US Autoworkers End Strike with Pay Raises and a Chance to Unionize EV Battery Plants (apnews.com) 145
There's been predictions that a transition to electric vehicles would hurt autoworkers. But this week U.S. autoworkers ended their strike after winning "significant gains in pay and benefits," reports the Associated Press:
The United Auto Workers union overwhelmingly ratified new contracts with Ford and Stellantis, that along with a similar deal with General Motors will raise pay across the industry, force automakers to absorb higher costs and help reshape the auto business as it shifts away from gasoline-fueled vehicles...
The companies agreed to dramatically raise pay for top-scale assembly plant workers, with increases and cost-of-living adjustments that would translate into 33% wage gains. Top assembly plant workers are to receive immediate 11% raises and will earn roughly $42 an hour when the contracts expire in April of 2028. Under the agreements, the automakers also ended many of the multiple tiers of wages they had used to pay different workers.
They also agreed in principle to bring new electric-vehicle battery plants into the national union contract. This provision will give the UAW an opportunity to unionize the EV battery plants plants, which will represent a rising share of industry jobs in the years ahead.
In October the union's president criticized what had been the original trajectory of the auto industry. "The plan was to draw down engine and transmission plants, and permanently replace them with low-wage battery jobs. We had a different plan. And our plan is winning."
And this week the union's president said they had not only "raised wages dramatically for over a hundred thousand workers" — and improved their retirement security. "We took a major step towards ensuring a just transition to electric vehicles."
In Belvidere, Illinois, the union "won a commitment from Stellantis to reopen a shuttered factory and even add an EV battery plant," the Associated Press notes.
"The new contract agreements were widely seen as a victory for the UAW," their article adds — and perhaps even for other autoworkers. After the UAW's president announced plans to try unionizing other plants, three foreign automakers in the U.S. — Honda, Toyota and Hyundai — "quickly responded to the UAW contract by raising wages for their factory workers."
The companies agreed to dramatically raise pay for top-scale assembly plant workers, with increases and cost-of-living adjustments that would translate into 33% wage gains. Top assembly plant workers are to receive immediate 11% raises and will earn roughly $42 an hour when the contracts expire in April of 2028. Under the agreements, the automakers also ended many of the multiple tiers of wages they had used to pay different workers.
They also agreed in principle to bring new electric-vehicle battery plants into the national union contract. This provision will give the UAW an opportunity to unionize the EV battery plants plants, which will represent a rising share of industry jobs in the years ahead.
In October the union's president criticized what had been the original trajectory of the auto industry. "The plan was to draw down engine and transmission plants, and permanently replace them with low-wage battery jobs. We had a different plan. And our plan is winning."
And this week the union's president said they had not only "raised wages dramatically for over a hundred thousand workers" — and improved their retirement security. "We took a major step towards ensuring a just transition to electric vehicles."
In Belvidere, Illinois, the union "won a commitment from Stellantis to reopen a shuttered factory and even add an EV battery plant," the Associated Press notes.
"The new contract agreements were widely seen as a victory for the UAW," their article adds — and perhaps even for other autoworkers. After the UAW's president announced plans to try unionizing other plants, three foreign automakers in the U.S. — Honda, Toyota and Hyundai — "quickly responded to the UAW contract by raising wages for their factory workers."
Another monopoly industry coming to a bad end (Score:2)
We've been here before - in the early 80s the US car industry was shown up by higher quality lower cost imports because Detroit had grown fat and lazy. No doubt we will see something similar again as the quality of Chinese cars rises - Japanese ones started off with a poor quality record. Watch out for demands for protection - and probably in the longer term bail outs - from US automakers...
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China keeps making noises about selling cars here but they would have to comply with our safety requirements and parts supply requirements and both of those things run counter to the way business works in China. So all we get from China is Volvos, and that only because they bought a whole corporation already prepared to sell cars here.
It's not impossible to see it happen, it just seems like if it were going to it would have done already. I can see that consumers would buy them, after all they are buying Hyu
This article disagrees (Score:2)
They are coming!
https://cleantechnica.com/2021... [cleantechnica.com]
The reference to Mexico made cars may also be significant; that would be a place where the Chinese could get enough local content etc to benefit from the free trade agreement
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It's 2023 now bro. 2022 came and went without the prophecies being fulfilled. China says they are going to start selling their brands into our market every year or two just to see if anyone is interested, and so far, statistically no one is.
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'But China's car industry has quadrupled exports in just three years, surpassing Japan this year as the world leader. This year, exports of cars surged 86 percent through July.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/0... [nytimes.com]
https://english.elpais.com/eco... [elpais.com]
I hope you're right, but I suspect that it won't be long before China does have a lot of cars arriving in the USA; the latest wages deal is an invitation for them to try harder, and the economic logic is overwhelming
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Chinese cars are already on our soil. The Buick Envision, and some Cadillac models are made on the mainland.
delusional and disengenuous (Score:2)
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UAW could buy GM at its bargain price, cut the pay of management and distribute profits to hourly employees. Yet none of the strikers ask for that.
The strikers aren't in a position to demand that the corporation do business in a certain way. They can demand better treatment, and the logical way to give it to them might be to cut CEO pay (Well of course it is) but it's up to the automaker where they find the money to increase the wages. Naturally they are going to increase prices.
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UPS and USPS cannot invest to compete against Amazon.
Pretty much nothing beats the USPS for efficiency. Quite a lot of politicians hate this because it disproves their anti-government rhetoric so they keep doing crazy stuff to the USPS to make it look like it's bad. Fortunately, the US government is not yet as insane (or effective?) as the UK one since they haven't managed to privatize it over there yet. It's also the delivery service of last resort. The USPS is also the delivery service of last resort and
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Name one industry or,company in the US with a unionized workforce which is successful. UPS and USPS cannot invest to compete against Amazon. GM and Ford stock valuation is incredibly low. UAW could buy GM at its bargain price, cut the pay of management and distribute profits to hourly employees. Yet none of the strikers ask for that.
UPS and USPS are used as shipping services by Amazon. They don't sell what they deliver.
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Amazon invested huge amounts of money building out its warehouse and delivery service. I ordered a webcam last night. It is arriving today. UPS and USPS cannot match that.
That is because UPS and USPS are not selling the things you buy off Amazon. They deliver them.
The model is as you note, having huge warehouses that stock regularly sold items. And it works pretty well. You place your order, and the delivery service picks it up and delivers it to you.
Amazon is the retail front end.
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I see that the postal express service can deliver overnight, but there's always one or two days between the order placement and the start of delivery
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Name one industry or,company in the US with a unionized workforce which is successful
Is this a trick question? Pretty much all of them are successful and their workers are paid better. Industries such as construction, medicine, manufacturing, entertainment, public safety, education... the list goes on.
Er ... hooray? (Score:3, Insightful)
In October the union's president criticized what had been the original trajectory of the auto industry. "The plan was to draw down engine and transmission plants, and permanently replace them with low-wage battery jobs. We had a different plan. And our plan is winning."
Thanks to intimidation, it's going to take more people and factories to do the same things? Er, hooray?
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TL;DR Optimizing only for manufacturing efficiency leads to a fucked-up society that does not manufacture anything.
Intimidation? (Score:2, Insightful)
And no it's not going to take more people to do the same thing. Unions neither encourage or discourage automation and automation is what reduces the number of people. The only time a human being wins out over a robot it is when that person is a slave. And I would like to think that the majority of us have decided slavery is wrong. Although I'm not going to pretend it's all of us...
Tesla cuts corners (Score:2)
That said there's still a lot here, and a strong Union can bargain to keep more of it here. They can, for example, form voting blocks that can do things li
an opportunity to unionize the EV battery (Score:5, Funny)
I don't think the batteries will work if they are un-ionized
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Jeopardy (Score:2)
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The median monthly wage in America is about $4500.
In Europe, only Luxembourg, Norway, and Switzerland exceed that. Norway is a big oil producer. Luxembourg and Switzerland are financial centers with low populations.
European countries by average wage [wikipedia.org]
Re:UAW on the company decision board? (Score:5, Interesting)
Wage levels mean little if not compared to the cost of living. I've worked in various countries in Europe, and yes, you earn a lot of money in Switzerland, but in the end, what's left of that at the end of the month is not as much as you'd hope for, since the cost of living is insane.
I currently make less money in Austria than I made in Switzerland, but at the end of the month, there's WAY more money in my pocket than I had back then.
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Yeah, my brother found Switzerland all sweet and dandy when he started to work there but after 2-3 years, he came back home. Not that he hates now, just that it wasn't as bright and shiny for him as when he first got there. Another funny thing, when he got his apartment, he found a case of ammo under the kitchen sink so he phoned the authorities. The cops said there was nothing to worry about, the former tenant simply forgot it there after doing his military service they supposed.
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> The cops said there was nothing to worry about, the former tenant simply forgot it there after doing his military service they supposed
That's genuinely hilarious.
Every eligible man is conscripted into the militia for a number of years. They are given training, a rifle, and a box of ammunition. The weapon is government property and there are strict rules about its transport and use, and the ammunition box is not to be opened except under orders.
Apparently the practice of giving out ammo was ended 2007?
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If the ammo was made before 2007, it's at least 16 years old.
I wouldn't trust it, especially if it was stored under a sink.
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I have military surplus ammo older than that which works fine. It was stored in standard U.S. ammo cans. Modern ammo has a very long shelf life if not stored in a pool of water.
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That's probably the reason why he specified "under a sink", IE NOT in a pool of water is in question.
Not to mention that that's often where cleaning chemicals are stored.
Now yeah, it should be fine, especially if the ammo can was intact and still sealed. 16 years is relatively nothing to ammo - WWII stuff still fires fine most of the time if stored properly. Korean/Vietnam era stuff is even better.
And isn't it sad that I rate storage in terms of wars...
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If you mean according to the parent poster's story, we don't when the brother found the ammo, so we have no idea how old the ammo could have been. The brother was there for about 2-3 years. So the latest he could have found it was about 2-3 years ago (which makes the ammo possibly 14 years old).
And if this happened a decade or even longer time back ago, of course the ammo will be even "younger".
Anyway I don't think 16 years old ammo fails all that much, if at all - look at the old crap Russia is using in Uk
Re:UAW on the company decision board? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why in the world would anybody be alarmed at finding a large box of ammo?
Hell, with today's ammo prices, that's like finding a small pot of gold!!!
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Switzerland still lands way up in the list of median after-tax wages adjusted for prices. It's even in the OP's link. ("European and transcontinental countries by monthly average wage" section, sort by descending "Net (PPP)".)
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You forgot about US medical costs. You get sick in Zurich, you will have the world's finest medical care and it won't cost you a thing. You lose your job, you have actual unemployment. You have a retirement Don't forget about vacation weeks to months that Europeans get. That $4500 a month in the US is consumed by $1000+ for health insurance, $3000+ for rent, upkeep and maintenance of a vehicle because almost no US cities have usable public transportation, not to mention student loans (which no other co
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The country with the highest opioid use is Germany [nih.gov], not America.
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The country with the highest opioid use is Germany [nih.gov], not America.
And European opioids are superior to the opioids of those fat lazy Americans as well.
Re: UAW on the company decision board? (Score:2)
WWII was Benzedrine vs Methedrine.
Now we have to fight an opiate war? War never changes I guess
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WWII was Benzedrine vs Methedrine.
Now we have to fight an opiate war? War never changes I guess
That was an interesting time. Most countries used some sort of amphetamines. The Germans used Methamphetamines. Pervitin its name. They even sold it to civilians.
As we know, long term use of Meth causes big problems, eventually psychosis and worse.
Side foray. At Dunkirk, after pushing Britain to the sea, the German soldiers stopped at a point where they could have pretty much ended Britain's ability to wage war by a huge massacre. It isn't a secret that the Germans had no issue with killing huge number
Re: UAW on the company decision board? (Score:2)
"Substantial heterogeneity in global opioid consumption patterns reflect the challenges involved with providing adequate access to opioid treatment while avoiding potential misuse."
Germany or the US... hmm. I wonder which does a better job of dealing with those challenges. Well, no doubt the US comes out in front on heterogeneity.
Re: UAW on the company decision board? (Score:5, Interesting)
Why do we have to fight. America and Europe are both much better places to live than China or Russia.
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Why do we have to fight. America and Europe are both much better places to live than China or Russia.
A disinformation campaign perhaps? Or at least the useful idiots that help those campaigns.
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Sure, America / Europe may be better places to live generally, compared to China or Russia. You may have to fight if either of those two decide to attack / invade your country.
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At least most of us in the US are heavily armed....if our own damned govt would quit trying to take them away from us....
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I never understood the superiority complex. They take pride in the oddest things. Not personal accomplishments, or their profession, no they are proud that they have catered their system of measurements to their inability to do advanced maths. They pride themselves on having a higher percentage of manual transmission vehicles, as if a skill you could learn in a couple of hours in a parking lot is the height of sophistication.
They will poke fun at you as an American because some American's are obese, becaus
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Why do we have to fight. America and Europe are both much better places to live than China or Russia.
When elevating our living it helps not to compare to hellholes.
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It's also worth saying that in a few of the places we keep hearing about these problems, the citizenry is fucking tired of this shit but change comes slow. First step is to fire the bureaucrats and "come-to-do-good, stay-to-do-well" politicians and deep-thinkers that caused the problems to begin with, and that takes another election or two to accomplish.
Living in Portland, I can tell you that there is severe disinterest in maintaining the Multnomah County District Attorney or any of his disciples. Same wi
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Switzerland has private insurance to cover medical costs the same as the US.
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People in Europe have socialized healthcare (much cheaper, not dependent on staying employed), and generally speaking have a lot more public services. While wages are lower and taxes are higher, quality of life is better.
https://www.numbeo.com/quality... [numbeo.com]
https://worldpopulationreview.... [worldpopul...review.com]
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Where the hell did you get $4,500? (Score:2)
There's a reason 40% of the homeless are working full-time jobs.
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Median income in America is $31,500.
Your numbers are off. [census.gov] "Real median household income was $74,580 in 2022". Even if you assume that 100% of households have dual-incomes, you are still at $37K.
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Median income, median salary, and median household income are three very different things.
The median salary in America, according to BLS, is $54,132 for 2022 or $4,500/month. That is how much the median full-time worker was paid.
The median income is much lower because it includes over a hundred million people who aren't working or aren't working full time.
Household income is the income of all people living together and includes interest, dividends, pensions, and other income.
Household income is not good for
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Bluntly? A small amount of corruption is fairly good for the overall economy.
Because, let's face it, you'll always have corruption. Whether you call it corruption or lobbyism, the difference is just at what level it happens. Whether you hand the government official a bottle of wine or the corporate "negotiator" hands the president an invitation for a week at a winery, the difference is just scale.
And the other difference is that more people participate and profit from the former than the latter.
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just like strikes are relatively rare in Europe
I totally forgot that France isn't part of Europe, where air traffic controllers are on strike RIGHT NOW. And the french national rail company (SNCF) in the recent past had so many "strike days" that Reuters made infographics for it [thomsonreuters.com] and travel journalists have had to write articles telling people how to anticipate and deal with transportation strikes. [ricksteves.com]
Strikes are relatively rare in Europe - tell us another laugher.
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So according to your source, France is #10 on the list of strike-days-per-country. And you know what? 7 of the top 10 are European countries (Denmark, Iceland, Spain, Norway, Italy, Ireland, France).
So let's have a look at the original claim ("with this in mind, these strikes would never happen, just like strikes are relatively rare in Europe"), and this evidence you've brought, in analyzing the criticism I presented:
If the United States is #11 on that list, and there are 7 european countries that are eac
Re:And this is why vehicles are so expensive. (Score:5, Insightful)
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They were doing well enough, firmly middle class for a low skilled assembly line job.
No matter, their greed has just ensured a robot will take their job even sooner.
Re:And this is why vehicles are so expensive. (Score:5, Interesting)
No matter, their greed has just ensured a robot will take their job even sooner.
You don't have the right orders of magnitude. In terms of energy output (the best way to estimate the cost of transforming something into some other thing), a robot is ~500-1000 times cheaper than a worker. Even if we were talking about an actual slave (that you still have to feed, protect against, etc...), a robot is 100 times cheaper. Even if those workers manage to get a x2 raise, this is not going to change the fact that robots were and are still vastly cheaper.
But everything that could be automated already is, except for very marginal things, and what you call "assembly line workers" nowadays are just people watching over machines. They won't be replaced by robots, their real threat is their job being outsourced/offshored to a country were human labor is cheaper.
You shouldn't wish that, because even though the end product might seem cheaper to you, it comes at the cost of hidden negative externalities: worse living conditions for the workers, usually more lax environmental norms, and so on...
Negative externalities? (Score:2)
1) worse living conditions for the workers,
Well yes, that's what it means to be a worker in a lower wage economy. And when they export to a high wage economy their wages rise. Note that Chinese wages have risen massively despite the lack of free unions
2) usually more lax environmental norms
True, but the way that the environment gets addressed is when people become prosperous enough to worry about it. Note that greater prosperity cuts population growth rates, which is a positive externality...
The difficult r
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1) worse living conditions for the workers,
Well yes, that's what it means to be a worker in a lower wage economy.
Uh, let's not simply ignore the other side of that coin.
Worse living conditions, also tends to apply to the former American auto line worker who was fired after the outsourcing. The one who was trained to do that one job as a career, and is now unemployed and living off the Government dole while still living in a high-wage economy battered by inflation.
And quite frankly, everyone globally will be suffering the same once Greed N. Corruption replaces the meatsack worker who always needs those "annoying" thi
No easy solutions (Score:2)
Yes, the prospects are horrible for those employed in industries where their viability is in serious trouble. But the cost to the rest of the community in maintaining those jobs is equally a problem, and at a time when there's already a massive government deficit, bailing out death choosing industries is not a reasonable solution.
One of the problems of economic change is that the victims are far more visible than the beneficiaries. The result is therefore that policy seeks to prevent the changes, rather tha
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But everything that could be automated already is, except for very marginal things, and what you call "assembly line workers" nowadays are just people watching over machines. They won't be replaced by robots, their real threat is their job being outsourced/offshored to a country were human labor is cheaper.
I'd have to disagree; Telsa is demonstrating with their "gigapress" that there's still lots of room to automate more. Even if their factories ended up with more workers than Musk wanted, less automation, they still went quite a bit further than traditional automakers. Now other companies are starting to get into gigapress territory.
It's perhaps better to look less at what "can/cannot" be automated and more at "what's economical to automate". Because there's capital costs involved with automating stuff, y
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But everything that could be automated already is, except for very marginal things,
At the risk of diverging from the topic of the UAW contract, what you write is an economic truism. There are always a number of jobs right at the margin, barely worth or not worth automating. But technology is rapidly improving so over time, marginal jobs will turn into definitely automate jobs.
I think, however, you underestimate the number of jobs which might eventually be automated. I assert it's an enormous number. I mean, ultimately you could chat with CarGPT on the phone, it would design a vehicle just
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They're fleeing from China TO Mexico and lots of other less developed nations, who have learned. The reshoring that's happening in the U.S. is really not much.
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No matter, their greed has just ensured a robot will take their job even sooner.
But everything that could be automated already is, except for very marginal things, and what you call "assembly line workers" nowadays are just people watching over machines.
And A.I. won't ever replace them? Robots absolutely can't do that? A.I. simply can't be trained to diagnose machine issues and direct robots to fix it? That just seems naive.
Anyway, you're right, it's outsourcing that will get them quickest, and they just made that a lot more likely. Their wages were absolutely fine.
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But everything that could be automated already is
Everything has been invented, nothing is left to be discovered. Throughout all of history we have heard the same thing. Every day we've reached a new peak automation. And yet we still have a never ending advancement in automation. The idea that we can't automate things further is a complete lack of imagination on your behalf. Car companies staff entire departments dedicated to advancing automation.
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They were doing well enough, firmly middle class for a low skilled assembly line job.
This was only true for auto workers hired before bailouts. The contract UAW negotiated in 2007 included a wage freeze that somehow lasted until 2023, resulting in 20%+ loss of wages due to inflation. Additionally, new hires got even lower wage tiers, so anyone that worked less than 16 years makes even less. That 40% raise would apply to 2008 and later hires to end the two-tier system, so not everyone gets that.
If you research into UAW strikes, what they are asking is entirely reasonable and what media rep
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Not every job is meant to support a family, not every job is worth a "living wage".
We used to call those starter and student jobs, like burger flippers for example.
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If your business model only works by denying a full time worker a sufficient wage to reside in your locale your business model is broken.
The "student jobs" I had when I was growing up were very much part time, as in, under 20 hours a week. Nobody expects a <20 hour a week job to provide a living wage. They do expect a 40 hour a week one to do that though. Do you really think that's unreasonable?
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If it is something so low level and menial, like burger flipper..then yes, I still say it isn't a job meant to support yourself for a living, much less a family.
Not everything is worth a living wage.
Do I think of baby sitter as a living wa
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Not every job is meant to support a family, not every job is worth a "living wage".
We used to call those starter and student jobs, like burger flippers for example.
And what happens when YOUR job becomes obsolete? And YOU are forced to flip burgers?
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I find another job....something that is way above burger flipper, given my experience, breadth of work over a lifetime, etc....
I've had many jobs in my life...I basically started at 16yrs old at "burger flipper" level...washing dishes in a medium upscale restaurant.
Even at that young age, I didn't stay that low long, I worked hard and made my way up the employment food chain with hard work, people skills and education.
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I can't answer, because I fundamentally reject your premise....
No one is forced into a job....no one is forced to be a burger flipper.
That is not the job you get for life...ev
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You sound like a confused person. The minimum wage was never meant to equate to a living wage.
You are wrong in every way it is possible to be wrong. [thebillfold.com] Given that your comment is based on a lie there is no sense in critiquing the remainder of it.
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You sound like a confused person. The minimum wage was never meant to equate to a living wage.
You are wrong in every way it is possible to be wrong. [thebillfold.com] Given that your comment is based on a lie there is no sense in critiquing the remainder of it.
A President dealing with The Great Depression making such statements happened in 1933. Took years for a Government to respond to that and actually establish a minimum wage, which was more targeted towards eliminating illegal child labor and pushing workers to death with insane workweeks well beyond a ~40-hour standard. Eventually citizens grew to understand a minimum wage was never going to sustain itself as a living wage. I sure understood that when I was making $3/hour still living under my parents roo
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Whatever people "understood" a minimum wage to be 90 years ago, people today want it to be for a living wage, or close to it. Frankly, you're just arguing semantics, by definition.
The problem is that many people simply either aren't smart enough to get a better, job, are disabled and can't do anything useful (but still need to work), or they're smart but have skills that are suddenly useless (see the majority of programmers in 10 years) and there's very little to move "into" (we can't all be managers!).
You
Re:And this is why vehicles are so expensive. (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, it must be the fact people want to be paid fairly and not the fact that the car companies are making huge profits. For example, Ford made $25 billion in the last year. You don't think the they could have taken slightly less profits to pay people fairly? They sure keep paying the execs more and more but the people actually doing the work certainly have not been seeing that increase. All the workers want is to share in the profits of the company that they are helping make. Instead, the profits have gone to only the execs by way of higher exec pay and higher share price (which primarily benefits the execs).
Re:And this is why vehicles are so expensive. (Score:4, Informative)
Agree 100%. It's the same argument made in Office Space. Ford made sales records this quarter and I get paid the same either way. What is my incentive to do anything beyond the bare minimum required of me?
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You don't have a bonus scheme? My company made record profits last year, and I received a record bonus as a result. It sounds like your remuneration scheme is poorly thought out.
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Let's do some math here. There are 4,004,000,000 shares of Ford stock out there. At $0.15 per share, they are paying out $600,600,000 each quarter in dividends. That is $240 million dollars each year. Which a good portion of goes to execs since they get shares given to them as part of their compensation. And that is not even counting the $3.5 BILLION they spent on stock buybacks between 2012 and 2022 (which again, mainly benefits the execs who have more stock). But please, continue to tell me how pay the pe
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Have wages risen on average 33% outside autoworking since 2007?
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Most of the increased cost of cars nowadays is safety features and reduced emissions. Most people want a safe vehicle. It's not really fair to let people externalize the cost of their cars to other people via emissions either.
Labour is only a small part of the cost of a vehicle. If you really want burger flippers to get by on $10/hour though, instead of ranting at them you should try to reduce the cost of living. Affordable housing, socialized healthcare, that sort of thing.
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Please stop right there.
NO...I do not and never have expected "burger flippers" to "get by" or make a living doing such.
Not all jobs are worth nor meant to be jobs you make a living at much less support a household/family.
Burger flippers and other min wage jobs, are 2nd jobs or starter/student jobs.....something for someone that is still supported by parents, etc.
This is where you start learning to work...budget, schedule and well.....work.
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The cost of cars has exploded in recent years due to multiple factors, significantly:
a) manufacturers faced with supply chain disruptions choosing to focus on higher-trim versions and neglecting making less profitable base models. A good example of this are F150 trucks. There is no shortage of $100K optioned-out Limited trucks, they actually sell at discount and under MSRP. Yet there is a waiting list for a base model 40K work vehicle.
b) cost o
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Many people just want a cheap car that can meet their needs. Yet the cost of cars has exploded. But god forbid that these entitled union workers don't get their expected pay raise. Stop trying to force consumers to finance your lifestyle. If you aren't happy with what you are being paid, then find a new job. Same reason why a fast-food cheeseburger costs $10 now, because the burger-flippers think they deserve $20/hour+. Folks, this money doesn't come from nowhere.
As if vehicles were cheap before this strike? Covid gave companies an excuse to jack up prices and blame it on "the supply chain".
What really killed the cheap used car market was cash for clunkers.
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What really killed the cheap used car market was cash for clunkers.
That is nonsense. It did cause a small blip in used vehicle prices but the vast majority of the vehicles turned in under the C4C program were F-Series pickups, and the majority of the F-Series turned in had 460s or other V8s. These were single digit or at best low-double-digit MPG (combined) vehicles that the poor couldn't afford to drive. You had to buy a NEW CAR to get a benefit from C4C, and most of the people driving cheap econoboxes couldn't afford to do that.
What's really raised the price of used cars
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That is nonsense. It did cause a small blip in used vehicle prices but the vast majority of the vehicles turned in under the C4C program were F-Series pickups, and the majority of the F-Series turned in had 460s or other V8s.
Bullshit. Here's the data. https://www.thedrive.com/news/... [thedrive.com]
1995-2003 Ford Explorer/Mercury Mountaineer: 46,676
1996-2000 Chrysler/Dodge/Plymouth minivans: 23,998
1993-1998 Jeep Grand Cherokee: 20,844
1992-1997 Ford F-150: 20,222
1984-2001 Jeep Cherokee: 18,329
1988-2002 GM C/K pickup: 17,202
1995-2005 Chevrolet Blazer: 15,668
1999-2003 Ford Windstar: 12,157
1991-1994 Ford Explorer: 11,612
1994-2001 Dodge Ram 1500: 8,103
SUVs and minivans are the top three and trucks are a distant fourth.
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F-Series includes F-250 and F-350.
HTH, non-car-guy, and HAND.
P.S. Did you look up the MPG on those antique Ford Exploders?
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Yes, actually. Let's pick year 2000 as the range is 1995-2003. You claimed single digits or low double digits. Actual reported mileage is 16mpg. https://www.fuelly.com/car/for... [fuelly.com]
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Yes, actually. Let's pick year 2000 as the range is 1995-2003. You claimed single digits or low double digits. Actual reported mileage is 16mpg. https://www.fuelly.com/car/for... [fuelly.com]
Considering double digits goes up to 99, 16 looks like low double digits to me.
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Oh, but the execs deserve literally millions of dollars a year *increase* (including bonuses) for their hard work at... manipulating the stock market.
You're a spoiled, entitled PoS. You *certainly* never worked an assembly line (and yes, when I was young, I did.)
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GM does not make passenger vehicles in the US because of high labor costs and work rules
Citation required.
My understanding that GM does not make passenger vehicles for the US market because there is low demand. People want to drive SUVs or trucks. More so, GM has assembly lines in Canada and Mexico, covered by NAFTA [wikipedia.org], so it wouldn't even make sense that US labor costs would have such effect. If that was true, they would just take sedans already manufactured in Mexico and sell in US.
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Your entire post is nothing but a work of fiction.
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Until someone, be it local or otherwise drops the price for market share and everyone scrambles to drop price to keep current market share.
Didn't that sort of happen recently when Tesla dropped prices of (at least some) it's EV vehicles and a whole bunch of other companies followed?
So if someone drops prices (even if in ICE vehicles), others may be forced to drop as well to keep the market shares.
Maybe it will be China brands. Maybe European. Or Korean, Japanese or even an American brand. If it's cheap enou
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This may just kill the US auto industry. Eventually, there will be enough price pressure that someone will start importing Chinese cars... other than GM, and selling them for a similar price they sell on the mainland. That is when the car industry in the US is pretty much history, because they priced themselves out of the market.
Same thing happened in the 1980s, when even though GM couldn't deliver on an economical car, Honda, Toyota, and other companies did, and GM should have learned that lesson by now.