A
complementary article about the concurrent missteps of GM. It will be a sad day when GM is inevitably, and deservingly surpassed in sales volume by a foreign automaker.
<rant>
Likewise, the UAW really need to stop shooting themselves in the feet. A system that was once meant as a shield against economic inequality has now become defiled and abused. Whoever said any job should earn you a "living wage" at the cost of everybody else? How do you teach your children the value of hard work when the butcher at Albertson's or Safeway rakes in $35/hr, and a dockworker in a West Coast dock pockets $110,000 a year (and they still went on strike, demanding more). In contrast, earning my EE degree, by no means a cakewalk, will probably earn me $70,000 after graduation. Also, contrary to popular consensus, union work != high quality. My house in the SF Bay Area, built by K&B, is the prime example of union workers thinking they can get away with sloppy work. All of their shortcomings revealed themselves once my brother and I started renovating the place: misaligned subflooring upstairs, unfastened subfloor anchor screws, incomplete concrete-based backerboard coverage in the bathrooms, and more. They even left some live AC wires inside the walls and forgot to punch out a socket. We discovered it when we were scanning for studs, picked up an AC signal instead, and confirmed with our neighbors who had the same model homes.
</rant>
What a mouthful...