of location. The logistics of producing in Mexico is better than either China or India.

Then you have culture. All 3 of those countries populations and cultures don't have the same expectations that ours does. In China or India, if you don't like the working conditions, there are 100 million people outside who will gladly take your place. We don't have that issue here. In the U.S., we have the cultural mentality of being entitled and demanding; give me what I want or I'll sue. Give me what I want or I'll attack; agree with me or I'll attack. It's completely different than what you see elsewhere. Our 'poor' are not at all like the poor in other countries. Chinese poor are POOR, and 75% of that 1.5 billion population are poor. That's a massive labor pool that will pretty much do just about anything to keep from starving to death. "I'm inside out of the weather, I have a bowl of rice and I get paid? I'll take it!" We don't have that here.

There's so much more to this story than can be talked about in here, otherwise it would start looking like a novel. Just because people on a forum aren't running the companies being discussed, doesn't mean they are stupid, inexperienced and don't have valid ideas. It's like someone in a bad relationship; everyone around them can see it, but the person in it can't see it clearly. For us, GM is that relationship right now.

The problems American manufacturing have are a combination of management attitude, worker skill and attitude, and government attitude and behavior. All of that started a long time ago; it's been going on for decades. It's all about people; their expectations, perceptions, attitudes and behavior. You see it in here, you see it in politics, you see it in business, you see it in the schools, you see it in society. Bad attitudes bring bad results; good attitudes bring better results. Good attitudes combined with confidence and vision can bring great results, but in every case, good attitudes always have to deal with those with bad attitudes. It's a constant drag on progress, society, and quality of life. Even simple conversation is compromised by bad attitudes.

America as a nation can do what no nation before it ever has, did or could... as long as we're united. We can only be conquered when we're divided. We can be conquered politically, industrially, commercially, economically if we can be divided as a society and culture. It begins with attitude, which leads to behavior. Everything else is the result of those two things.