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Posts Tagged ‘Detroit’

GM to Boost Volt Production

General Motors Co. plans to boost production for its range-extending electric car, the Chevrolet Volt, to 16,000 vehicles this year, and 60,000 in 2012, the company said today.

The Detroit carmaker had originally planned to build 15,000 Volts this year, and 45,000 in 2012, but strong demand for the battery-powered car has prompted the company to churn out more.

The announcement comes just two weeks before a four-week shutdown at its Detroit-Hamtramck plant, where GM builds the Volt, for retooling.

Blue Collar Workers Hanging By a Thread

They arrive for work at 7:25 a.m. and many of their cars are rusting buckets of crud. Except for the boss’s. He drives a Volvo.

Walk in the door at Schaefer Screw Products and there is the enemy — the clock. The oil vapors and solvents are overwhelming. The yellow light is dispiriting. The workers don’t want to be here. The liquor bottles in the weedy lot out back tell part of the story. The graffiti in the bathroom — profanely denouncing “hard workers” — tells the rest.

The workers punch the clock at precisely 7:30 a.m., not a minute later since they would be docked 14 minutes and nobody in America works 14 minutes for free. A quiet resignation settles over them as the roar of the screw grinding machines rev up. Want it or not, they need to be here. After this place, there is no place. Not in today’s America.

This machine shop may be the next wobbling domino in the collapse of the American manufacturing sector and the struggles of its blue-collar workers. There are at least seven shops nearby that are available for lease.

NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, created a free trade block beginning in 1994. But that is only part of the story. The World Trade Organization (WTO) began quietly in 1995, encouraging a sort of worldwide NAFTA that all but eliminated international trade barriers. China was admitted in November 2001 and since then Michigan has lost nearly 400,000 manufacturing jobs or nearly 50 percent of its industrial work force.

For workers here, their boss is the closest they will come to THE MAN. And by THE MAN they mean the bozos in Washington, D.C., who voted for the trade agreements and the bank deregulations that let the jobs slip away and money disappear into thin air.

When they say THE MAN, they mean the wolves on Wall Street who amplified the housing bubble and nearly took the world economy down. Instead of paying the price and going out of business and collecting their own unemployment checks, the Wall Street wizards got a multibillion-dollar bailout and bonuses.

Goldman Sachs, which was a heartbeat away from failure in 2008 and received $40 billion in federal aid, paid out $16 billion in bonuses and compensation in 2009 — an average of nearly $500,000 per employee. The bank paid just $14 million in taxes.

At the same time, Deutsche Bank forecasts that a quarter of homeowners are underwater and RealtyTrac.com reported 315,000 foreclosures in January, the most for that month on record. Many economists are predicting a bleak year in the housing market if wages and unemployment don’t improve.

“You feel the whole thing’s a swindle,” says Cindi Borbi, the 59-year-old account manager behind a desk in a cloud of cigarette smoke. Her husband took his life last year after being let go from his auto supply firm. He left his wife a broken heart, a mound of debt and a house she can’t pay for. “I’m looking for a basement if you’ve got one.”

Money Fueled Evil in Detroit

In the end, it’s all about the money and getting more of it.

Money is the reason Monica Conyers, the former City Council president, is headed for 37 months in a federal prison, convicted of taking bribes from Synagro Technologies Inc. in exchange for her vote. She wanted more of it, her “loot.”

Money is the reason that Detroit’s disgraced former mayor, Kwame Kilpatrick, is furiously trying to keep from going back to jail for violating probation, chiefly for hiding money he could have used to repay $1 million in restitution to the city he claims to love. His ardor has limits when weighed against the prospect of losing the good life and being indicted by the feds.

Like so much else in the rotten political culture that helped lead Detroit to the brink of collapse, it was all about them. It was about enriching them, about power for them, about perks and prestige for them, as watching Conyers preside over a council budget hearing could attest.

Seldom if ever was it about the people who elected them to represent the public, a quaint notion largely out of fashion in modern politics. The deepening plight of their city, or the fiscal wreck, or the structural rot, or the unpredictability of it all to business leaders and regional political players? Not so much, even though both of them, in their own ways, helped to foster it all.

The falls of Conyers and Kilpatrick, each endowed with powerful names in Detroit political circles, are only just beginning to reverberate. But if they pave the way for more responsible, more competent, leadership, they each will have performed at least one valuable public service.

The Truth About Union Electricians in IBEW Local 58.

Ford Offers Buyouts to All UAW Workers

 DETROIT, Dec 21 (Reuters) - Ford Motor Co (F.N) said on
Monday it is offering its 41,000 U.S. factory workers buyouts
and early retirement offers in a bid to reduce its payroll
costs as it aims to return to profit by 2011.

 The buyouts mark the second round of such offers for Ford
workers represented by the United Auto Workers union this year.
About 1,000 workers took Ford's earlier offer in July.

 While Ford was the only U.S. automaker to have avoided
bankruptcy in the past year, its relative success has
complicated efforts to win concessions from its major union.

 Ford workers have until late January to accept the offer,
which includes payouts of up to $70,000 cash for newer hires to
$60,000 cash for veterans already eligible for retirement.

 "Despite a strengthening in our business, we still have a
surplus in employees," said Ford spokesman Mark Truby.

 Ford did not provide a target for how many workers it
expected would take the buyout offers.

Can Detroit Be Saved?

Dave Bing has just signed on to four years of maybe the most futile and thankless job in America: mayor of Detroit. What in the world was he thinking?

“I wouldn’t have taken this job if this wasn’t doable,” he says. “I finished basketball in 1978, then went into my own business in 1980 and did it for 29 years. . . . Now I get to the end of that career and probably should have retired. But there was a calling greater than anything that I ever envisioned, and that was to help bring this city back.”

In November, 57% of the Detroit voters bought into his tough-love reform agenda. Mr. Bing replaced the disgraced Kwame Kilpatrick, who went to jail earlier this year for spending city funds on his girlfriends—just the publicity boost the city already flat on its back didn’t need.

Dave Bing is no Milton Friedman when it comes to economic solutions. He’s praying for lots of federal aid to help the city pull out of its ditch, he wants to borrow against future tax revenues, and he hasn’t ruled out tax increases “if they have a sunset” to pay the city’s bills. He believes it’s a core responsibility of government to help people.

Yet Mr. Bing is a realist, something Detroit hasn’t had at the helm for a long time. “We’ve been paralyzed by a culture in the city of Detroit, and maybe the state of Michigan, of entitlement,” by which he means ever-rising union wages. “Our people, I don’t believe, truly understand how dire the situation is. There are ugly decisions that need to be made and I’m surely not going to be popular for making them. But I didn’t take this job based on popularity.”

One group that surely isn’t a fan is the public employee unions. He grumbles that there are 17 unions with over 50 separate bargaining units. “I can give you a data sheet that will show you we’ve got several of those bargaining units with less than 100 people, and each one of them has a president that’s paid by the city to negotiate against the city,” he says. “Coming from the private sector, I find that insane.”

The mayor is quick to remind me that he is not antiunion. He joined the NBA players association in the late 1960s and hired a mostly unionized workforce at his firm, Bing Steel. But for months he has been locked in tedious negotiations and the aggravation is starting to show.

“The problem for the most part,” he argues, “is poor union leadership. I think the rank-and-file aren’t being told the truth. And I’m not going to B.S. anybody. I’m going to tell them the truth. They can’t continue to ride this gravy train forever.”

He poses this question to the city workforce: “Are you better off having a job and making 90% of what you’re at today or having no job at all? To me, you don’t have to be a brain surgeon to say I’ll take that 90%.”

Could Detroit be the first major city in America to actually declare bankruptcy, I ask hesitantly. His honesty surprises me: “I hope not, but I wouldn’t rule it out if we don’t get concessions from the unions.” He may be using the threat of bankruptcy, which is a poison pill for unions, as a bargaining chip. “This would void all the city contracts,” he insists. “That means workers have to make a decision: Do you want to start with zero, or do you want to start from where you are and give up just a little bit? Under bankruptcy you start with zero.” Mr. Bing is a hardliner.

“We have to be honest with ourselves and say we’re no longer going to be the motor capital or the manufacturing capital of the world,” Mr. Bing says. “But I think we can be the entertainment capital of the Midwest. We have casinos, great hotel accommodations, great restaurants, we’re one of the few cities that has every professional sports team.

He truly is the spirit of Detroit

Music Videos – Kid Rock – American Badass (Uncensored)