Big strike at GM

[mosdef]

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If people don't like their jobs they should find something else. Profound indeed.

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A bit late if they worked for 20 years of their life expecting certain promises (should we call them contracts) to be held to.

Which is very much what GM promised to their employees when they needed to attract them!

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The collective bargaining process is supposed to be about negotiating compensation for the upcoming period. If they were promised deferred benefits in prior periods but didn't get them or expect not to get them, they should maybe stop negotiating for deferred benefits. The deferred benefit they have not received was in respect of work in a prior period, not for work in the upcoming period. If they want, they can quit and sue the company for the compensation they didn't receive for past work and work somewhere else for future work.

[MidGe]

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The collective bargaining process is supposed to be about negotiating compensation for the upcoming period.

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I can assure you that is NOT the way it presented to the workers at the time. Are you denying the contracts in place 20+ years ago and the basis for them? The workers skill base was not based on legal expertise, the negotiators on behalf of GM surely were very well skilled and/or briefed in legal obfuscation.

[pvn]

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I find this argument very interesting. Here we had a company GM that made an agreement with its workers in return for their labor to give them a certain salary and deferred benefits in the form of pensions. This was to the benefit of the company management (performance oriented bonuses) and shareholders (access to cheap fund for their company growth).

Now due to incompetence of the company management of allocation of its management responsibilities to incompetents, the funds (rightly the employees) cannot provide the benefits , not only envisaged, but promised.

I think that the suckers, the ones at the bottom of the wealth hierarchy got done once more! GM ought to be sold to some company that will pay the workers their past entitlements, or the directors and all those responsible for their false promises, should be sued for everything they have!

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GM ought to be sold? To whom? You would force someone else to buy it, and to make good on these promises which are economically impossible to fufill?

Basically it sounds like you're advocating a bailout for the "bad guys" here.

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PS withdrawal of labor is the only recourse left when employers default on their obligations

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Duh.

[surftheiop]

so you want the governement to prop up some monopolies (those on labor) and you want governemt to dismantle other monopolies?
wtf bro