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

Short Lived

[110010001000]

President Trump will bring those 2,000 jobs back, and add 5,000 more. He promised. If he doesn't, he is a liar and a charlatan. Check back in 4 years to see how he did!

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

[Oswald McWeany]

He's wanting to put tariffs on imported goods. Car manufacturers rely on imported goods. Detroit is about to get a whole lot poorer. Even if more parts were made domestically, retaliatory tariffs will make American made cars unattractive overseas. America could potentially lose most or all of its car industry. I suspect the design of cars will still be done by well trained engineers in the US, but the whole product will be assembled elsewhere to avoid extra retaliatory tariffs in the rest of the world.

(we did this whole tariff thing in the 1800's and early 1900's; abolishing it is what led to people getting wealthier)

Re: Short Lived

[prefec2]

Yes of course. And the bad weather.

Re:Short Lived

[publiclurker]

so apparently you prefer a planet where the sick simply crawl away into the corner and die quietly so as not to disturb the corporate owners meals.

Re:This is totally Trump's fault!

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Jobs vs. Stuff

[Tablizer]

Protectionism has mostly "worked" in Japan, at least in terms of jobs. They have a low unemployment rate compared to other countries. But many products are indeed more expensive because of it. Whether jobs or "stuff" is more important is a subjective choice.

Re:Jobs vs. Stuff

[Tablizer]

That's assuming the so-called losers want money instead of jobs.

For males it's especially difficult: our career is our #1 defining quality to society for good or bad. For women the equivalent is looks. That may not be fair either, but it's less career pressure. If a lady has looks, she doesn't have to work so hard.

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.

[Anonymous Coward]

All the real manufacturing jobs got replaced with robots. There's nothing Trump can do to fix that. The dream of 9-5 in a factory tightening bolts all day for $20/hour is dead and gone and won't come back. But hey, blame it on Democrats. Simple answers are best, after all.

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:Think About It...

[mark-t]

Ford isn't... but the poster to whom I was asking the question did not specify that he was referring to car companies, specifically, and just said "companies" in general. There are lots of companies that produce stuff in Canada, but are based in the USA. The film industry, most notably, is pretty big up here, but I'm not aware of any actually unfavorable work conditions that SJW's would oppose.

we need more trades schools and less college. ITT

[Joe_Dragon]

we need more trades schools and less college. ITT and others like it where good but they got stuck in the college traps as well high costs.

Also Devry was better but they moved to more online and less hands on classes.

Community college is hit or miss and some times the 4 year colleges make you repeat classes that you took already.

4-6 Years of pure class room is way to much for most jobs and they have big skill gaps.

It's not just low-skilled people there are also lines of work that college is a poor fit for.

Why should some one who went to a 4 year party to get a piece of paper be better ranked then some who went a 2 year tech / trade school with more hands on classes then some 4 year colleges.

Well rounded is nice to have but not at today's pricing levels.

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.

Re:WTO troubles

[Man On Pink Corner]

That something is likely to get him into trouble with the WTO

Chief of Staff: "Mr. President, we're seeing some pushback from the WTO in Geneva with regard to our recent establishment of protectionist trade tariffs. Do you have a response for the Secretary of State to convey?"

President: "Sergeant, bring me that briefcase they were telling me about. The one with all the buttons and lights and handcuffs and whatnot."

Marine guard: "I beg your pardon, sir?"

President: "And where's Geneva, again? That's in Wisconsin, right?"

Re:No doubt...

[Calydor]

Judging by the sound bites we got here in Europe, Trump's plan for bringing jobs back went something like

1) Promise more jobs.
2) ???
3) Profit!

It is entirely possible that he actually HAS a working plan, I won't rule that out. But until I hear something more believable than "Because magic" or that one sound-bite going on all day of "We didn't do it. God did it!" I have very little faith in the next four years for you guys.

Re:Detroit has been 98% Democrat since shortly bef

[MightyMartian]

Thank you! Detroit is a symptom of the same deindustrialization pressures that hit parts of Canada and the UK. There are other rust belts over the last three or four decades who have been hit by severe declines. The notion that you can blame what is an issue suffered by a number of industrial areas in a number of different countries on an American political party is stunningly absurd. I'm sure there are many Thatcherites that would be thrilled to blame the industrial decline in Northern England on the Democrats of the 1980s!

Re:Dumb Trump supporters

[MightyMartian]

And then, once the cheap loans and subsidies have been eaten up, the companies that were bought off still move to Mexico...

Handing subsidies to companies to keep their facilities in your area is just another iteration of the race to the bottom. If the only way a job can be tenable is by handing company money (directly or indirectly), then the job isn't really tenable at all, and all that happens is that other sectors of the economy have to underwrite untenable and unsustainable jobs.

Look at Venezuela. That's the best example of how throwing money at non-viable sections of the economy ends up. Simply put, a responsible government and a responsible society recognizes when buggy whip manufacturers need to be allowed to die. That's not to say that money can't be spent to help the people, which is why most countries have job retraining programs.

Check out the 1930 Smoot-Hawley tariff consequence

[Streetlight]

In 1930, in order to raise revenue the Republican Congress passed the Smoot-Hawley increased import tariffs on 20,000 imports. Trading partners did the same for US imports and a trade war started. US imports decreased to about a third and exports decreased by about 61%. The US GDP was cut in half. Was this act the cause? Other things were going on, but the increase in tariffs is blamed by many economists as part of the cause of deepening the Great Depression. Since the end of WW II there has been a continuing process of reducing tariffs and though we've had ups and downs in economic progress the trend has generally been up.

In this particular situation, if GM decides it can't make the Cruze economically in the US and the tariff would make it price uncompetitive then it could just stop making the car. Not only would no US workers make the car and dealers not have it to sell and make a profit, but there would be no Mexican workers making it either. This would be good news for foreign car makers producing similar sized cars made overseas. Another option is to build the car completely using robots. GM knows a lot about industrial robotic car assembly.

Economics is complicated and dramatic, swift changes in policies can have many unintended consequences.

If I thought Trump would do what he said

[rsilvergun]

or could for that matter I might want to get on the Trump Train. Lord knows H1-Bs have bit into my career mightily and I'll wager many /.ers can concur. But he's literally taken every possible position during the campaign. I wasn't expecting much from Hilary, but I knew what I was getting into. Just a tinsy bit of progress and things more or less holding together. With Trump I've got no idea, and I've got Mike Pence behind him doing God knows what to my daughter's access to Birth Control and health services...

Re:Another of the same, then

[PopeRatzo]

Would that would be the same Lansing, Michigan where there hasn't even been a Republican CANDIDATE for mayor for the last twenty years or so, because only Democrats have any chance of getting elected? Yet another example of the great success that is Democrat rule?

I notice you failed to mention that Lordstown, Ohio has a Trump-supporting, Republican city council, a Republican congressman, a Republican senator and a Republican governor. Oh yeah, and Ohio is a "Right to Work" state.

And their plant is moving to Mexico, too. I notice you failed to mention that.

Re:WTO troubles

[mark-t]

I was talking about Trump, specifically... I have yet to see any evidence that he actually cares about anyone in the USA except to the extent that it is somehow profitable for him, personally.