General Motors To Lay Off 2,000 Workers at Two US Plants (reuters.com)

General Motors plans to lay off 2,000 employees at two U.S. auto plants in early 2017, the automaker said on Wednesday. From a Reuters report:GM said it will furlough the employees when it cuts the third shift at its Lordstown, Ohio and Lansing, Michigan plants in mid-January. The Lordstown plant builds the compact Chevrolet Cruze, whose U.S. sales through October were down 20 percent. The Lansing Grand River plant builds the Cadillac ATS and CTS, whose sales were down 17 percent through October.An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from a Washington Examiner report, "Trump has already criticized General Motors for reports that it would shift some production to Mexico, a plan that the company hasn't confirmed and didn't allude to Wednesday. The incoming Republican president also has said that he would impose a 35 percent tariff on the products of former U.S. subsidiaries that moved out of the country. When Ford announced the opening of a new factory in Mexico earlier this year, Trump called it an "absolute disgrace" and pledged to tax its imports to the U.S."

Comments

Re:Short Lived

[cayenne8]

Hey, he's president, at worst, you should hope he can do something.

Frankly, I have no problem with the US giving breaks and incentives to stay in the US, employ US citizens...and penalize those that leave and ship jobs overseas.

Re:Short Lived - MAGA, despite the liberal shits.

[Anonymous Coward]

as usual a snarky smug liberal fucker who would rather see failure and be "right"

the fucking labor force has been collapsed and real jobs replaced for multiple gig jobs and barista-style service jobs.

Fuck you. the whole time for the last 30 years I have worked whether you fuckers were sticking your boot up my ass or not. i pay insane tax rates too and i have kids and all the EBT fuckers give me the middle finger and call me racist while I feed them? fuck you.

Re:This is totally Trump's fault!

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not? Trump blamed everything of the last 30 years on Hillary.

Re:This is totally Trump's fault!

[DogDude]

You don't think that people are planning now? Why not? Our company is making plans now, based on what just happened, and it doesn't involve more investment or jobs in the US, I can tell you that. These dummies who voted for this idiot deserve what they get: fewer jobs and a lower standard of living. Fuck 'em.

Original Article was pretty short

[krelvin]

Other than it being announced after the Election, there doesn't seem to be anything political in the announcement.

Sales are down on vehicles made at those two plant and they are cutting the Third Shift at both plants.
Nothing about moving production elsewhere or even discontinuing the two other shifts at both plants.

The added on Anonymously section to the /. article is where the politics are injected with a reference to Trump and his proposed tariffs on products made outside of the US by US mgs.. which this story is not about.

This will be a very interesting experiment

[ErichTheRed]

Growing up in a Rust Belt city, I watched as most factory workers got thrown out of work when factories moved to the South, then offshore. The next 4 years may or may not be a very interesting economics experiment depending on how many policies Trump implements from his campaign promises. The loss of stable high-paying manufacturing jobs has a devastating effect on the locations they hollow out when those workers aren't paying taxes, buying things locally, etc.

If he does succeed in building the wall, deporting immigrants and taxing foreign imports, how much of a tariff will be necessary to convince manufacturers to make goods for the US market in the US? I know India has a similar setup -- it's very expensive to import foreign goods to India, and manufacturers are responding by setting up plants in India. Unless there's absolutely no way around it, and the tariff is set at a punitive level, manufacturers are just going to say "tough" and raise the price of their goods to cover the cost.

I know all the arguments are against me on this one, but I would definitely like to see all the manufacturing come back. People say we're one of the top countries in manufacturing output, but the reality is that this is due to high dollar items like airplanes and weapons systems. I'm an educated person, working in a non-factory job for a non-manufacturer, and I see the need for this. The country needs to be able to dump low-skilled people directly out of high school into a job that will pay enough to sustain them and their families over a lifetime. Don't concentrate so hard on educating everyone -- some people can't handle it and don't want to be...look at how many students are just barely graduating college and not actually absorbing anything. I graduated high school in 1993, and even by that time the only route to a stable life without a college degree was to get a union apprenticeship in a skilled trade. This is still viable, but only in union states and it certainly doesn't pay the same as it used to.

College should be available to those who want it at a reasonable cost, but having it be the new minimum standard to be considered for any type of employment is crazy. Bring back old school factory work, and allow those who can't handle education to work in a steel mill, shipyard or car plant.

Re:This will be a very interesting experiment

[quietwalker]

The thing is, manufacturing jobs won't come back, because they're gone. In the 70's and 80's, it took 200 people to do what 3 machines running 24/7 with almost no error do now. Even if you were to set up a new factory, you'd have like 40 jobs where you used to have 1000 - enough to actually support a reasonable town. So point 1,

1. You aren't bringing the jobs back.

Here's another amusing point: even if we do get jobs, the value of them will be based against the value of that job globally - so long as businesses and currency is still traded globally, so until we have really brought the quality of life and cost of living to some sort of equilibrium world wide, these jobs will never provide the value they used to. Back when we didn't have to compete with other countries for this work, it was viable. That's no longer the case and it won't ever be. We avoid manufacturing now because it's simply not the best return on investment for a business OR an employee. So point 2,

2. Manufacturing work doesn't make enough money for the business or employee to incentivize companies or workers to do it in the US in past large numbers.

Last, you mentioned vocational skills. Surprising many who haven't looked into it, we do have some vocational training and even government programs to make it cheap and relatively available. The problem? If you churn out 70-200, let's say, air conditioner repairman from the same school, in the same location, every 6 months, you're not going to have enough jobs available for them. The only way that would work is if you got trained and then were required to move at least 20 miles from any other graduate at any point in time. So point 3,

3. Vocational training doesn't work at scale because it saturates the local markets past the point of available jobs

The end tally is this: Neither manufacturing nor vocational jobs have the ability or potential to support a nationwide middle class, nor provide economic mobility to enter the middle class in numbers greater than what we have today, with all likelihood of them actually decreasing in the future.

In layman's terms, manufacturing can't support a large middle class population.

Even China, the manufacturing king of the world, is dealing with this issue right now. It's prompting their hurried transition to a more service-based economy.

Advocating to bring back factory work, you may as well advocate to bring back rat catchers, switchboard operators and video rental stores for all the good it'll do the middle class. The reality is that we're moving towards a more maintainable, fully service-based economy and that necessitates higher levels of education to meet the ever rising bar for good paying skilled jobs if we want to maintain a large middle class. For good or for ill, the college degree is fast becoming the old highschool diploma as far as job hunting goes.

Re:Short Lived - MAGA, despite the liberal shits.

[110010001000]

Of course it is the "smug liberal fuckers" who have collapsed the labor force right? You know, like CEOs of steel industries. They are real "liberals" arent they. That is the problem, you guys think that the "liberals" did this.

Think About It...

[sycodon]

If you believe that companies should be able to move their production overseas, you are tacitly approving of working conditions( wages, safety, environmental, etc.) that, were they in effect here in the US, would have SJWs lighting themselves on fire in the public square in protest.

If Mexico or any other nation imposes the same regulations as the US, then moving to another nation would be no different than moving to another state. Absent that, it provides an unfair advantage to outsourcing companies at the expense of the employees of the overseas plant.

This is 100% against what most Democrats believe.

Re:Think About It...

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny thing, he doesn't believe in global warming but bringing manufacturing to the US with stricter environmental requirements would do more to help than the carbon tax sham.

Re:No doubt...

[Clsid]

Speak for yourself. As a latino I take no offense in Trump winning. Why would you support people that pay no taxes only and accept whatever wage is thrown at them since they have no options, which in the process reduces the job pool for a lot of people, simply because they could not find a legal path to immigrate to the US?

It seems you are too blinded by the kool-aid that the media gave you about Trump to actually see that he was the one talking about bringing jobs back and making the economy work again.

But just chill, it is politics after all. I am not expecting miracles coming from either candidate so just focus on getting better opportunities or starting your own thing.