On 4/27/2015 12:57 PM, graham wrote:
> On 27/04/2015 12:18 PM, W. Lohman wrote:
>> On 4/27/2015 11:45 AM, sf wrote:
>
>
>>>>
>>>
>>> Ah - yes, of course, I see the light now. Unions were single handedly
>>> responsible for the miserable failure of *American* automobile design
>>
>> Design wasn't really a problem,
>>
>> Job banks and mediocre build quality however were.
>>
> An engineer explained it to me that where US car companies worked to
> a 5 thou precision, Japanese companies worked to 2 thou.

The real fact is that unions created close to a $3500/vehicle cost
imbalance vs. non union producct.

> That's company policy, not the workers' fault.
> Graham

Union policy made US cars uncompetitive imports.

That had to change and did, and now:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articl...8/mbdlhh0yhq0x

Since 2007, the United Auto Workers has agreed to let automakers hire
new workers who forgo traditional retiree health care, equal pay for
equal work, job security and pensions in exchange for jobs that would
have gone to Mexico or Asia. About 13 percent of GM, Ford Motor Co. and
Chrysler Group LLC hourly workers, or 15,155 employees, now are entry level.

The union’s concessions were inconceivable -- and easily rejected by
labor leaders -- just a few years before. Now, as many as half the
workers at the Michigan factory assembling Sonic and Verano sub-compact
cars make less than the $19.10 hourly average U.S. manufacturing wage
and lack traditional union retiree benefits.

The U.S. economic recovery has been built on the shoulders of
autoworkers such as Werner, who left a $9 an hour job at a nursing home
in November to earn $16.78 an hour at GM, and David Ramirez, 39, who
earns $18.41 an hour installing mounting brackets for transmissions at
the same plant. In August 2011, he escaped an $8 an hour job making
doughnuts at Wal-Mart.

Significant Gains

While the rest of the U.S. economy continues to lag, the significance of
the auto industry’s comeback is hard to overstate. Autos contributed 18
percent of the 2.2 percent average rate of growth for gross domestic
product in the recovery that began in the third quarter of 2009 -- when
GM followed Chrysler out of U.S.-backed bankruptcy -- to the second
quarter of 2012, according to data from the Commerce Department.
The U.S. auto industry sold cars in September at a faster rate than in
any month since March 2008, before the failure of Lehman Brothers
Holdings Inc. GM earned $9.19 billion last year. Automakers throughout
the U.S. have been on a binge of hiring that has led to third shifts in
eight states.

“This is the reason we have job growth in the United States,” Kristin
Dziczek, director of the labor and industry group at the Center for
Automotive Research in Ann Arbor, Michigan, said in an interview. “I
don’t think we would have seen the new investments and the job growth in
the United States without some movement in labor costs.”

Closing Gap

The compromises will close the labor-cost gap at GM, Ford and Chrysler
factories with those at U.S. plants for Toyota Motor Corp. and Honda
Motor Co., Dziczek said. By 2015, GM’s total cost for wages and benefits
will be about $59 an hour, compared with $56 at Toyota. In 2007, GM
estimated the gap with Toyota at $25 to $30 an hour. Chrysler’s average
hourly labor costs may fall by 2015 to $53, lower than Toyota’s, CAR said.