| OooOo |
Eve shto mozhe mokjen sindikat da napravi. Mojot ex-gazda vikashe 'Unija e za nerabotnici!' i ushte togash mislev deka e vo pravo, no sega sum UBEDEN vo toa!
G.M. Will Offer Buyouts to All Its Union Workers
DETROIT, March 22 — General Motors reached a landmark agreement Wednesday with the United Automobile Workers intended to reduce sharply the ranks of a generation of auto workers long envied by other blue-collar workers for their wages and benefits.
G.M., staggering under the weight of $10.6 billion in losses last year, said it would offer buyouts and early-retirement packages ranging from $35,000 to $140,000 to every one of its 113,000 unionized workers in the United States who agreed to leave the company.
At the same time, Delphi, the nation's biggest automotive parts maker and a unit of G.M. until seven years ago, will offer buyouts of $35,000 to 13,000 U.A.W. members, of 24,000 on its factory floors.
Despite the ambitious plan, G.M. still has much more to do in its effort to rebuild itself as a smaller, more competitive automaker after losing ground for two decades in the United States against the growing strength and sophistication of Asian and European rivals.
For G.M., which is paying the full cost, the buyout offer is an expensive way to persuade its workers and those at Delphi to retire rather than accept the full pay and benefits they would ordinarily receive when their plants closed or they were laid off. Analysts said the plan could cost G.M. as much as $2 billion, depending on how many workers took part in the buyout program.
On average, U.A.W. members at G.M and Delphi cost the equivalent of $67 an hour, including pay of about $27 an hour plus pensions and health care expenses.
The buyout plan, coupled with concessions on health care late last year, signals the willingness of the U.A.W. president, Ron Gettelfinger, to grant concessions without formally reopening the union contract for new bargaining — something not done since the industry slump of the early 1980's. At that time, the U.A.W. renegotiated its contract only after Chrysler sought a federal bailout and both G.M. and Ford suffered deep losses.
For G.M.'s American workers, the offer presents a host of difficult choices, forcing them to consider the risk that the company may be even worse off in the future if the buyouts fail to spur a turnaround in business.
Amid all the maneuvering, analysts said, bargaining in next year's contract talks has already begun, with Mr. Gettelfinger gambling that if the union can address major issues now, it can stave off a bitter confrontation in 2007.
But the situation is far from resolved for G.M.'s chief executive, Rick Wagoner, whose future is now in serious doubt. He must deliver even broader cost cuts to save both G.M. and his own job. Already, he is under growing pressure from the company's largest individual shareholder, Kirk Kerkorian, whose representative has joined the board.
Delphi, which is operating under bankruptcy protection, remains a wild card. Despite G.M.'s assistance, it is still demanding that U.A.W. members accept sharply lower wages and benefits by the end of the month. Otherwise, Delphi has threatened to ask a bankruptcy judge for the ability to impose lower rates. If that happens, the U.A.W. has warned that it may go on strike.
In pursuing this substantial a downsizing, said John A. Challenger, president of Challenger, Gray & Christmas, a Chicago firm that follows workplace trends, G.M. is finally recognizing that its dominant position in industrial America is over. "It's taken the company losing $10 billion," he said, "for the jam to begin to break."
Beyond the buyouts, analysts said, G.M. must take further steps to become more competitive or risk being pushed aside by strong rivals like Toyota, which could unseat G.M. to become the world's biggest auto company as soon as sometime this year.
A number of industry analysts have raised fears that G.M. could be forced into its own bankruptcy filing as a result of a flood of bad news at the company.
Late last year, G.M. announced plans to eliminate 30,000 jobs and close all or part of 12 plants through 2008.
It estimated that it faced a liability of $5.5 billion to $12 billion from the bankruptcy at Delphi, because it must pay for the pensions and health care coverage of workers who were at G.M. before Delphi was spun off.
Its once-sterling credit rating has sunk to junk-bond status, and its financial results have been restated twice in four months, most recently last week.
G.M., its union and Delphi began talking about the retrenchment plan shortly before Delphi sought bankruptcy protection last October.
Under the program, G.M.'s hourly workers would be offered packages to retire or leave, ranging from $35,000 for those who are already eligible to retire to $140,000 for those with 10 years at the company who are willing to cut ties and give up health care coverage.
At the same time, as Delphi will be offering buyouts to roughly half its unionized employees, G.M. agreed to take back 5,000 workers from Delphi, and those workers can opt for one of the G.M. retirement programs.
Employees are not under the obligation to accept a deal, and there is little likelihood that G.M. would give buyouts to all its workers — something that would cripple factories.
Rather, it is likely to look for volunteers at the plants it already wants to close so it can make room for the Delphi workers who come back.
Even so, some executives and union officials have been concerned that workers could hold out for sweetened offers. The $35,000 lump-sum payment, for example, is roughly half what some better-paid workers earn in a year.
The Ford Motor Company, for example, is offering buyouts of $35,000 to $100,000 under a program that will eliminate 30,000 jobs by 2012.
Reaction to the G.M. plan Wednesday was decidedly mixed.
Robert Betts, president of the U.A.W. local at the Delphi plant in Coopersville, Mich., said the offers were attractive. "If someone is going to give you $35,000 to take your pension, that's good," Mr. Betts said. "I think a whole lot of people are going to hit the road over this."
But Steve Brunner, who has spent 22 years as an electrician at the G.M. truck plant in Flint, Mich., and still has eight years to go until he can retire, said he was not interested.
"I mean, $35,000 is not even a year's wages," Mr. Brunner said. "I don't think it'll change anyone's mind unless they were ready to go."
Analysts also said they were not convinced that the plan had gone far enough to push G.M. and Delphi over the hump.
"The risk of a strike has not been eliminated," John Murphy, an auto analyst at Merrill Lynch, said in a research report. Mr. Murphy called the deal "disappointing," especially because it was likely to increase G.M.'s ratio of 2.5 retirees for every active worker.
But in a statement, Mr. Wagoner said that the move was an important step in the company's revamping, and that G.M. was "pleased" by the agreement.
A G.M. spokeswoman, Katie McBride, said that about 36,000 workers were eligible to retire with full pension and benefits, meaning that they had spent at least 30 years on the job.
An additional 27,000 are within a few years of retirement, and would be offered a plan providing them up to $2,900 a month, on top of their usual pay, if they agreed to retire when they reached the 30-year level.
Michigan's governor, Jennifer M. Granholm, whose state has about half the employees at G.M. and Delphi, said the agreement "signals that Michigan's manufacturers and workers are committed to working together in new ways."
Governor Granholm, who faces re-election this fall, has aggressively courted Toyota to build an engine plant in the state.
Given G.M.'s cutback plans, there are not likely to be jobs for the Delphi workers when they "flow back" to G.M. Unless they retire, that means some would go into a program called the Jobs Bank, where workers receive full pay and benefits until the U.A.W. contract expires next year.
The buyout program is the second major accommodation the union has made under the terms of its current labor agreement, which has 17 months to run. Late last year, U.A.W. members at G.M. and Ford agreed to pay more for health care benefits.
The union has not yet reached a similar agreement at Chrysler, which was the only Detroit auto company to earn a profit in North America and gain market share last year.
Union officials said last week that Delphi would possibly hold off filing its motion to dissolve its labor agreements if it reached a deal with G.M. and the U.A.W. on early retirement. Delphi, though, reiterated its intention to go ahead on March 31 if there was not a deal with the U.A.W.
Talks are likely to continue after that. But a strike by the U.A.W. would cripple production at G.M., and could topple the company into filing for bankruptcy protection, under which its own workers could face the threat of lower wages and benefits like those Delphi is seeking from the union.
Averting that is the supreme challenge for G.M., said David Cole, chairman of the Center for Automotive Research in Ann Arbor, Mich.
"When we look back at this particular period," Mr. Cole said, "what we are going to realize is that we were right in the middle of the most dramatic restructuring period in the history of the automobile industry." |
| zlotty_co_380 |
Ima slicen primer vo Australia sto se dogajga poslednive 3-4 nedeli.
Qantas saka da zatvori okolu 12000 mesta vo Australia i da gi preseli vo Kina vkulucivajki ja i cela t.e. odrzuvanje na Avionite. Sto se sluci, rabotnicite se krenaa na strajk, unijata izleze na sostanok na celo so odgovornite lujge. Rezultatot ispadna samo eden del sto e od 500 lujge ke se zatvori i ke se premesti vo Kina. Ok, se soglasija nekako. Pred dva dena, ista prikaska, da se premesti odrzuvanto na avionite sto se vo bazata vo Singapore, da se odrzuvaat vo Kina, pak protesti vo 3 grada, Syd, Mel, Bne, unijata izleze pak sostanoci, resenie ispadna nema da se nosi vo Kina, ke ostanat vo Singapore, ama rabotnicite ke bidat od Azija. Najtragicno e sto 99% od avionite na Qantas vo Singapore se Boeing 747-400, koj znae kako ke gi odrzuvaat azijcite niv , mislam na tehnicka odgovornost.
Uniite se silni vo Australia, vo skoro site slucaevi rabotnikot pobeduval, no od druga strana pak ke go zemam primerot so Qantas, ako Qantas t.e. odgovornite menageri soopstea deka ke zatvorat eden del vo Sydnye od 500 lujge, ke imase golemi protesti, ic malce barem 6-12 saati vo denot nemase da cepkaat nisto da rabotat. Ako unijata izlezese da pregovara, sekako ke pobedea, no od druga strana i tie bea pametni, izlegoa so baranje deka ke gi zatvorat polno delovi i ke gi nosat vo Kina, unijata izleze , pregovori imase, i sekako na kraj ispadna toa menagerite sto go zamislile, da go zatvorat toj del i da se prenesi Kina. Ako vo pocetokot izlezea samo so ova baranje, najveroajtno ke zavrsese so krajno resenie pola da im se smenat rabotnite mesta, a pola da se platat i otpustat vo rok od 3 -4 god. Ama oni pametni i go dobija toa st ogo baraa. Koj znaes sto ke im bide slednite baranja, no najverojatno treba da se dogodi nesto pa da se svestat menagerite glavni kade ja pravat greskata. Zborot mi bese Unijata se uste ima golema mok tuka i seuste go stiti rabotnikot. |