Re: General Motors
What would be interesting would be contrasting the benefits obtained by and cost of, say Toyota workers, versus GM workers.
I suspect that GM workers get more money per employee per car than Toyota workers do. Explaining why GM struggles.
Re: General Motors
GM has problems with their pension and healthcare costs but the reason for their struggle is sales and sales alone, lift the sales and the other problems disappear and sales aren't down due to healthcare costs nor pension costs.
Re: General Motors
True, the problem is caused by poor sales, but companies go bust due to lack of profitability and profitability could be raised by slashing worker benefits - if the unions would allow it.
For a company with as poor sales as it currently has, GM is spending too much on worker benefits.
Where are the 1950s witch hunts when you need them .. I’d denounce utd as a union-loving commie in an instant 
Re: General Motors
MS, GM just gave there CEO a $2.4 million bonus on top of his $2.2 million salary, this being the case why should the union be willing to cut workers benefits?
Re: General Motors
Profitability is one thing. Revenue is another.
Workers Comp, benefits, CEO salary and bleeding hearts liberals.. they all impact profitability or loss, not the revenue.
Revenue is impacted by only one thing. How many cars they sell and for what price. For GM, the major problem is that the revenue line is going down, down and down. The reason is the quality of the cars, the styling of the cars and that customers are giving better rating for overall value-for-money to their imported competitors.
Re: General Motors
I consider Toyota & Honda to be more American and Japanese.
Re: General Motors
You can “consider” Colorado to be part of Switzerland, doesn’t realy matter, in the larger scheme of things. 
Re: General Motors
^ 
In Japan the people I talked to complain that as most of the models are assembled in USA the Japanese cars there aren’t any cheaper.
Re: General Motors
Gone are the days, when Japanese used price as a selling point. They charge a fair price for their cars, and usually are more expensive than comparable American models. Japanese are still less expensive than some German automakers, but Germans are able to sustain their higher production costs by charging higher prices selling brand-name cars.
Re: General Motors
They aren’t cheaper for Japanese people 
They were complaining that as it is a Japanese car, it should be cheap at least in the home country.