It appears the UAW is settling for less than what they wanted…
The United Auto Workers and Ford Motor Company have reached a tentative agreement to end the UAW work stoppage against Ford. The deal may also serve as a template for GM and Stellantis to settle with their workers.
If the deal is accepted by the UAW executive council and ratified by the rank and file, the strike will be over. If so, it will make union president Shawn Fain look like the idiot he is.
Fain was issuing blood-curdling threats to the automakers to give them what they wanted or see a historic work stoppage. Fain demanded a 32-hour workweek with 40 hours of pay, a 46% pay hike, and a restoration of pay raises given back during the downturn of 2008.
Full article, HERE from PJ Media.
So, apparently, the threats didn’t work as advertised… And the car companies realized that would have priced American cars out of the reach of pretty much everybody in the world that ‘might’ be interested in buying one.
Per Consumer Reports, the average cost of a new car is $48,000, HERE. And trucks are even worse! I had to get an oil change a couple of weeks ago and walked around looking at the prices of trucks and didn’t find a single one under $60,000!!! And the high end ones were over $72,000. Not a single ‘basic’ work truck on the lot, and apparently if you order one, it may take up to six months to deliver it…
Sigh…
And all of the manufacturers are losing money (Ford supposedly $5BILLION) a year on the electronic vehicles…
Oh yeah, and there aren’t any used vehicles that are affordable anymore either, no thanks to Obummer’s cash for clunkers.
Am seeing reports that some models of old clunkers are being stolen for the value of their parts to keep other old clunkers running. Pro-tip: find your electrical box, pull the starter relay and keep it in the house. Maybe get a spare to be safe. Pay the extra for OEM.
In Japan you can still buy mew cars for less than $48k. We’re buying a fairly expensive (for Japan) new car with a list price (once all the options we wanted were included) of just over JPY 4,000,000 which I think is a little over $25k US maybe $30k max.
We’re also buying an old used kei car for US$2K or so. That one is a real deal due to the car being moderately obscure so if it breaks badly then fixing it may be spendy. BUT at the price if it turns out to be really spendy we toss it and buy another one.
Of course as I understand it part of the probel in the US is that you really can’t buy a basic gasoline power new car as opposed to a truck. Even foreign brands like Honda or Toyota have stopped selling the smaller cars (eg. Honda Fit Toyota Camry) in the US.
Perhaps it is time to start thinking about horses, bicycles and good footwear. If we ultimately cannot afford to purchase/maintain an internal combustion powered vehicle and cannot charge an electrically powered vehicle, then …
Which means you’ll never go more than 10-20 miles from home again.
My husband and I are pensioners; our car and farm truck are 20 years old. We can’t afford new or used ones, but some Amish neighbors gifted us with a horse and buggy. We use the horse and buggy for trips within 10 miles and it is actually quite enjoyable. Not only that, you are still doing 22- 30 mph with this decent standardbred. It helps that our daughter is a farrier. For long distances you jump in the old car or get public transportation. Not workable for suburbs but just fine for up here in northern Maine where there are hitching posts at the grocery store, post office and bank. Plus if you totally ditch the cars, you save on car insurance (we aren’t there yet).
The Amish that gifted us the horse use bicycles; their two sons rode their bikes from our area in northern Maine to the coast; 150 miles or so in one day. Nothing for them! And they stay fit.
As they say, ’embrace the misery’ and turn lemons into lemonade.
That is why I am driving a 2007 Chevy Colorado pickup and a 2009 Pontiac G6. Being retired and living on a small pension and Social Security, I have been priced out of the new car market.
Back in the mid 70’s I was in the market for a “fish’n” truck. No power steering, no automatic trans, small V8, 4WD nice but not essential. Couldn’t find anything I wanted on the used car lots. Finally found a ’67 Chevy C10 w/283 engine, 4-speed trans a local farmer had for a decent price. Wish I hadn’t got rid of it.
This will all come home to roost once the workers figure out they can’t afford the cars they are building, even with the employee discount. Wife is an ex-Ford employee (retired) and I am about to retire shortly. Told here she better learn to love the 2023 Explorer as we are not going to be buying another one for a loooong time. Note – we are down to one vehicle since I’ve been working from home since the COVID days and now only have to go to office a week
Given American’s love for old cars and restoration for same, “Cash for Clunkers” could only have been come up with by a Communist America-hating bastard. Oh wait, it was.
Canada’s used vehicle market quickly spiked in prices so there’s no relief up here (any more.) A retired car dealer friend of mine told me that when he was attending the dealer-only auctions, there were regularly American dealers from northern-state dealerships attending with fleets of empty car-carrier tractor trailers, and they were going back full. (A natural effect of Cash for Clunkers – buy where you can find ’em.) Keep in mind our population and market is 10% of the USA, so there was only so long our “surplus” could feed out-of-country demands.
When recently forced to go shopping for a used vehicle, the sticker shock was intense. *sighs* I drive ’em until repairing becomes “throwing good money after bad” and then I let them go and try to find another good one to drive till it drops.
Get all you can out of what you have, folks. Things aren’t getting any better out there.
Yup, losing my Ford Flex on the way back from LC really screwed me. Couldn’t afford to replace it as that would have cost 5K more than I paid for it and the other gal’s insurance company wasn’t going to pay me replacement cost (and I just didn’t feel like getting a lawyer).
The prices for new cars are literally insane. At least used cars are starting to come down a little.
I’ve been debating looking for an old broken down pickup truck, buying it, and then paying to have it restored. Probably cost me way less than a new one. But even that’s getting hard as the feds are going after the companies selling replacement engines.
Dealers are putting the screws to everyone right now. It’s a seller’s market. Economic pressures will cause a flip to a buyer’s market eventually, but until then, the dealers are going to squeeze buyers for every penny because they can.
So for now, you’ll have to be very nimble and quick to get to a private seller as first-in-line to both evaluate a vehicle and offer to buy at their price. Pray that you can find a seller selling a decent vehicle at a fair price. They’re out there, but the time frame from when a vehicle is listed to when the seller marks it as “sold” is about 1 to 3 hours, at least in my recent experience. Yes, it’s that bad.
There will be no negotiating room on price, because there will be a line of buyers behind you who are willing to meet the seller’s price (or even beat it.) Normally this is just the seller’s claim to put pressure on you. Right now, it’s just a fact.
Don’t rely on promises that you’re first in line, get there first physically with cash in pocket, ready to assess, test-drive, and then make the deal. Cash is king, and he who has cash-in-hand wins.
Also be flexible on what you’re willing to drive. It might not be what you want, it might have imperfections, but if it gives you what you need (reliable transportation) and you can live with the cosmetic flaws, close the deal.
AG…. The only “fair” price is what someone is prepared to pay.
If vehicles are becoming expensive because they are rare, don’t blame the seller. Blame the people who drove up production and import costs.
The UAW backed their employers in a corner back in the seventies. Making a decent living, it wasn’t like Roughnecking, they were doing okay.. But they demanded and demanded until the automakers were not financially able to develop cars to keep up with the onslaught from Japan. I blame the uaw for much of the downfall of Detroit. I’m sure there was plenty of greed in management, too.
The insanity of the Let’s build electric cars is gonna really hurt the industry. The sooner someone says
We will not build electric cars until it makes sense
The sooner everyone else will see the wisdom of that.
And until the grid can reliably supply the current to refill all those batteries, it doesn’t make sense.
And when the Maffs say
The ability for a gallon of gasoline to propel a vehicle twenty miles at a cost of four dollars and it takes eight seconds to pump it
And compare that to the equivalent horsepower requirement using electricity, stored in a battery that weighs so much more, I don’t think it ever Can make sense. I don’t believe the ethanol in gas is even close to being worth it all,the windmills are a total economic failure. Even IF they worked as advertised, didn’t wipe out birds and insects and could be recycled,, and didn’t spontaneously combust or require deicing,it’s not worth doing.
They Keep selling the Dumbmasses on stupid crap that sounds good to people who have Zero grasp of what a good decision is and replace what works with what sounds good to idiots.
There was no way that the UAW could get their demands met; they had to know it (or should have).
I have no problem with reasonable incomes, but what they wanted was ridiculous, especially in a tightening industry and economy.
Sorry but I’ll support the union on this one.
Bargaining means you set a initial goal higher than you expect to end up with. See Art of the Deal by Bad Orange Man.
Hard to play poor when the company pays it’s CEO’s a rather extravagant compensation for the last several years.
“Meanwhile, the ratio of Barra’s total compensation to the median of all GM employees’ total compensation is 362 to 1. The median pay for GM’s global employees in 2022 was $80,034, according to GM, up from $69,433 a year before.”
“What the company pays Barra
$2.1 million in salary
$14.6 million in stock awards
$4.9 million in option awards
Nearly $6.3 million in incentive plan compensation
$1.1 million in other payments”
You can see the other CEO’s salaries here.
https://www.freep.com/story/money/cars/general-motors/2023/04/28/gm-ceo-mary-barras-2022-compensation-revealed/70155472007/
IMHO it’s a very hard sell to me to blame piss poor design (K cars) or foolish business models (E vehicles) on the worker bees. The Big Three treat their suppliers the same way.
Tell that to the Mill Workers’ Unions and the Garment Workers’ Unions.
Where, pray tell, are the clothes in the USA made by union labels (just look for… the union label.)
Subtle hint. America used to be the biggest textile mill country in the world. We sold textiles to China, for God’s sake.
And then the Unions came.
And the Mills disappeared. Then the Clothes manufacturers disappeared.
All those union jobs gone.
There’s bargaining in good faith.
Then there’s the UAW way of bargaining, which is to hold the companies to unrealistic goals, and then screw the companies until they go away. There’s a reason there are lots of car factories in non-union states now, all due to the UAW’s greed.
Book a flight on Eastern Airlines lately?
Their union did SUCH a great job with excessive demands that Eastern ceased to be. NEXT!
Don’t kid yourself.
A CEO is paid what the owners/shareholders think he is worth. His job is to bring more benefits to the than he costs. If he doesn’t, then he goes.
Same goes for the production-line workers. If your contribution is not worth more than you get paid, then either you go, or the company goes. Comparisons between those whose skills common or easily acquired, and someone whose skills are at a 1-in-a-million, are stupid and based on envy.
If you think running even a small company is easy and can be done working only a 35hr week, then start your own company and do it yourself. Your income as “CEO” will be a tiny fraction of your business turnover, but your decisions regarding how you handle the rest will be what makes or breaks the business.
50% of businesses fail within five years of startup. 2 out of every 3 fail within ten years.
People whining about one individual wages package are generally using that as a convenient excuse to hide from the consequences of decisions that they like.
Costs of doing business like wages, insurance, regulation, transport, power….. are all more significant than what the CEO gets paid.
Inflation driven by Government borrowing, money-printing and other forms of short-term “stimulus”.
Supply-chain disruption due to the popularly supported panic-measures over Covid.
No… Free… Lunches….
So glad I’m out of the car selling game. It isn’t just the cost of new cars, it is the quality. I watch a lot of YouTube and a recent one was a repair shop owner and manager being interviewed about the best diesel powered pickup. They are in the middle of oil country and see a lot of trucks. When asked about Ram/Dodge, their response was the Cummings motor was good but the rest of the vehicle was crap. No surprise there.
IMO, every time a UAW member votes for a Democrat who has bought into ‘climate change’, they are voting for their eventual doom. Over regulation is killing industry after industry.
All- Interesting takes, and yes, I’m going to drive what I have until the wheels fall off… sigh… And I really miss having a pickup, but can’t afford one, and am too broken down to rebuild one (which used to be my ‘fun’ thing to do).
Once upon a time, pickups were the cheapest vehicle you could buy, new or used.
Then, as a result of .gov corporate fuel ratings, small and/or cheap trucks disappeared. My ’83 Mazda diesel pickup got an actual 42 mpg/freeway, 34mpg commuting. Worst I ever saw was 28mpg screaming down I-5 with 2 racebikes, a small trailer, and gear for two riders for a race weekend at Willow Springs.
Now, most trucks are luxury level, bloated boats that produce big profits for the makers, and the build quality is trash. I’ve owned two Ford Rangers with an automatic trans, and both those transmissions were junk. First was an ’88, second a ’00. They used to know how to design/build an auto trans, but that knowledge seems to have disappeared.
Hell, I had a ’71 Mustang with a 429 and C6 trans. That engine package shows over 500 HP on u-tube dyno runs, and that trans would spin the tires shifting into high gear with over 80k miles on it. I’ll never own another ford automatic. Tired of junk.
It is political ‘consensus’ forcing electric vehicles where it makes no GD sense.
A problem that this consensus faces is that the consensus is not sustainable.
You can split the behaviors into two portions, the acquisition of political power, and the uses to which that political power is put. You can predict failure with an analysis that asks two questions: 1) But how does it really work? 2) What are the higher order consequences?
The conventional theory of political power in America is based on the notion that politicians can be allowed to do things, and that they are not going to destroy everyone’s personal interest enough to be very concerned about what they are up to.
This is directly in conflict with the increasing excess of environmental policy.
US government has an executive branch, which is a mess of bureaucratic organizations, also congress and judiciary who insist that the law supports executive regulations.
The federal govenrment has three tools for obtaining compliance. Trust/persuasion, naked force, and the bureaucracies. The conventional observation of the behavior was that the central government exercised control over the bureaucracies, and the bureaucracies influenced the rest of the country through local bureaucrats.
The problem is that electrifying vehicles directly impacts transport costs, speed, and effectiveness. Moving bureaucrats cross country easily, quickly, and cheaply is necessary for the existing method of exercising control over a bureaucracy, and for having a national bureaucracy that has a policy influence on the entire country. Without enough transport, you will either see splitting into local factions within the bureaucracy, or the bureaucracy will be concentrated where it can be controlled, and where it has no local influence.
“ A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy……”
What you have here, is people making decisions for which they expect to suffer no consequences if they are wrong.
They are supported by voters who expect that their “needs” will always be met by those decision-makers.
Those complaining, generally expect the cost of opposing those decisions to be light. Maybe we should remember that those who signed your Declaration of Independence faced jail and loss of all their property if they failed. If not death.
There is no free lunch.