For a GM family the American dream vanishes
11-19-2005, 04:08 AM
#1
Thread Starter
For a GM family the American dream vanishes
This article from today's New York Times is interesting because it mirrors in a lot of ways the changing society that we are living in. Time changes everything of course, but it is interesting to read about how we are watching American institutions crumble, and the effect it is having on people.
I didn't post this article because it's about General Motors, I posted it because its about America and the American people. Read it and see what you think. (I posted the article instead of linking to it because of the new "pay to read" format of the Times.)
November 19, 2005
For a G.M. Family, the American Dream Vanishes
By DANNY HAKIM
FLINT, Mich. - Four generations of the Roy family relied on General Motors for their prosperity.
Over more than seven decades, the company's wages bought the Roys homes, cars and once-unimaginable comforts, while G.M.'s enviable medical and pension benefits have kept them secure in their retirements.
But the G.M. that was once an unassailable symbol of the nation's industrial might is a shadow of its former self, and the post-World War II promise of blue-collar factory work being a secure path to the American dream has faded with it.
After a long slide, it now looks like the end of an era. "General Motors, when I got in there, it was like I'd died and went to heaven," said Jerry Roy, 49 - who started at G.M. in 1977 and now works on an assembly line at a plant operated by Delphi, the bankrupt former G.M. parts unit that was spun off in 1999.
When Mr. Roy was hired at G.M., nearly three decades ago, his salary more than doubled from his job at a local supermarket. He traded in his five-year-old Buick for a new Chevy and since then he has done well enough to buy a pleasant house on a lake near Flint.
But now he faces the prospect of either losing his job or accepting a sharp pay cut. And for those coming after him, "it's just sad that it's ending, that it looks like this," he said. In his hometown, he added, "all these places that used to be factories are now just parking lots."
Those factories supported the Roy family for generations.
Jerry's great-grandfather, John Westley Roy, came to Michigan from Missouri in 1931, in the depths of the Depression. He built a home five blocks north of a plant operated by General Motors' AC Delco division and worked there for a decade before he was injured and retired to a farm.
Mr. Roy's grandfather, Edward, worked at the Delco plant during the war, when it was converted into a machine-gun plant: he would tell a story about a day one of the guns came off a mount and began shooting holes in the wall of a cafeteria.
Mr. Roy's father, Gerald, started at G.M.'s Fisher Body unit in 1951, was laid off after a year and a half, and then got a job in 1954 at AC Delco. Gerald's sister, uncle and future wife, Delores, worked at the plant.
The elder Mr. Roy remembers the 1950's and '60's as a golden era, when everything seemed possible.
"There were three shifts - they worked around the clock," he said of the AC Delco plant, adding, "you'd go in there and you couldn't even hardly walk."
Buoyed by such prosperity, the auto industry was the pioneer in advancing what became the American model for the social contract between workers and their employees - from the $5 a day Henry Ford offered workers in 1914 to the all-inclusive health care and pension benefits that became a mainstay of the vast expansion of the middle class in the second half of the 20th century.
In many ways, it was not the government but Detroit and other major industries, at the prodding of their unions, that created the American-style social safety net, and helped foster the shared prosperity that is now fracturing.
"The days when blue-collar work could be passed on down the family line, those days are over," said Gary N. Chaison, a professor of labor relations at Clark University in Worcester, Mass. "Where you did have automobile plants it was always looked at as an elite job. It was hard work, but good, steady work, with wonderful benefits and good solid pay, and you were in the upper middle class."
Now, with G.M. and other domestic automakers and suppliers fighting to survive brutal global competition, Detroit is planning to cut even more manufacturing jobs. At the same time, the industry is moving to rewrite or even tear up its labor contracts in a bid to turn itself around by drastically reducing both wages and benefits. Today, Mr. Roy and Gerald, 71, who once helped him get his job, are both preparing to make sacrifices.
Robert S. Miller, the turnaround specialist who became chairman and chief executive of Delphi in July, said in an interview in October that Delphi and the United Auto Workers would have to grapple with how much to take from the retirees pockets and how much from workers.
"This is a tradeoff," he said. "I can't satisfy what everyone would like to have."
[But Delphi is pressing for such large cuts from both constituencies that one top U.A.W. leader, Richard Shoemaker, recently called the company's proposals a "roadmap for confrontation."] Not only is the company seeking to cut two-thirds of its 34,000 hourly workers in the United States, it wants to cut wages from as much as $30 an hour to as little as $10.
Worries about a strike at Delphi have also been among the many issues weighing on G.M. itself. [Talk of bankruptcy has become so persistent around G.M., despite the significant cash and other resources it still has at its disposal, that Rick Wagoner, the company's chief executive, went out of his way in a letter this week to state that there was "no plan, strategy or intention for G.M. to file."]
Delphi is also seeking major cuts in the health care and pension benefits of retirees, though under the terms of the spin-off of Delphi, G.M. would have to assume much of those costs, setting up a further quandary because simply dumping troubles on G.M., its largest customer, is not necessarily palatable to Delphi or the union.
Delphi plans as well to do more of what it has been doing since its spin-off, by continuing to shift thousands of jobs overseas. An internal memo obtained earlier this month by The Detroit News listed the Flint plant where Jerry Roy works among factories targeted for closure. Delphi has called the memo incomplete and preliminary.
Delphi puts the choices facing Detroit and its workers in starkest relief. G.M., at least so far, has sought a more compromising approach, in large part because automakers face slightly less-onerous competitive dynamics than their suppliers.
Earlier this month, U.A.W. members reluctantly agreed to allow the company to shave $15 billion, or nearly 20 percent, from its retiree health care liability. The elder Mr. Roy and other retirees will now be required to pay monthly premiums, deductibles and co-payments for medical services for the first time, with costs of as much as $752 a year.
For his part, Gerald Roy is more worried for his son Jerry than himself.
"What worries me the most, or bothers me the most, is him working for 28 years for G.M. and he might lose his retirement," he said.
But the Roy's are the lucky ones. Gerald and his wife, Delores, another G.M. retiree, are healthy and not on medication, and their son is single and does not have any children.
They are both aware that the good life that auto work has afforded their family for four generations, and for hundreds of thousands of other families in Michigan and elsewhere across the country, is ending.
Indeed, others face more difficult times ahead.
"We're going to have to make a choice between what bill to pay, whether to go to the doctor," said Larry Mathews, who works at the same Delphi plant as Mr. Roy and is also the editor of The Sparkler, a paper for plant workers. If the pay cuts go through, Mr. Mathews said he would no longer be able to afford his son's college tuition.
"I know I'm going to have to call my son at Central Michigan and tell him to come home," he said. "I bet those executives don't have to make those calls."
Like Gerald Roy, Mr. Mathews's father retired from G.M. at a time when the bond between the company and its workers was still strong. Mr. Mathews's father died from an asbestos-related illness stemming from his plant work. Even so, Mr. Mathews said his father, who became ill in his late seventies, refused to sue.
"He said, 'This place paid for everything I got today; I'm not going to sue them now,' " Mr. Mathews recalled.
But now, Mr. Mathews makes clear that he has no desire for his own son to continue the family tradition.
"Given what we've lost here in the past decade, I really didn't want to see him come to work at G.M. or Delphi," he said. "The security just isn't there."
When the web of labor contracts was woven during the postwar American auto boom, industry executives wanted, above all, to keep the union at bay and profit rolling in. With young workers and no Toyotas and Hondas to worry about, there was little short-term downside to the industry's concessions.
"The work forces were young, the pension costs were low, the exposure for health care wasn't really there and they didn't promise a lot to begin with," said Gerald Meyers, a professor at the University of Michigan and the former chief executive of American Motors. Each contract, he said, "added a little more and a little more and a little more."
"The thinking in top management," he said, speaking from personal experience, "is that they've kicked this ball in front of us, and keep kicking it. And when it comes due, we're not going to have to pay it."
"It's like the national debt," he added. "We'll spend it now and let the kids worry about it. Well, here we are in 2005, and the kids are now the management. They're paying for their fathers' sins."
G.M. workers should not expect the dire approach that Delphi has taken, at least on wages, because assembly work has always been better paying, including for competitors like Toyota and Honda in their American plants.
G.M.'s problem, at least in terms of its costs, is the enormous price of health care benefits for hundreds of thousands of retirees. G.M. is the largest private provider of health care, covering more than a million Americans.
"If I look at our priority list on the things we need to do to get cost competitive, wage rates are nowhere near the top for us," Mr. Wagoner, the G.M. chairman and chief executive, said in a recent interview.
Not that anyone has much chance of getting a job at these companies anymore. Wages are less important because the industry is so much more efficient than it used to be and has already cut so many jobs.
G.M. plans to cut its blue-collar work force even further, though, to 86,000 Americans nationwide by the end of 2008, about the same number of people it once employed in Flint alone in the 1970's. At its peak, G.M. employed more than 600,000 Americans.
"Frankly in our business, the progress in improving productivity has been dramatic," Mr. Wagoner said. "Over a 10-year period, we have gone from a ballpark of 40-plus hours a vehicle in assembly to 20-plus hours a vehicle."
Benefits are another matter. G.M. pays about $1,500 per car assembled in the United States for health care, more than it spends on steel.
Even with the coming cuts for retirees, the elder Mr. Roy is not concerned; he's actually more worried about paying heating bills for the large house he built two years ago, abutting woods just outside Flint.
"It costs a lot to heat this place," he said, sitting on a swivel chair in his sun room, before taking a visitor on a tour of his house, including his own woodcarvings displayed in his basement.
"We really made out," he said. "I bought a little cabin out on the lake and made a chalet on it, turned around and made enough money to buy this house."
But his son Jerry, knowing that his job may disappear and that his pay is likely to shrink no matter where he ends up, faces much greater uncertainty.
"What can you do?" Jerry asked. "People survive somehow, regardless of what happens. I mean, it's sad, I could cry all night, but I'll figure out a way to get by - somehow."
I didn't post this article because it's about General Motors, I posted it because its about America and the American people. Read it and see what you think. (I posted the article instead of linking to it because of the new "pay to read" format of the Times.)
November 19, 2005
For a G.M. Family, the American Dream Vanishes
By DANNY HAKIM
FLINT, Mich. - Four generations of the Roy family relied on General Motors for their prosperity.
Over more than seven decades, the company's wages bought the Roys homes, cars and once-unimaginable comforts, while G.M.'s enviable medical and pension benefits have kept them secure in their retirements.
But the G.M. that was once an unassailable symbol of the nation's industrial might is a shadow of its former self, and the post-World War II promise of blue-collar factory work being a secure path to the American dream has faded with it.
After a long slide, it now looks like the end of an era. "General Motors, when I got in there, it was like I'd died and went to heaven," said Jerry Roy, 49 - who started at G.M. in 1977 and now works on an assembly line at a plant operated by Delphi, the bankrupt former G.M. parts unit that was spun off in 1999.
When Mr. Roy was hired at G.M., nearly three decades ago, his salary more than doubled from his job at a local supermarket. He traded in his five-year-old Buick for a new Chevy and since then he has done well enough to buy a pleasant house on a lake near Flint.
But now he faces the prospect of either losing his job or accepting a sharp pay cut. And for those coming after him, "it's just sad that it's ending, that it looks like this," he said. In his hometown, he added, "all these places that used to be factories are now just parking lots."
Those factories supported the Roy family for generations.
Jerry's great-grandfather, John Westley Roy, came to Michigan from Missouri in 1931, in the depths of the Depression. He built a home five blocks north of a plant operated by General Motors' AC Delco division and worked there for a decade before he was injured and retired to a farm.
Mr. Roy's grandfather, Edward, worked at the Delco plant during the war, when it was converted into a machine-gun plant: he would tell a story about a day one of the guns came off a mount and began shooting holes in the wall of a cafeteria.
Mr. Roy's father, Gerald, started at G.M.'s Fisher Body unit in 1951, was laid off after a year and a half, and then got a job in 1954 at AC Delco. Gerald's sister, uncle and future wife, Delores, worked at the plant.
The elder Mr. Roy remembers the 1950's and '60's as a golden era, when everything seemed possible.
"There were three shifts - they worked around the clock," he said of the AC Delco plant, adding, "you'd go in there and you couldn't even hardly walk."
Buoyed by such prosperity, the auto industry was the pioneer in advancing what became the American model for the social contract between workers and their employees - from the $5 a day Henry Ford offered workers in 1914 to the all-inclusive health care and pension benefits that became a mainstay of the vast expansion of the middle class in the second half of the 20th century.
In many ways, it was not the government but Detroit and other major industries, at the prodding of their unions, that created the American-style social safety net, and helped foster the shared prosperity that is now fracturing.
"The days when blue-collar work could be passed on down the family line, those days are over," said Gary N. Chaison, a professor of labor relations at Clark University in Worcester, Mass. "Where you did have automobile plants it was always looked at as an elite job. It was hard work, but good, steady work, with wonderful benefits and good solid pay, and you were in the upper middle class."
Now, with G.M. and other domestic automakers and suppliers fighting to survive brutal global competition, Detroit is planning to cut even more manufacturing jobs. At the same time, the industry is moving to rewrite or even tear up its labor contracts in a bid to turn itself around by drastically reducing both wages and benefits. Today, Mr. Roy and Gerald, 71, who once helped him get his job, are both preparing to make sacrifices.
Robert S. Miller, the turnaround specialist who became chairman and chief executive of Delphi in July, said in an interview in October that Delphi and the United Auto Workers would have to grapple with how much to take from the retirees pockets and how much from workers.
"This is a tradeoff," he said. "I can't satisfy what everyone would like to have."
[But Delphi is pressing for such large cuts from both constituencies that one top U.A.W. leader, Richard Shoemaker, recently called the company's proposals a "roadmap for confrontation."] Not only is the company seeking to cut two-thirds of its 34,000 hourly workers in the United States, it wants to cut wages from as much as $30 an hour to as little as $10.
Worries about a strike at Delphi have also been among the many issues weighing on G.M. itself. [Talk of bankruptcy has become so persistent around G.M., despite the significant cash and other resources it still has at its disposal, that Rick Wagoner, the company's chief executive, went out of his way in a letter this week to state that there was "no plan, strategy or intention for G.M. to file."]
Delphi is also seeking major cuts in the health care and pension benefits of retirees, though under the terms of the spin-off of Delphi, G.M. would have to assume much of those costs, setting up a further quandary because simply dumping troubles on G.M., its largest customer, is not necessarily palatable to Delphi or the union.
Delphi plans as well to do more of what it has been doing since its spin-off, by continuing to shift thousands of jobs overseas. An internal memo obtained earlier this month by The Detroit News listed the Flint plant where Jerry Roy works among factories targeted for closure. Delphi has called the memo incomplete and preliminary.
Delphi puts the choices facing Detroit and its workers in starkest relief. G.M., at least so far, has sought a more compromising approach, in large part because automakers face slightly less-onerous competitive dynamics than their suppliers.
Earlier this month, U.A.W. members reluctantly agreed to allow the company to shave $15 billion, or nearly 20 percent, from its retiree health care liability. The elder Mr. Roy and other retirees will now be required to pay monthly premiums, deductibles and co-payments for medical services for the first time, with costs of as much as $752 a year.
For his part, Gerald Roy is more worried for his son Jerry than himself.
"What worries me the most, or bothers me the most, is him working for 28 years for G.M. and he might lose his retirement," he said.
But the Roy's are the lucky ones. Gerald and his wife, Delores, another G.M. retiree, are healthy and not on medication, and their son is single and does not have any children.
They are both aware that the good life that auto work has afforded their family for four generations, and for hundreds of thousands of other families in Michigan and elsewhere across the country, is ending.
Indeed, others face more difficult times ahead.
"We're going to have to make a choice between what bill to pay, whether to go to the doctor," said Larry Mathews, who works at the same Delphi plant as Mr. Roy and is also the editor of The Sparkler, a paper for plant workers. If the pay cuts go through, Mr. Mathews said he would no longer be able to afford his son's college tuition.
"I know I'm going to have to call my son at Central Michigan and tell him to come home," he said. "I bet those executives don't have to make those calls."
Like Gerald Roy, Mr. Mathews's father retired from G.M. at a time when the bond between the company and its workers was still strong. Mr. Mathews's father died from an asbestos-related illness stemming from his plant work. Even so, Mr. Mathews said his father, who became ill in his late seventies, refused to sue.
"He said, 'This place paid for everything I got today; I'm not going to sue them now,' " Mr. Mathews recalled.
But now, Mr. Mathews makes clear that he has no desire for his own son to continue the family tradition.
"Given what we've lost here in the past decade, I really didn't want to see him come to work at G.M. or Delphi," he said. "The security just isn't there."
When the web of labor contracts was woven during the postwar American auto boom, industry executives wanted, above all, to keep the union at bay and profit rolling in. With young workers and no Toyotas and Hondas to worry about, there was little short-term downside to the industry's concessions.
"The work forces were young, the pension costs were low, the exposure for health care wasn't really there and they didn't promise a lot to begin with," said Gerald Meyers, a professor at the University of Michigan and the former chief executive of American Motors. Each contract, he said, "added a little more and a little more and a little more."
"The thinking in top management," he said, speaking from personal experience, "is that they've kicked this ball in front of us, and keep kicking it. And when it comes due, we're not going to have to pay it."
"It's like the national debt," he added. "We'll spend it now and let the kids worry about it. Well, here we are in 2005, and the kids are now the management. They're paying for their fathers' sins."
G.M. workers should not expect the dire approach that Delphi has taken, at least on wages, because assembly work has always been better paying, including for competitors like Toyota and Honda in their American plants.
G.M.'s problem, at least in terms of its costs, is the enormous price of health care benefits for hundreds of thousands of retirees. G.M. is the largest private provider of health care, covering more than a million Americans.
"If I look at our priority list on the things we need to do to get cost competitive, wage rates are nowhere near the top for us," Mr. Wagoner, the G.M. chairman and chief executive, said in a recent interview.
Not that anyone has much chance of getting a job at these companies anymore. Wages are less important because the industry is so much more efficient than it used to be and has already cut so many jobs.
G.M. plans to cut its blue-collar work force even further, though, to 86,000 Americans nationwide by the end of 2008, about the same number of people it once employed in Flint alone in the 1970's. At its peak, G.M. employed more than 600,000 Americans.
"Frankly in our business, the progress in improving productivity has been dramatic," Mr. Wagoner said. "Over a 10-year period, we have gone from a ballpark of 40-plus hours a vehicle in assembly to 20-plus hours a vehicle."
Benefits are another matter. G.M. pays about $1,500 per car assembled in the United States for health care, more than it spends on steel.
Even with the coming cuts for retirees, the elder Mr. Roy is not concerned; he's actually more worried about paying heating bills for the large house he built two years ago, abutting woods just outside Flint.
"It costs a lot to heat this place," he said, sitting on a swivel chair in his sun room, before taking a visitor on a tour of his house, including his own woodcarvings displayed in his basement.
"We really made out," he said. "I bought a little cabin out on the lake and made a chalet on it, turned around and made enough money to buy this house."
But his son Jerry, knowing that his job may disappear and that his pay is likely to shrink no matter where he ends up, faces much greater uncertainty.
"What can you do?" Jerry asked. "People survive somehow, regardless of what happens. I mean, it's sad, I could cry all night, but I'll figure out a way to get by - somehow."
11-19-2005, 09:03 AM
#2
As noted, the same 'shot of reality' will soon be coming to your local school teachers, public employees, etc. The global economy is a bullet heading our way.....and it's not a BB gun 
11-19-2005, 09:38 AM
#3
Registered User
The old social contract that you could graduate from high school, get a blue-collar job, and be middle-class is largely dead in this country.
I held blue collar jobs for most of my life, including 17 years with the same company. I worked in their repair shop, repairing product that was returned by the distributors for warranty and non-warranty repair. When the product was made by US labor, who earned a middle-class living, I felt I too could be middle-class. (Although not upper middle-class; not at the UAW level.) When the company moved the production equipment to Mexico, it became clear that I wouldn't remain middle-class if I stayed, so I quit and finished my degree and started over. Unfortunately, this was not a viable option for everyone I worked with.
As Jerry noted, it's going to happen to more and more of us. Software developers, engineers, etc. have already seen enough jobs outsourced overseas to dramatically lower salaries here. The big accounting firms are no doing it; some of the architectural firms are sending design work overseas.
Keep in mind it will affect us all. If the young engineers and accountants can't find jobs, they'll become teachers or real estate salespersons, or something else, driving down salaries in that field. The bell does indeed toll for thee...
I held blue collar jobs for most of my life, including 17 years with the same company. I worked in their repair shop, repairing product that was returned by the distributors for warranty and non-warranty repair. When the product was made by US labor, who earned a middle-class living, I felt I too could be middle-class. (Although not upper middle-class; not at the UAW level.) When the company moved the production equipment to Mexico, it became clear that I wouldn't remain middle-class if I stayed, so I quit and finished my degree and started over. Unfortunately, this was not a viable option for everyone I worked with.
As Jerry noted, it's going to happen to more and more of us. Software developers, engineers, etc. have already seen enough jobs outsourced overseas to dramatically lower salaries here. The big accounting firms are no doing it; some of the architectural firms are sending design work overseas.
Keep in mind it will affect us all. If the young engineers and accountants can't find jobs, they'll become teachers or real estate salespersons, or something else, driving down salaries in that field. The bell does indeed toll for thee...
11-19-2005, 02:27 PM
#4
Originally Posted by RedY2KS2k,Nov 19 2005, 01:38 PM
....As Jerry noted, it's going to happen to more and more of us. .....some of the architectural firms are sending design work overseas. ....
He pointed out that those who will retain some job security are 'knowledge workers'.... who deal with original thought (see Matt_inva's thread). In this case, I think the conceptual architects who PROGRAM and DESIGN non-repetitive buildings will still have jobs. The production architects who (largely) turn an approved design into a set of usable construction documents may NOT have secure jobs...especially on MEGA projects.
Massey was pointing out that the 'right brain' (qualitative/ creative) people have a better chance at surviving the outsourcing abroad than do the 'left brain' (quantitative) folks
What are the words to that song, Rob? "Teach your children well...."
11-19-2005, 02:58 PM
#5
Thread Starter
This is similar to what I saw happen to the clothing industry, especially the men's clothing industry, twenty years ago. Of course there were differences, but as more and more jobs went overseas a proud and healthy industry died. Today virtually nothing, neither mens nor ladies garments, are made in America. An industry that through hard work afforded its laborers, mostly unskilled and often immigrant, an opportunity to become middle class is completely gone. The ILGWU (ladies) and Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union (mens), once powerhouses, are mere shells of themselves. In the case of clothing, not only did the jobs disappear, the entire industry disappeared.
I've often wondered how we are going to create wealth in America if we continue to send our manufacturing overseas?
I've often wondered how we are going to create wealth in America if we continue to send our manufacturing overseas?
11-19-2005, 03:03 PM
#6
Thread Starter
Teach Your Children Well
Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young
You, who are on the road
Must have a code
That you can live by
And so
Become yourself
Because the past
Is just a good-bye
Teach you children well
Your father's hell did slowly go by
And feed them on your dreams
The one they picks
The one you'll know by
Don't you ever ask them why
If they told you, you would cry
So just look at them and sigh
And know they love you
And give of tender years
Can't know the fears
That your elders grew by
And so please help
Them with your belief
They seek the turf
Before they can die
Teach your parents well
The childrens hell
Will slowly go by
And feed them on your dreams
The one they picks
The one you'll know by
Don't you ever ask them why
If they told you, you would cry
So just look at them and sigh
And know they love you
Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young
You, who are on the road
Must have a code
That you can live by
And so
Become yourself
Because the past
Is just a good-bye
Teach you children well
Your father's hell did slowly go by
And feed them on your dreams
The one they picks
The one you'll know by
Don't you ever ask them why
If they told you, you would cry
So just look at them and sigh
And know they love you
And give of tender years
Can't know the fears
That your elders grew by
And so please help
Them with your belief
They seek the turf
Before they can die
Teach your parents well
The childrens hell
Will slowly go by
And feed them on your dreams
The one they picks
The one you'll know by
Don't you ever ask them why
If they told you, you would cry
So just look at them and sigh
And know they love you
11-19-2005, 03:34 PM
#7
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There are way too many people that have a pessimistic outlook to gloabilzation. I do not subscribe to the authors assertions. The reality is, we as Americans need to rise up to the challenge instead of just rolling over. There will always be a need for service oriented jobs, they can not be outsourced. Healthcare, ditto. People need to be empowered and have enough drive to improve themselves and show there is a clear advantage to our human resources. Capitalism at work.
The old motto stands more true now than ever "Adapt or die".
The old motto stands more true now than ever "Adapt or die".
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11-19-2005, 04:54 PM
#8
Thread Starter
The only problem is that the service sector doesn't create new weath it simply redistributes it. Manufacturing, mining, farming etc. creates wealth.
11-19-2005, 06:48 PM
#9
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Location: Green Bay WI
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The worst part is outsourcing some jobs just doesn't work. I bought a Dell laptop and technical support is very very spotty. It is all based on if you got someone on the line from the U.S. or India. The Indian support was useless, even harmful, as the dipshit started reading me instructions for the wrong computer and made me break the keyboard because he was having me "pry" in the wrong place (even after repeatedly telling him that his instructions made no sense).
Teach your kids to go into business, build them up for major butt kissing, so they can get ahead. Teach them to play golf, act snooty, and ridicule basically everyone else (ding ding management material).
but seriously...
I know a few things about computer programming industry, it pays to specialize, but you must always be willingly to adapt and re-specialize. So few people are willing to do it, especially once they have "made it". The specifics of my job have changed every 5 years (18 years running), but not the basics, can you learn?, think logically?, translate business needs into code? One thing that will never go out of style is logical thinking (yes left brain), so few have that capability in business it is frightening.
The only reason they can outsource many of these jobs is because there is a lot of dead weight in the industry, people that should never have been computer programmers. I have worked with many of them, not sure what they should have been, but not computer programmers. I say good riddance to the dead weight, so management can stop thinking that we are commodity. I completed one project last February, and a parallel project should have finished about that time. I was called in last week to give recommendations about this parallel project because it was still failing to work 9 months after it should have been done. Gee I wonder why they want to keep giving me projects even though as a consultant, I cost twice as much as an employee (not that I get to see most of that).
Teach your kids to go into business, build them up for major butt kissing, so they can get ahead. Teach them to play golf, act snooty, and ridicule basically everyone else (ding ding management material).
but seriously...
I know a few things about computer programming industry, it pays to specialize, but you must always be willingly to adapt and re-specialize. So few people are willing to do it, especially once they have "made it". The specifics of my job have changed every 5 years (18 years running), but not the basics, can you learn?, think logically?, translate business needs into code? One thing that will never go out of style is logical thinking (yes left brain), so few have that capability in business it is frightening.
The only reason they can outsource many of these jobs is because there is a lot of dead weight in the industry, people that should never have been computer programmers. I have worked with many of them, not sure what they should have been, but not computer programmers. I say good riddance to the dead weight, so management can stop thinking that we are commodity. I completed one project last February, and a parallel project should have finished about that time. I was called in last week to give recommendations about this parallel project because it was still failing to work 9 months after it should have been done. Gee I wonder why they want to keep giving me projects even though as a consultant, I cost twice as much as an employee (not that I get to see most of that).
11-19-2005, 07:45 PM
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Wow. An entire story about the decline of GM, and not one mention of the unions or their intransigence regarding health care costs, the union's willingness to cut wages in order to keep more people employed, or pretty much any kind of compromise that would allow GM more flexibility. So what if health care is through the roof, GM should have to pay for it, because they always have...