R.I.F. at G.M. North America, 2018 edition

If the writing is on the wall anyway, why wouldn't they take whatever is offered?
Most of them don't have Jay Leno's Tonight Show contract: "Play or Pay". Why would they "hold out" for "Something better"? The Man tells you he wants you gone, you're gonna be gone anyway. Might as well take even a low-ball Don't Go Away Mad, Just Go Away, offer
 
Sounds like an OK offer. From the linked article:
GM is allowing some employees who took the buyouts to leave as early as this coming Saturday with an official last day of Jan. 31 and salary and benefits continuing for six months after that. Executives could also leave in December with an effective last day of Feb. 28 and a full year of salary and benefits, according to the severance materials.
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I wish I'd been offered a year's pay when I Fired.
 
razztazz said:
If the writing is on the wall anyway, why wouldn't they take whatever is offered?
Most of them don't have Jay Leno's Tonight Show contract: "Play or Pay". Why would they "hold out" for "Something better"? The Man tells you he wants you gone, you're gonna be gone anyway. Might as well take even a low-ball Don't Go Away Mad, Just Go Away, offer
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Absolutely. When I left MegaMotors in 2007 the offers were generous. The following year, those that hesitated got a walk to the door from security and a kick in the butt.
 
Very sad all around. Everyone to blame, and no one.

I interviewed with GM my senior year in college, thank goodness I didn't go that route - gives me the shivers to think of it now.
 
If one believes the news, the job market is terrific so these people won't have trouble finding jobs.
I am a skeptic.

I worked at Packard Electric --- now merged into Delphi --- after graduate school. My classmate in graduate school is now with GM in Germany.
Some high level manager. He's worked with General Motors his entire career.

Holiday time is a horrible time to be laid off.
Not that there ever is a good time.
 
I can tell the economy is in good shape and jobs are going unfilled a couple ways. First is the traffic on the roads. In the bust years around 2009, I had the freeways to myself. Prior it was bumper to bumper. Now we are back to bumper to bumper.

Then there's the line of employers who hold job fairs at the prisons and jails here in California to recruit prospective workers. When you are vying for employees who are coming straight from jail, that pretty much spells out a tight labor market.
 
My impression is that 6 month severance is pretty standard for a RIF. It's what I was looking at in potential RIFs in 2002, 2010, 2013 and the one I finally took in 2015 - ain't the aerospace industry grand?
 
skipro33 said:
I can tell the economy is in good shape and jobs are going unfilled a couple ways. First is the traffic on the roads. In the bust years around 2009, I had the freeways to myself. Prior it was bumper to bumper. Now we are back to bumper to bumper.

Then there's the line of employers who hold job fairs at the prisons and jails here in California to recruit prospective workers. When you are vying for employees who are coming straight from jail, that pretty much spells out a tight labor market.
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No the prison thing has to do with cheap labor and captive workers. Ex Cons generally can't even think about going somewhere else. Easier to screw than normal workers.
 
Lakewood90712 said:
Article cites buyout offered to 17,700 salary employees with just 2250 accepting.

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/28/heres-the-buyout-gm-offered-before-announcing-14000-job-cuts.html

That has got to be about the lowest acceptance on a buyout I have ever seen.
I wonder just how Generous the package offered by Generous Motors was.
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My understanding is that the up to 6 months of severance offer is the same standard salaried benifit that has been on the books since ~2007 or so. If you are involuntarily separated, then you receive up to 6 months salary.

So the benefit of the offer was that people could self nominate, without downside risk if they wanted to wait resulting in the low take rate.

-gauss
 
We have a friend who's a Salaried engineer at GM (not at one of the plants closing). He's 62 and the package isn't particularly generous. The worst part is that there's no offering of GM health insurance until he's 65, and no bump in pension to help cover ACA premiums. Their prior ER windows have always offered one or the other, so it's pretty perplexing. He's passing on the package, unless of course they tell him he isn't.
 
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fosterscik said:
Sounds like an OK offer. From the linked article:

I wish I'd been offered a year's pay when I Fired.
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How about if you got that offer 20 years before you planned to retire? And your skills didn't translate well to other industries? And you were in a locale with few other opportunities? And you had only held one job your entire adult life?
 
stepford said:
My impression is that 6 month severance is pretty standard for a RIF. It's what I was looking at in potential RIFs in 2002, 2010, 2013 and the one I finally took in 2015 - ain't the aerospace industry grand?
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One time I got laid off I received 1 week for each year of employment. The other time I got 10 weeks. Nobody where I ever worked got 6 months except for the top handful of executives.
 
razztazz said:
No the prison thing has to do with cheap labor and captive workers. Ex Cons generally can't even think about going somewhere else. Easier to screw than normal workers.
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WRT your comment, I disagree. In prior years, no one hired ex-cons. No one. The labor shortage is creating new paradigms regarding who to recruit.
 
Similar. Either one or two weeks per year of service. Had a co-worker, 40ish , two kids etc. Had only six month on the job and was walked to the door with two weeks in his pocket.
 
Red Badger said:
WRT your comment, I disagree. In prior years, no one hired ex-cons. No one. .
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And now this is a new technique by The Business community to run yet another end around in the economy.

And BTW there have always been businesses that hired ex-cons. Cheap. Can harass the carp out of them. Where dey gonna go? It was their business model. It's just going mainstream now.
 
They came to me, on occasion, as I did outreach work to keep a few from returning to the hoosegaw. I tried to help align them with employers that would give them an opportunity. Obviously, you never worked for that type of company. I did. We lifted up a few at our company, got others a job where we could place them. I wasn't doing this on the company dime, but when the star aligned, my firm took a few.

We didn't F#ck 'em over for the bottom line. Have a nice day.
 
I too had many years in the auto business, and 2008 was the year my division essentially "retired" everyone 55 years old and 30 years with the company. We got a year's severance pay, another 5 weeks vacation, a supplement on the pension to make up for not getting social security (to age 62), ability to purchase their healthcare to age 65 and 50 weeks unemployment. I came out smelling like a rose.

Those eligible for GM retirement would do well to go ahead and go voluntarily. Those eligible but not taking the package may be sent home involuntarily with lesser benefits than those eligible for retirement. Sounds as if the packages being offered are not as good as those 10 or 20 years back. And it also sounds as if there is a large group of GM employees that are 10 year employees. That means the old time workers have already been retired/sent home--15 or 20 years ago. GM presently only has about 1/3 of the employees they had in the 1970's anyway. It's already a scaled down operation. So many components made by GM are now contracted out to non-union factories all over the country.

I do feel for the employees, especially in the Rust Belt. But we southerners are building much better products than ever came out of Detroit or Ohio. I have 5 major auto factories within 2 hours--and a bunch of components factories. They had a robot with a shovel last week in Huntsville dig the first bucket of dirt for the new Mazda-Toyota factory--another major industrial coup for the state.
 
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Bamaman said:
I too had many years in the auto business, and 2008 was the year my division essentially "retired" everyone 55 years old and 30 years with the company. We got a year's severance pay, another 5 weeks vacation, a supplement on the pension to make up for not getting social security (to age 62), ability to purchase their healthcare to age 65 and 50 weeks unemployment. I came out smelling like a rose.

Those eligible for GM retirement would do well to go ahead and go voluntarily. Those eligible but not taking the package may be sent home involuntarily with lesser benefits than those eligible for retirement. Sounds as if the packages being offered are not as good as those 10 or 20 years back. And it also sounds as if there is a large group of GM employees that are 10 year employees. That means the old time workers have already been retired/sent home--15 or 20 years ago. GM presently only has about 1/3 of the employees they had in the 1970's anyway. It's already a scaled down operation. So many components made by GM are now contracted out to non-union factories all over the country.

I do feel for the employees, especially in the Rust Belt. But we southerners are building much better products than ever came out of Detroit or Ohio. I have 5 major auto factories within 2 hours--and a bunch of components factories. They had a robot with a shovel last week in Huntsville dig the first bucket of dirt for the new Mazda-Toyota factory--another major industrial coup for the state.
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Yep.

Here's where they are made today. Not listed are GA and SC, but they are strong as well.

https://www.mlive.com/auto/index.ssf/2015/03/these_are_the_top_10_states_fo.html
 
Red Badger said:
Yep.

Here's where they are made today. Not listed are GA and SC, but they are strong as well.

https://www.mlive.com/auto/index.ssf/2015/03/these_are_the_top_10_states_fo.html
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Yep. They have incredible modern Hyundai and Kia factories in Montgomery and 100 miles east just over the GA state line.

And BMW in NW SC is exporting a bunch of vehicles to Europe. Great products and workmanship.

The Mercedes factory just outside Tuscaloosa is a multi $ billion investment, and they just add on and add on to the original facility. They're making 3 different cars there now.
 
The six months is standard at GM. It used to be up to a year at full pay and then 6 months at half pay but that was when they wanted to keep you in the rehire pool for a cyclical business. I think they shifted away from DB pensions around 2003 but the folks hired before that had both pension and 401k. Therefore they should’ve added a sweetener to boost acceptance. If you decline and hang around for a month or two you’d get paid for 7 or 8 months unless they cut the standard severance. The 20 yr old plant near here builds transmissions for trucks and hybrids and they are on the closure list so I guess that work will be moved elsewhere. And oh, they are getting back into medium duty trucks which they exited in 2008.
 
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