Beginning of the end??: Chrysler

Wow.

Chrysler is definitely in a big time trouble. Bigger than ever.

 

How many weeks do they get off normally?

 

I have a feeling those 2 weeks will be filled with many job interviews for those employees.

 

A two week shutdown during the "model changeover" time is common in the industry. It used to be that stamping plants needed time to change dies and the tooling that was required for changing to a new model year was being installed in the plants during that period. Since the plant wasn't producing, the production workers would normally not work during those times. All very typical, and the shutdown is still part of the union contracts.

When I was at GM (Allison Gas Turbine) we were forced to shutdown the plant for two weeks even tho we weren't even related to the auto industry and it hurt us not to be in production for those two weeks. It made no sense for us (figures that GM is still in trouble), but we had to do it. Otherwise the union would have tried to get other GM plants not to shut down (if they had real demand) and it would have been a mess. Remember that most of these union guys that have been there for 15 years have about 25 vacation days during the year (in addition to the 10 or 11 paid holidays off). It is hard to get enough replacement workers to man the line, so it is better to shut the entire place down and have everybody take their vacation at the same time. It is hardest on the folks who are newer and don't have much vacation time, since they have to use up all of their vacation (or not get paid) for the time during shutdown.

Moreover, if demand is down you don't want the assembly line churning out too many cars, but if you stop the line during normal times, you have to pay everybody even if they don't show up. Enforcing a plant shutdown policy is a smart thing to do if demand is down, and it costs you nothing to do it that way.

Bottom line is that it is a smart move in a time when they aren't selling as many cars.

These people aren't stupid, they have a set of union rules and they are playing by them, but this is a good way to reduce costs during an economic slowdown.

The real thing that this is telling us is that the people running Chrysler don't think that the economy is going to be strong later this year....

 

You should have known after the Vipers day was numbered that they where suffing a terminal illness .

 

Chrysler just sold its engine plant in Brazil to Fiat.

 

Sorry, I'm a car enthusiast and I think we'd be better off if Chrysler threw in the towel. Yes, I care about the workers. I know that they can find gainful employment with a car company that can survive without bailouts. But this company, among others in your state, is clueless when it comes to the future of the automobile.

Global warming is not a "farce". There's reasonable discussion to be had about how fast, what the effects have been/will be, and how to slow it. But you can't spew CO and NO2 into the atmosphere indefinitely without poisoning it, and us. You don't have to be an Al Gore fan: even GWB admits that we're doing serious harm to the environment and therefore ourselves.

I just finished an excellent book from Economist correspondent Vijay Vaitheeswaran, (Zoom: The Race to Fuel the Car of the Future), and interviewed him for a program I host. His research and narrative is pretty much spot on: The auto industry has lobbied itself out of innovating for decades, and clung to century-old technology. The real source for the auto industry's problems is its historical greed. It has fought everything from seatbelts to catalytic converters to fuel injection to alternative energy vehicles tooth and nail, and so now its core product dates from the age of the steam locomotive. The real tragedy is that U.S. politics allowed these companies to survive this long without fundamentally improving their product.

(BTW, ample blame to the oil industry as well for stifling innovation by intentially manipulating oil prices on several occasions.)

The fuel economy argument is ludicrous. The Ford Model T got better fuel economy than the average 2008 automobile. If car companies gave a **** about anything other than profits on the whatever crap they could churn out, we could have great cars running on something much more clever than ancient internal combustion technology.

The Viper's dead because Chrysler won't apply some brainpower and save it.

The Neon -- you're joking, yes? I guess it was better than the K car and the Cordoba.

 

Old news.

 

AMEN

 

The Viper is dead? Since when?

 

I hope Chrysler folds. Then I would not have to see any more blinged out 300's.

 

Has anyone checked into the August off for BMW employees in Germany each year? I wonder if they are in trouble like Chrysler is????? Oh, they have been taking a month off for years.......hmmmmmm.....I wonder!!!!!

And their days off program.
Work six days and get a day off.
Work five days and get two days off.
Work four days and get three days off.
Work three days and get four days off.
Work two days and get five days off.
Work one day and get six days off.
Begin the rotation again..........At least that was the way it was done when I was with BMW and made a factory visit to Munich , Dingolfing and Regensburg in Germany. When we walked in at 10am the production line was shut down and all the workers were taking a break at the same time--an ale break. They each received one chip in the morning and one in the afternoon that could be exchanged for the equivalent of a pint of ale to be consumed on their breaks. The employees all seemed to be happy and when the assembly line started back up they were happy to get going again.

I do not know if something like this would help employee morale in the US and the unions would probably not allow it to happen but it seemed to work there.

Old dinosaur thinking, the US auto industry....but they do seem to be trying to adapt to change.....

 

Okay, thanks!

As for the ongoing discussion here. I think Chrysler is pretty big here in DK for an American make. There seem to be a lot more Chruysler products on the roads than GM or Ford. Of course we have a lot of the EU Ford and Korea Korea Chavy, but they don't really count

Personally if I could choose to buy a car of anyu kind it would come from Chrysler rather than Ford or GM.

 

+1

 

...just more blinged out Hyundais...