• DominusOfMegadeus@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    “The automakers, however, say they’re facing unprecedented demands on capital as they develop and build new electric vehicles while at the same time making gas-powered cars, SUVs and trucks to pay the bills.“

    GM’s full-year 2022 revenue was $156.7 billion.

    Keep clutching your pearls, automakers. You disingenuous fucks.

  • PrincessLeiasCat@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    Starting in 2007, workers gave up cost-of-living raises and defined benefit pensions for new hires. Wage tiers were created as the UAW tried to help the companies avoid financial trouble ahead of and during the Great Recession. Even so, only Ford avoided government-funded bankruptcy protection.

    Many say it’s time to get the concessions back because the companies are making huge profits and CEOs are raking in millions.

    That’s the problem with agreements like this - workers concede because it’s an emergency type of situation, but when things get back to normal it’s never revisited. As a result, the workers have suffered the repercussions of their “emergency time concessions” for 16 years while the companies reap the benefits of their employees’ sacrifice.

    This has to be successful…I feel like it will set a precedent going forward regardless of the outcome. Let’s hope it’s positive. Solidarity!

  • Margot Robbie@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    Remember everyone: Unions and strikes are cool, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

  • KevonLooney@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    The limited strikes will help to preserve the union’s $825 million strike fund, which would run dry in about 11 weeks if all workers walked out. But Fain said more plants could be added if the companies don’t make better offers.

    Even Fain has called the union’s demands audacious, but he maintains the automakers are raking in billions and can afford them. He scoffed at company statements that costly settlements would force them to raise vehicle prices, saying labor accounts for only 4% to 5% of vehicle costs.

    Smart idea: ask for a lot and strike immediately. Don’t wait and strike all at once. Pull more workers off the job if they refuse to negotiate, but start out slow.

    That allows time for the board to ask management wtf is going on, because they are slowly losing money.

  • GreenM@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Won’t automakers be moving their production lines aboard as result ? There are companies that moved production abroad to reduce costs or/and not have to care about working conditions. Just saying.

    • astral_avocado@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      They kinda already did, the big automakers fighting unions are arguably what caused Detroit’s current situation. I wonder if they can outsource even more or if they’re stuck for some reason.

      • Voroxpete@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        It’s not a case of being “stuck” per se. It’s just not cost effective to move production on this kind of stuff overseas. Shipping goes by volume, and cars have an absolutely atrocious cost to volume ratio (think about how many dollars worth of iPhones you could stuff into the space occupied by a single car). It makes a lot more sense to build them where you plan to sell them (broadly speaking). That’s why a lot of car manufacturing still happens in countries like the US, Canada, and the UK.

        • GreenM@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          It’s what they are good at, comparing costs and maximizing profits.
          They will find the way to get around it at least partially even if they have to invest into fully automatic production with limited human labor.

      • Corkyskog@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        Considering less than a sixth of a vehicle’s input cost is labor, they could double their pay and still make 25% more profit than what it would cost for truck import taxes…

        • GreenM@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          They could but they are after maximizing profit. Why else would be corporates moving their factories to the other end of the world? To give poor people a job? Or to reduce costs because domestic labour is much more expensive?

          • Corkyskog@sh.itjust.works
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            1 year ago

            If we’re still talking about trucks, you would need to find some place where not only do you pay them less than what someone would make in a Chinese vehicle manufacturing plant, you also need to make sure that shipping and getting the right materials doesn’t eat into that savings. It just isn’t really economical anymore, unless you find more and more obscure countries with more instability and less infrastructure.

            • GreenM@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              Managers of these companies are good at doing that and are richly rewarded for doing so. Instead of China it might be other cheap labor place like Vietnam, India or even eastern Europe.

              Just take Ford as example, they made trucks in Turkey, imported trucks as passenger vehicles to get around chicken tax, de-mounted passengers seats in states to sell it as protected trucks.

              Eventually they got caught. But do you think they would to this gray business if it wasn’t profitable ?
              Even if we look at it as having $1.3 billion USD “loan” without a mortgage, because they eventually had to pay back these taxes, it’s still profitable because these $$$ allowed them to build more and sell more in less time + they saved costs on cheap labor.