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"Corporate Greed at Its Worst': After Reaping $514 Million From GOP Tax Scam and Billions in Public Subsidies, GM to Fire Nearly 15,000 Workers

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#22

And how many jobs were saved by that? The whole point was avoiding Chapter 7 bankruptcy. The unions took on employee healthcare and other one-time employee benefits in negotiations with automakers in 2007—that’s a huge responsibility. In return, the automakers go bankrupt, thousands of jobs are lost, the unions disappear and so do retiree benefits. The only people that win in that situation are who, privileged folks? Why is that good or better? Why is that capitalism?

Workers take it on the chin all the time. I have yet to see the “right” in that. The bailout just asked privileged folks to take a cut too.

3 Likes
#23

Chapter 11 was inevitable. GM lost over $30 billion in 2007, and sales were plummeting. The UAW actually did make out pretty well under the circumstances, but they forked over major concessions. They’ll be forking over more next year if they want to keep some of these jobs, but that’s not guaranteed. That’s the reality of a globalized workforce and automation. I live around Detroit, it’s much more of a high tech robotics hub than most people understand. Robots don’t get paid shit.

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#24

GM did a Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization.

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#25

My bad. Thank you—I’ll correct. I meant Chapter 7 and liquidation.

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#26

Yep. Rents and the cost of housing shoots up even as wages remain stagnant. There nothing left for a “new Car”. The rule of thumb was not spending more than 30 percent of income on housing. This has shot up to well over 50 percent ,

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#27

Wouldn’t have gone under
We revived a corpse

Did you Work in a collapsed industry in 2009

#29

If you have a TOTAL stake in the business as Professor Wolff advocates then it will have a VERY dramatic impact on its success. In the 2018 sense, if you have at least some input (and control) in an enterprise, yeah I think it will make a difference on the business AND its employees. Another very important thing with todays business is unionization. Make it much easier for employees to vote for unionization.

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#30

But, but, you criticized a Democrat! That means you support everything Trump does! (yes, sarcasm)

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#31

Yeah, and saved thousands of GM jobs AT THE TIME. Trump said he was gonna bring all these jobs back. Yeah? What’s he gonna do in this case? Like everything else he does NOTHING but do his tweeties.

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#32

Kinsella tweet sez: “For those wondering: in the past decade, the Canadian government gave General Motors about $14 billion, and the U.S. government gave them about $50 billion.”

Whooee! And that’s in a “free” market. Imagine if we had to pay for it!

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#34

Not surprising. As Chomsky says, corporations are “private tyrannies” and should be abolished, ideally. “Corporate greed” is lamented but these institutions exist to reap profits at all costs, sometimes even breaking the law.

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#35

Obviously, the bigger the stake, the greater the impact.

From what I’ve seen though, in an employee-owned company you rarely have a union. What’s the point of unionizing against yourself?

#36

In a word: Neoliberalism. Neoliberal corporate globalization, if you like. And it’s been a resolutely bipartisan US duopoly project for the past 40 years. [Bold italic emphasis not directed at you, CMS.]

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#37

At some point, every industry is a collapsed industry.

#39

As i’ve written here repeatedly in the past few months:

“Limited-liability, investor-owned corporations” were literally invented to carry out colonization and grand theft continental, with the necessary genocide, enslavement, ecocide, and “cost externalization” to do so. Read the Wikipedia page on Dutch East India Company, the original limited-liability, investor-owned corporation.

Colonization, by any means necessary, is what corporations were designed for. It is what they do. The limited-liability, investor owned corporation must be abolished.

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#41

Predictable. They did the same thing with the Obama bailout, too.

Another corporation loyal to nothing except its executives pay packages and its largest shareholders.

Drag these scum to the guillotine and collect the debt the old fashioned way.

#42

It’s definitely a start, my brother.

I’m at the guillotine stage of grief.

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#43

It depends on what that means. I actually knew the man who invented ESOPs (from a long interview when I debated at my university years ago)–Lou Kelso–and he pointed out the obvious: that giving an employee a smidgen of stock as an incentive was more a union-prevention tactic than an actual motivation. Kelso, in fairness, wanted genuine employee stakeholders. But he acknowledged that the concept of “employee-owned” would likely be abused by many corporate directors. So that’s how you can get unionization in an employee-owned company.

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#44

My understanding is that you should not be mentioning that the Democrats are in on the scam. Das ist verboten!

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#45

We’re in 2 degrees of separation then drone! I met Louis Kelso too back in college. He was a believer in real employee capitalism - create a meaningful stake in the business and everyone wins. I wouldn’t call most of the “tax credit ESOP” companies employee-owned - those are the ones where the company got a tax benefit for giving employees stock equal to 1/2 percent of the payroll. Real ESOP owned companies though are another matter - I’ve worked in one of those, and it’s night and day different!

2 Likes