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The airline industry has always been a money loser. Inherent high fixed costs plus fuel has always been its achiles heel. Management's job at the airlines is to babysit the transportation of America while hedging their future compensation packages. As ugly as the management/union relationships at the airlines is, not having those unions there would mean the airlines would (by virtue of labor force inelasticy of demand for work) pay "circuit city" hourly wages in a week. Not what pilots want to see, and certainly not what grandma wants to hear when she's zooming at 30,000ft at 500MPH. They already pay mcdonalds wages at the regional level, and the majors ain't something to write home about these days either. Paying people "good salary", absent unions, is not a compatible affair. We can hate on the unions' over-reach all day, but the whole "we need to compete" global mantra would just put the nail on the coffin and open these industries to cabotage.
I recognize these labor compensation obligations have put GM at a competitive disadvantage, but what do you suggest? I can't speak for Nissan, Honda or Toyota plants, but does anybody care to elaborate on the working conditions and income expectations are these plants vis-a-vis the classic GM labor model? Because all I hear here is cheerleading for making auto manufacturing jobs in America pay McDonalds wages, at which point I have to wonder what team are you rooting for? I don't see systematic dilution of the manufacturing base's purchasing power as a particularly constructive thing, just so some academics can sleep better at night knowning the "global economy" is working for others.
No they shouldn't be bailed out, but I would much rather have seen these "inefficient" auto and airline industries bailed out before the finance sector. Of course we know what team the government and wall street is really playing for (hint: not us).
What I am wondering is what the government will do with all that bad debt. Who is going to bail THEM out? Big unprofitable corporations have to die, among them the Federal Reserve if that is possible.
Something I was just thinking about, if you look at the cars that GM and Ford are building and then match them to the cars of Nissan,Toyota and Honda there's really not much difference MPG wise anymore. All of them build gas guzzler SUV's,trucks and cars as well as fuel squeezers so it seems to me that labor costs have got to be what's killing them. Am I missing something?
Because all I hear here is cheerleading for making auto manufacturing jobs in America pay McDonalds wages, at which point I have to wonder what team are you rooting for?
There has to be a middle ground.
McD's wages are for HS kids.
Assembly jobs at a factory should be a notch above that.
Machinist jobs should be a step above that.
etc
etc
And then you have the white collar workforce.
But that's not always the way it goes.
I work in the aviation industry myself. My company builds general aviation aircraft. I'm an engineer and went to college to get my degree so I could do this job. The pay is good, benefits are ok, and I have a 401k. I'm happy.
But the knuckleheads out working the line make as much as I do and have as good or better benefits in a lot of cases. They also get signing bonuses when their contracts come up. And with OT they make well in excess of what I do.
Now I'm not trying to belittle their job. Clearly we couldn't do it without them. Airplanes don't build themselves. But it's not rocket science either folks. And that's where my argument is. If it comes down to them keeping their jobs and making less vs them losing their jobs because they refuse to budge which way would you have it? Oh yeah...heck they should just lose their jobs right? Why don't you ask the individual workers on the day you give them their pink slip if they would rather take a pay cut and stay than walk out the door and see what they say?
We are where we are in this country because the labor demands are so high that we're shipping all the work overseas and south of the boarder.
Wait a second, you speak as if you're in a different boat from these people. Let's get something straight, I have the exact same education as you do and although our label is "rocket scientist" (what a joke, when was the last time anybody came up with anything new in this field) you know that this job today is de facto bean counting; there's nothing cosmic about it, and we all "worked hard" to get this crappy degree (heck I even got a master's on the same). Your job is no more secure than theirs is by virtue of the "hard work" you put in college. Indian and Chinese kids are doing the same thing with your job overseas as line workers in China are doing to these "overpaid knuckleheads", as you view them.
Your argument for "salary temperance" is a euphemism for "I'm just bitter these kids didn't waste 5 years foregoing weekends to get a narrowly-marketable aerospace engineering degree that I have to uproot my family for every half a decade". I'll buy ya a beer if we ever meet to make ya feel better. The reality is that the concessionary attitude of staying in for a paycut is a welcome sign to forego your purchasing power in an economic system where said decreases in salary do NOT yield proportionally lower cost of living nor proportionally lower product price. All it does is continue the wealth siphoning to the upper managerial class and capital investors. In essence, you're working harder to see no additional returns. Yeah, no thanks I'll take the pink slip before the paycut, it's not as if these folks make 250K/ year and a 75% paycut would still put them above cost of living.
Remind yourself you're no different than these people, no more marketable in this environment (your job specialty field in particular is so fickle I didn't walk away, I RAN away as fast as I could) than these backbone workers. Bachelor's degrees don't mean squat anymore, and white collar is no longer an invisible shield of super powers that inherently commands respect and a salary a couple of sigmas to the right of the knucklehead rivet-pusher, if anything your job is becoming easier to offshore than the rivet-pushers, and at least the Mickey D fry boy doesn't have to move every 10 years, which is money in my book.
Off my soapbox, it just rubs me when fellow aero engineering folk talk as if this is still 1960 and we're shooting people to the moon working for NASA and their "irreplaceable talent" is God's gift to aviation. You're no different than these line folk in the bigger economic picture.
Letting Ford and GM go under will cause a mega depression in the country. Think of the tens of thousands of workers who earn their living working for Ford and GM. Not to mention the millions of dollars those corporations pay in taxes. We have to take a good look at why Ford and GM are failing. For one thing lawyers and accounts not engineers began designing cars. They wanted to make them cheaper and what we got was a car that inferior to the Japanese. They made big dollars using this approach back in the 60's and 70's but when the Honda and Toyota began giving us superior product they were slow to respond to the new competition. They did not react fast enough to change and even in the 80' and 90's they were still playing the numbers game by producing millions of cars which were behind in foreign design and quality.
For the last ten years they have been giving us SUV’s which get terrible gas mileage. They should have seen the prevailing winds, but chose to continue their way of doing business. The heads of these companies should be replaced with engineers and not CPA’s and attorneys. Funny thing is that if they spent a little extra time and money to make sure the possibility of faults within their cars were remedied, they would be popular again. That means not giving us a car with cheap flimsy parts which are prone to breakage. Does any one remember the Tucker car produced in the late 40's? It was well ahead of its time but the auto industry chose to destroy Tucker rather than adopt his improvements.
Wait a second, you speak as if you're in a different boat from these people. Let's get something straight, I have the exact same education as you do and although our label is "rocket scientist" (what a joke, when was the last time anybody came up with anything new in this field) you know that this job today is de facto bean counting; there's nothing cosmic about it, and we all "worked hard" to get this crappy degree (heck I even got a master's on the same). Your job is no more secure than theirs is by virtue of the "hard work" you put in college. Indian and Chinese kids are doing the same thing with your job overseas as line workers in China are doing to these "overpaid knuckleheads", as you view them.
Your argument for "salary temperance" is a euphemism for "I'm just bitter these kids didn't waste 5 years foregoing weekends to get a narrowly-marketable aerospace engineering degree that I have to uproot my family for every half a decade". I'll buy ya a beer if we ever meet to make ya feel better. The reality is that the concessionary attitude of staying in for a paycut is a welcome sign to forego your purchasing power in an economic system where said decreases in salary do NOT yield proportionally lower cost of living nor proportionally lower product price. All it does is continue the wealth siphoning to the upper managerial class and capital investors. In essence, you're working harder to see no additional returns. Yeah, no thanks I'll take the pink slip before the paycut, it's not as if these folks make 250K/ year and a 75% paycut would still put them above cost of living.
Remind yourself you're no different than these people, no more marketable in this environment (your job specialty field in particular is so fickle I didn't walk away, I RAN away as fast as I could) than these backbone workers. Bachelor's degrees don't mean squat anymore, and white collar is no longer an invisible shield of super powers that inherently commands respect and a salary a couple of sigmas to the right of the knucklehead rivet-pusher, if anything your job is becoming easier to offshore than the rivet-pushers, and at least the Mickey D fry boy doesn't have to move every 10 years, which is money in my book.
Off my soapbox, it just rubs me when fellow aero engineering folk talk as if this is still 1960 and we're shooting people to the moon working for NASA and their "irreplaceable talent" is God's gift to aviation. You're no different than these line folk in the bigger economic picture.
Nah get back on your soap box. I'm sure you have more. And I will take you up on that beer, sir. I'll never turn one down.
We need them. They need us. Full stop.
We are in the same boat <company>. But don't forget that I and many others out there could easily do their job. (I know you scoff at this idea and think there's no way I could go from calculating aero loads and engine performance to riveting on airplanes but you're just going to have to live with the fact that I'm damn good with my hands in addition to being an engineer)
In August the union boys went on strike over a 1% increase in salary. The company offered them a guaranteed 4% increase per year for 4 years and they voted to strike over it. They're lucky to have jobs at all in this environment. We couldn't believe it.
So for a month our engineering staff got the opportunity to work on airplanes. What we learned was not only could the job be done by amatures but we engineers could do a lot of tasks in less time and with fewer people than the union guidelines said you had to have.....hmmmm. How is that possible that a bunch of white collar engineers could do the same job as these union workers...only better in a lot of cases?
The difference between us and them is that we could do their jobs....they can't do ours.
Similarly I can do my engineering job but I can't handle corporate legal and accounting issues. And that's why those guys command a higher salary than I. When corporate lawyers make $250k or whatever...i'm envyous....but I know they deserve it....because I couldn't do that job....not without going back to school and working my arse off.
The mentality of the average union worker is, "If I can make $50k or more a year out of HS why should I bother going to college?" Well ya know Jimbo that's a good question. There was once a time when it paid to go to school and get a degree. Now factory union jobs pay just as well if not better than if you went and got an education. And I think it's wrong. Sorry.
But do you really think there is no more technology to be developed? Do you really think engineering is a 'bean counting service'. I'm sorry but it may be like this in some areas but it's certainly not where I am. I still have to whip out notes from college to do my job every now and then. I just did a freggin integral last week to solve an issue we were having. And my ye ole HP engineering calculator sits next to me on my desk. Engineering is alive and well whether or not we're going to the moon.
And the moon? Who cares about that? It's so far away.
Yeah, we agree to disagree on the job transposability. I'd love to watch engineers have to take the line these rivet pushers left cold-turkey. It'd make good reality TV for me. That aside, it's quite frustrating to hear an "educated" man such as yourself put these corporate lawyer and management types in a godly pedestal as if their education was actually harder than what you went through. I guess "I wanna be lebron james too" syndrome is alive and well in corporate america. I'm also quite confident you subscribe to supply-side economics, and I don't know you from Adam.
Look, aside from what you gage your personal worth to be professionally, it does the collective no good when you argue that they deserve less than you because you are Johnny jack-of-all-trades. Demand more pay if you're so invaluable, don't say you're "happy" with where you are at and then tell the rivet pushers they're not worthy of your purchasing power because they can't whip out a differential equation faster than you can put together an airplane, all by yourself of course. College is not this mythical right of passage full of insight, it's a paper mill. I'd gladly push for your salary increases than accept your salary contentment (TODAY anyways) over whoring out the purchasing power of the collective majority. Their salary decreases, substantiated by your salary contentment, IS THE SAME DIFFERENCE, you're giving away extra effort for no return. You only think it's adequate that their salary be decreased, while yours is "right-priced" only because yours lies to the right of the cost-of-living line, and theirs would get closer to that line or fall below. If the line would suddenly catch up to your salary, your whining (remember they don't have a degree, you do, so you'd stand to cry louder according to your own assessment of what a college degree SHOULD be worth) would make these 1% union vote downs look like the line workers themselves are part of the Missionaries of Charity.
Finally, recognize that your skills are not that unique either. Yes, compared to the line workers it would take time to spool any of them up to your level of education. But, you're not an island, and a BOATLOAD of people have your skill set my man, just like you argue you possess these line worker's skill set, and the reason for which they should be paid less. It is only a matter of time before kids will be doing your job for 75% of the pay, experience of work equal to yours, just by virtue of market saturation. Take time to visit your alma mater for next year's commencement see how many degree holders they are pumping on this economy with the same education as you and I. I'm telling ya, I don't doubt you're proficient at what you do, but you're not exempt from the working woes of these workers, you only feel you are because the cost of living line seems far from your purchasing power, TODAY. Good luck to ya.
What a lot of you fail to think about is that "Will the bailout work for GM or the other automotive companies?"... by "work", I don't mean let them survive for half a year and then bankrupt and we lose all our bailout money... When I say "work", I mean SAVE the company and know that they will survive for years to come... A lot of the people in the government knows that the bailout won't "save" the company, just prolong its demise... I want to help people, but I rather use that $40 billion and help the unemployed than prevent a company that IS going under from going under right now... so there it is... you want to lose $40 billion for 6 months of working for thousands of workers? Or do we use $40 billion and save MILLIONS of unemployed... mind you the CEO will work another 6 months earning millions of dollars with the bailout... even though they know the company and their gravy train is going to end... So lets look more than 2 months ahead of time, lets look at long term projections... $40 billion ain't worth it...
Location: Georgia, on the Florida line, right above Tallahassee
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Quote:
Originally Posted by drjones96
There has to be a middle ground.
McD's wages are for HS kids.
Assembly jobs at a factory should be a notch above that.
Machinist jobs should be a step above that.
etc
etc
And then you have the white collar workforce.
But that's not always the way it goes.
I work in the aviation industry myself. My company builds general aviation aircraft. I'm an engineer and went to college to get my degree so I could do this job. The pay is good, benefits are ok, and I have a 401k. I'm happy.
But the knuckleheads out working the line make as much as I do and have as good or better benefits in a lot of cases. They also get signing bonuses when their contracts come up. And with OT they make well in excess of what I do.
Now I'm not trying to belittle their job. Clearly we couldn't do it without them. Airplanes don't build themselves. But it's not rocket science either folks. And that's where my argument is. If it comes down to them keeping their jobs and making less vs them losing their jobs because they refuse to budge which way would you have it? Oh yeah...heck they should just lose their jobs right? Why don't you ask the individual workers on the day you give them their pink slip if they would rather take a pay cut and stay than walk out the door and see what they say?
We are where we are in this country because the labor demands are so high that we're shipping all the work overseas and south of the boarder.
BAM! You are me, bro. Except it's the telcom indusrty.
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