KillFort

The first thing out of a UAW persons mouth when you say something remotely negative about the UAW is "You're just jealous!" It gets old and lame. Yes, I realize you said you aren't UAW and I don't mean to be targeting you. Its just that you also made the comment. For the record, I'm not jealous. I have no reason to be. I'm doing just fine financially speaking and my work ethic and knowledge are my job security. I don't need a union to protect me. If I get laid off, I'll go out and find another job making comparable money. Unlike the average UAW worker, I have options.

That being said, I've been in many auto plants, both UAW and non-UAW. Most people do not understand that the average assembly line worker does work hard and does care. I do support unions. Many people don't seem to recognize that unions have helped pull up everybody's wages and standard of living, not to mention workplace safety. My father is a skilled trades, UAW retiree. My college education was largely paid for by his wages, though my Mom made good money too. I recognize that and I admire the UAW for many of the standards they have brought to the workplace through the years. My issues with the UAW and some of its members is as follows:

1) Some have a "they owe me" attitude. Since this group tends to be the most vocal, they make the whole membership look bad. Why do they owe you? What have you done for the company that is so special and that someone else could not have done? This attitude seems to get worse with each successive generation of UAW worker within a given family. It makes me sad because this group doesn't seem to realize what a sweatheart of a deal they are getting. It looks like by the time they figure it out, they will be working for $12 per hour somewhere. That's not what I want. This nation needs a healthy middle class.

2) The UAW still protects those that don't deserve to be protected. They will use any means necessary to keep one of their members employed. I've seen it with my own eyes. If I were in the UAW, I guess that would make me both happy and sad. Happy because I would know they would be there for me if I needed them. Sad because I would know much of their resources were going into protecting the ~5% of membership that doesn't deserve to be protected. Why would I want grievances traded away during local negotiations to ensure some sack of $h! gets to keep his job?

3) The UAW still has the mentality that so and so company (read American Axle at the moment) is still making a profit so we aren't going to give anything back. Or at the very least we aren't going to give them the same agreement we gave their competitors. This says two things to me. One is that the UAW still doesn't have good comprehension of what a global economy means to them. The second is that it shows they still have no foresight. They can't see the forest through the trees. Helping out now means a more successful company which should equal more U.S. and UAW jobs. It reminds me of a demotivational poster I once saw. It said something to the effect of "A company willing to go to the ends of the earth for its employees will find it can hire them for about 10% of the cost of Americans."

4) It still "us against them." Union against management and everything, and I mean everything is managements fault. I occasionally catch my Dad falling back into this argument. Since the future of the companies are in both parties hands, it sure would be nice to see some cooperation. It seems to have gotten better under Gettlefinger. He seems to have seen the writing on the wall. Still, it is upsetting to see these local strikes at the two GM plants where their hottest selling vehicles are being made.

I hope this can be overcome. I hope the Big 3 and the UAW can succeed together. I fear that they are in a death spiral together, though. :( The best thing the UAW could have done was to organize the Asian transplants and level the playing field. Since that hasn't worked out for them, unfortunately there is only one other way for them to level the playing field and that is concessions. It would be nice to see some type of concessionary agreement from the UAW with a commitment from management that once the fortunes of the companies turns around, they will get some of it back. I don't think either is going to happen, though.

JMHO

Good points... and for a moment let's just take out the "jealousy" factor and consider the following:

I will agree that one can look at it from this perspective: Is it better to once have sight and go blind, or is it better to be blind the entire time so you do not know what you are losing? It is difficult to give up a certain standard of living once you've enjoyed it. But we must be grateful that our parents' generation was afforded such opportunities to help pay for our educations. Older generations are just that, old and certainly too old to "go back to school." I concede that the older one gets, the slower one is to adapt and accept new ideas. But where you must stop and question is in consideration of the actual net benefit from the change being proposed. Here's one example: Globalization. Good or bad for the United States? Does free trade exist? It does not appear so because of child labor and currency manipulation in other countries. Who is getting screwed here? Should we do away with the unions, the same group that helped dismantle unfair child labor so that we better compete? Do we need to go backwards in time after the way has been paved to our quickly deteriorating standard of living? I do not think that is the answer.

Furthermore, not all people are college material disregarding age. I do not wish to convey this in a derogatory way. What I mean is that you can have two individuals. One is great at making charts, the other great with their hands and pipe fitting. Take the individual that fits pipes and get them to make the charts. It may never happen. Correspondingly, get the individual that makes charts and get them to fit pipes. This may also never happen. My point is if we have 100 million working adults in this country with degrees, are there enough quality jobs to support them? I do not believe there is a balance in the social structure any longer to allow all people with different but equally important talents to find opportunities and still make a decent middle-class living. Should we just forget about these displaced people?

And just as you pick out the so called 5% of UAW members who feel entitled and "don't deserve to be protected", I ask that you also call out the portion of management that also does not deserve to be protected. I think I'd rather have a country where you can have unions with a smaller portion containing "bad apples" just as you have management groups with "bad apples" to balance out the greed and lack of accountability. The net effect is that there is a counterbalancing effect. There is a voice to better, although admittedly not perfect, represent all those involved. Accountability will come from representation. An easy example to see what happens when you remove representation is in regards to our country's current Executive Branch. Where's Congress and the Judicial Branch? They have been removed from the equation. At least our founding forefathers understand the more parties you have representing a cause, the better EVEN IF a minority of each party is equally corrupt. Another easy example is having only a two-party political system. But consider the alternative. What if we only had Democrats or we only had Republicans. Would we as a whole be better off? I don't believe so. We are better off, even if both parties have certain corrupt minorities than only having one group representing. Moreover, we would probably be better off yet if we had three parties representing. I think you get the point.

The alternative approach is to not have unions and simply have management teams operating under scorched earth policies. Thus, the counterbalancing affect is lost. A good life is about good balance. Balancing work, balancing school, balancing health and exercise, balancing friends and family, balancing time in general. We are seeing more and more problems in this country because balance is being lost.

CARBIZ... good post but this part "but then perhaps they should have gone back to school and become a CEO, too, rather than trying to blackmail their employer every 3 years into giving them what they are 'entitled' to." I respectfully disagree with.

The reason is that everyone can't be a CEO.... they are part of the top 1% and I'm not just singling them out either. Do we need a large corporation (80,000 to 100,000+ workers) with 70,000 people with CEO titles even considering they all have the necessary education as you asked for? You still need other workers and perhaps more importantly, consider that leadership starts at the top. And today's social and political climate lends itself to little accountability. Just look at the past eight years of the Bush administration. They do not even have an automated e-mail backup system to properly save e-mails, which is breaking federal law by the way. Even the Clinton administration retrofitted Lotus Notes to have an automated backup system. The current administration uses Microsoft Outlook and gave up when the Lotus system would not retrofit again. And this is just one example where accountability is non-existent.

You can start to ask as you did, why celebrities or sports players get multi-million dollar contracts these days. Is the work harder or are they working harder? Or is the work of a CEO in the last twenty years that much more complicated, or at least proportionately so to their compensation? I don't think so. Unions, while imperfect, help balance the employee/corporate structure out. It is analogous to competition in economic terms. The more firms you have within an industry, typically the greater the benefit to the consumer. Similarly and in general terms, the more parties you have representing a cause, the better.

Otherwise, the scale becomes tipped too far to one side. One should not forget unions helped pave the way to fair labor laws that we take for granted now that America is beyond the Industrial Revolution. In other news... other countries without labor laws exploit children for 18 hours a day to make shoes or lead-laced products for our naïve consumption.

Besides, education while important, does not instill common sense in an individual no matter how brainwashed and trigger-fingered we are in believing it performs such miracles. What we need is common sense. The sad part is that the country is losing its middle-class. This is one of the most important but quickly fading factors that once made the United States the envy of the world. One should consider that you may encounter three groups of people: (1) One group works hard and is NOT fairly compensated for their hard work (2) Another group works just as hard but IS fairly compensated for their hard work (3) One group knows all the right people and that gets them whatever they want despite their work ethic.

On a final note, here is today's common sense tip and hopefully it hits home for some folks out there: If things are so economically great as certain politicians would like you to believe, why are they sending you an economic stimulus check in the first place?

What concerns me is that the apparent increasing militancy of the UAW could spell trouble for quality control. What if this marks the ugly return to the labor unrest of the '70s and the infamous plant sabotage the unions pulled? Both sides in this need to understand that an increase in tensions is detrimental to both their mutual well-being!

... A lil' birdie tells me a large reason for the strike is due to the fact that management at the new plant is in fact returning to their "ship it" at all costs mentality, preferring quantity over quality with union workers refusing to go along. In other words, they are telling workers responsible for quality control on the line to stop writing up defects on the Lambdas and instead ship it although for awhile, it was the Toyota way of production.

Union workers for the majority appreciate building a quality product as it is their livelihood. They do not want to produce junk but expect fair compensation for sacrificing their bodies to the repetitive assembly line work.

I do not want to see anyone post that it is as simple as "bolting on a screw" and that pay is too high for such tasks. If anyone does, I will assume you are white collar without any line or assembly experience in your life. One of those kind of people that read it all in a textbook somewhere.

As for myself, I am white collar and highly educated with a degree from a Big Ten school and working on my second but did work for Oldsmobile early in my career on the assembly line. Each and every dollar is earned on the line. Stop the union bashing out of your jealousy. It's weird. Too many people in this country want to see their neighbors and fellow country people having a lower standard of living just because they have to work 16 hours a day in Corporate America for the same pay but have degrees so think they are entitled to bigger pay. No, it's just that you don't have the balls to form a union yourself but stand around the water cooler whining about the situation while the CEO makes over 400 times your pay (up from around 40 times the average worker's pay of the 1980's) and who gets a golden parachute in case they rob everything from the shareholders.

No celebrity will work out well if the product can't first stand on its own.

Now we have the Enclave. Let's keep things going GM.

I was just counting the days until this happened...

"Enhanced armrest padding."

This greatly interests me. GM's biggest problem with their door panels and armrests is that they are all hard plastic. Their armrests suck compared to just about every single other automaker out there and in fact, is one of my biggest interior complaints about GM.

Everytime I drive in my Intrigue, my elbow starts hurting after five minutes. The last time I saw a real armrest in a GM vehicle was in my previous car--a 1986 Pontiac Parisienne.

Don't know if the poster is legit or not but I am assuming we won't see a Trans Am sadly.

Ain't It Cool News says not legit while other places says it is. Who knows for now.

Rumors are true... 2008 but sadly, it doesn't look like there will be a 1982 Trans Am.

It's replacement is still black: http://www.aintitcool.com/images2006/kr2008big.jpg

Hey GM, consumers now have something called the World Wide Web. We can see what you offer in China. Information goes around the world in seconds.

Stop treating U.S. consumers like idiots. Did you think we wouldn't figure it out?

Sigh... political correctness has ruined America.

Can someone please confirm that the new Motortrend rendering (the black one, not the silver one) is NOT what it is going to look like? No offense regfootball, while I think the G8 nicer than what we currently have, it is still boring to me IMHO.

When I see the next Impala, I want my jaw to hit the floor. When I saw that rendering, the only thing that popped up was a number in my head. That number was "1995" because that is what year that car looked like it came from. It looked like it was trying to be futuristic, but what 1995 futuristic would be.. you know, back in the day of animated gifs, Geocities accounts and when Netscape ruled the world...

G8 Teaser on ABC News...

Screencaps!

The car itself looks awesome but GM has a real problem. This is a problem they need to address from this point on.

Look at the above interior picture. There are foot prints on the pedals and what appears to be a stain on the carpet near the door.

Please do not allow the release of pictures before someone reviews them thoroughly. Even if you have to have an entire team of people to work through the pictures, please have a checklist or some form of control with your photography folks. I understand mistakes happen and everyone makes them, but not in situations like this.

I agree.. I think those seatbelt buckles are my favorite interior detail. I miss those ol' GM buckles which seems strange to say since I'm only in my twenties. My first car had them but boy could they get hot in the summer.

Yeah, edmunds must have got it wrong. The info is still posted on their site: http://www.edmunds.com/insideline/do/News/articleId=118898

What a bunch of crap.. I stayed up until 3 AM. Yawn.. sleepy today.

LEt me say this: I've seen the car in person..........and love it.

Then I saw the red picture today -- and said to myself...."man......we need to get another photographer 'cause that's a horrible picture........"

I think you should withhold judgement until you see it in person..............NAIAS is first show..........

This was said by fbodfather over at cz28.com. We know he's an insider and he even agrees that the red picture sucks. The black one is small and undetailed. Let's wait for high-res pics...

Sigh... I was hoping they'd be up by now. I want to see!

From Edmunds.com:

DETROIT — Cadillac says it will release its first "official" photo of the 2008 CTS on December 19, and the formal unveiling of the new model is tentatively scheduled for January 8 at the North American International Auto Show.

See... I think the more photos we get, the more we will like it. The dark grey one, while small, is looking much nicer and upscale.

Folks, I think we are going to have to wait for more pictures that will tell the whole story.

My two cents:

(1) The angle is bad. It does not portray the length and sleekness the car seems to have as shown by the spy photos. Instead, this angle gives the car a snubby nosed look which I do not think will be the case in real life or for that matter, with better photos. This leads me to my next point....

(2) GM's photography sucks. It always has and always will it seems. Some how, they always manage to make their cars look cheap and boring. Typically, I do not like red and really do not like red with a gray background. If they were going to use red, they should have went with a black background. Also, real world photos in natural light always seem to be better than mock up or studio shots.

(4) The headlights on this car look cheap. Those units look like they came off an old Pontiac Sunbird or worse. The car needs projector units minimum with an option for HID. HIDs have been out for over a decade in the U.S. starting with Lincoln back in the early 1990s. Mazdas have an option, time for Chevy too. I can't believe the Aura doesn't have them. Luckily the Lambdas have the option. I emphasize option because this car is a mainstream offering and having them standard would probably be a bit much yet.

(5) I think the hype around this car was so great we expected a four door Camaro or better. If this car ends up leading in its segment, I think we should be happy. I see it besting the Camry but we have yet to see the NG Accord. The NG Impala should do the trick for bold.

Evok or Ah-ha, would you be able to shed any more light or hints?

Like, "Nope, not it.. the real deal is better." or "It's close."

True on all counts.

The thing about the current Impala is that although I would drive one, I wouldn't buy one with my own income.

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Exactly, nice car but lacks aspirational attributes. I can't wait to see the NG Impala. I sure hope a concept is at NAIAS this coming year.

- A mainstream car that will make GM money because it is class-leading with no compromises: 2008 Chevy Malibu

- NG CTS

- Production Camaro

- Production Enclave

- NG Impala: I have high hopes for this car

- GM's solution to hybrids

I think people are so used to expecting bland from GM that when they do design a stylish and unique interior like they used to in 1950's and 1960's, people strangely do not know how to handle it.

Had some exotic brand designed this interior, most would say "OMG, so cool..."

I remember talking to someone in the industry at the end of last year and they said the same thing... the upcoming Malibu is a real looker.