![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lordshipmayhemThe mood in my hometown: it ranges from gloomy to "It won't affect me... much... I think..."
The stunner announcement of the closing of Oshawa's quality-award-winning GM Truck Plant is over a week in the past, but it's still in the news. What the union will try to do next I'm not sure, but I am sure of its ability to influence GM's decision: precisely nil. You might as well try to talk a pissed-off Lina Inverse from casting a Dragu Slave.
The spin the Canadian Auto Workers Union has taken is fascinating. It's as if the two American and one Mexican plant closure announcements don't exist, and the market for gas-guzzling trucks is unaffected by either the U.S. housing market collapse or by the price of fuel heading for the stratosphere.
News bulletin #1 for the Canadian union: your layoffs are about 22% of the total being laid off between all three countries. Canada has about 20% of the total GM employees. It's roughly proportionate.
News bulletin #2 for the Canadian union: you are claiming that the trucks will still be built. Nope, they won't. From the Toronto Star: "The company says the latest cuts mean it will make about 88,000 fewer pickups and 50,000 fewer big SUVs this calendar year." That's not "making the trucks elsewhere", that's "not making the trucks".
News bulletin #3 for the Canadian union: Mexico, Wisconsin and Michigan are NOT Canadian provinces. I doubt if calls for Harper to resign are going to resonate much with those unions at all, despite your best efforts to paint this as a made-in-Canada debacle. You should be calling for the resignations of American and Mexican government officials. By the way, good luck with that.
News bulletin #4 for the Canadian union: A lot of your product was purchased by American home builders, who have cut back on home building (some have actually entered bankruptcy). They aren't buying the trucks in anywhere near the old volume, and the drop has been very sudden and steep.
I don't think the CAW has clued in yet that their American and Mexican brothers and sisters may not take kindly to their jobs heading North, which is exactly what CAW president Buzz Hargrove wants, although he isn't wording it that way.
Some of my friends are Americans, what do you think would be the UAW's reaction to the CAW's demands, if GM acceded?
The stunner announcement of the closing of Oshawa's quality-award-winning GM Truck Plant is over a week in the past, but it's still in the news. What the union will try to do next I'm not sure, but I am sure of its ability to influence GM's decision: precisely nil. You might as well try to talk a pissed-off Lina Inverse from casting a Dragu Slave.
The spin the Canadian Auto Workers Union has taken is fascinating. It's as if the two American and one Mexican plant closure announcements don't exist, and the market for gas-guzzling trucks is unaffected by either the U.S. housing market collapse or by the price of fuel heading for the stratosphere.
News bulletin #1 for the Canadian union: your layoffs are about 22% of the total being laid off between all three countries. Canada has about 20% of the total GM employees. It's roughly proportionate.
News bulletin #2 for the Canadian union: you are claiming that the trucks will still be built. Nope, they won't. From the Toronto Star: "The company says the latest cuts mean it will make about 88,000 fewer pickups and 50,000 fewer big SUVs this calendar year." That's not "making the trucks elsewhere", that's "not making the trucks".
News bulletin #3 for the Canadian union: Mexico, Wisconsin and Michigan are NOT Canadian provinces. I doubt if calls for Harper to resign are going to resonate much with those unions at all, despite your best efforts to paint this as a made-in-Canada debacle. You should be calling for the resignations of American and Mexican government officials. By the way, good luck with that.
News bulletin #4 for the Canadian union: A lot of your product was purchased by American home builders, who have cut back on home building (some have actually entered bankruptcy). They aren't buying the trucks in anywhere near the old volume, and the drop has been very sudden and steep.
I don't think the CAW has clued in yet that their American and Mexican brothers and sisters may not take kindly to their jobs heading North, which is exactly what CAW president Buzz Hargrove wants, although he isn't wording it that way.
Some of my friends are Americans, what do you think would be the UAW's reaction to the CAW's demands, if GM acceded?
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2008-06-10 10:18 am (UTC)They'd probably try to pull the same thing to keep GM in town except more severe to one up what the CAW is doing. So it would set an amazingly bad precident. GM admin probably (I say probably) aren't stupid enough to set that precident.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-06-10 03:49 pm (UTC)Either:
- the American and Mexican unions aren't getting the news air time that the Canadian union is getting
- the American and Mexican unions are more attuned to reality (that, I'd buy)
Buzz Hargrove is still insisting that those trucks will get made, just in the U.S. There's a news story about massive truck and SUV production cutbacks at Ford, Toyota and Honda, and how the Ford F-150 pickup went from #1 best-selling vehicle to #5 in ONE MONTH, with four Japanese sedans ahead of it. In that same month, GM's Hummer saw sales drop 60%. Nobody in April predicted May's bloodbath.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-06-12 12:31 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-06-12 01:50 am (UTC)Your second point is especially bang-on: Buzz seems to be treating Canada as a single market, which it hasn't been since the Auto Pact was signed waaaay back when the Toronto Maple Leafs still won Lord Stanley's Cup. (1965, for the finicky.) He's forgetting that most of his product is being sold to the home builders and gasoholics in the United States, and those two markets are going under like the Titanic after the iceberg came by for tea. The home builders who haven't declared bankruptcy are drawing in their horns, and the gasoholics have gone Temperance.