Remember this day. December 12, 2008 a referendum on behalf of the American taxpayer to hold GM, Chrysler and Ford management accountable for their own transgressions. Auto Workers unite and hold these managers accountable. Don't lose site of the miserable management that got your companies where they are today. It's a big mess that will hurt the line worker, so let's press the managers to take their hits too. Don't forget that mismanagement got you into this mess.
It's not the line worker who for many years ignored consumers. It's not the line worker that approved inferior designs and resisted conventional wisdom to produce more fuel efficient vehicles.
Unfortunately, the auto industry, as with airlines, is an industry Americans can love to hate. Polling Americans would likely reveal a large percentage of disgruntled consumers of these industries. It's the arrogance we hate. Both industries continue to treat their customers as problems rather than the life blood of their existences. In the short haul this arrogance is stupid, but in the long run it's deadly.
It's done. The leaders of GM, Chrysler and Ford should be held accountable now. It's on them to make this better from here on. It's a tough thing to say, but they'll need to make the market forces work for them or they'll simply fold. It's not unfair as some might have you believe, it's market forces bearing down on these poorly managed companies. What is sad is as always, it is unfair to the line worker, but had the taxpayer simply paid good money into these failing businesses the management would never have been called upon to own up and there's little evidence that any of these managers would have used the monies to make meaningful changes.
So don't anyone lose sight that these managers are the guys who came before Congress ill-prepared. They came ill-prepared for the most important interviews of their lives. They knew that the results of these interviews would impact a great number of innocent people and they ignored that fact by showing up unprepared, without restructuring plans. They had apparently given little thought about how they got into the mess or about admission that their history stinks or about the ways in which their foreign competitors have been doing it better or about smarter hedges against rising costs or about fuel efficiencies or about customer service, and on and on. Isn't that enough to show incompetence in their leadership?
