Machiavellian said:
Bofferbrauer2 said:
I'm happy to see that America finally sees the value of unions and how to use them.
If that was even remotely true, then Germany wouldn't have any car production plants for a long time anymore. But they still produce tons of cars, half as many as the US in fact, which are the second biggest producer after China.
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Not sure what Germany has anything to do with the US or even GM for that matter. I am talking specifically about GM themselves and what they have been doing lately. Just Ohio alone shows that GM is shutting down plants even though they are making huge profits. Workers going on strike, demanding more money when they are already closing plants probably making them feel they are making the right moves instead of the opposite.
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While GM is making big profits, these come from the increased sales... overseas! GM is growing very fast both in Europe and in South America and has a huge market in China (GM sells more cars in China than in North America). As a result GM, just like any car manufacturer would do, built a factory closer to the customers (which also allows them to design cars specifically for those markets), hence why the one in Ohio, among others (Michigan and Oshawa in Canada got axed too, along with 2 engine plants), simply got redundant. The closure and the strike have nothing to do with each other.
In the US, the sales had been slumping down the last couple years. GM sold 5M cars in the US in 1999, dropped to 2M after the financial crisis, yet could regrow from there. But in 2016, they barely breached the 3M line and slumped back below that afterwards. In 2018, it was just clear that they wouldn't reach those sales numbers anymore they reached in the 90's, and thus had way too much production capacities.
Long story short, GM may be rolling in cash, but that one doesn't come from US or north american customers, for whom those plants were meant for.