Competitive Connection

April 2, 2007

A look at the competition
Flexibility key to engine plant’s success
The Global Engine Manufacturing Alliance (GEMA) is a joint venture among DaimlerChrysler, Hyundai and Mitsubishi. It stresses flexibility and collaboration over traditional high-cost labor practices.  Union employees work side by side with lower-paid contract employees doing work once performed by Big Three laborers. And, in a departure from traditional union practices, employees have a stake in the plant's success through performance bonuses.

Chrysler executives say the plant is a marvel. Heavily automated, it can build a four-cylinder engine in less than the 1.82 worker hours it takes at Toyota's best engine factory in West Virginia. At full production its 650 employees will churn out 840,000 engines a year; Chrysler's traditionally run engine plant in Trenton, Mich., needs nearly three times as many workers to produce 500,000 engines.
Even more remarkable, half the workers don't even work directly for GEMA. They're employed by some 18 contractors doing non-core jobs, like moving supplies, maintaining equipment or cleaning the factory. Most are still union workers, but they are paid substantially less than the $31 per hour--$70 with benefits--that GEMA's 220 hourly workers earn. Other labor-intensive jobs, like attaching radiator hoses and pumps, is farmed out to suppliers. 

Workers and managers in Dundee are guided by a labor contract the size of a pocket calendar, not the usual Manhattan phone book. Gone are the narrowly defined job classifications that fostered overstaffing and a "not my job" attitude in many factories. Every employee is trained to do every job, and they're free to fix their own problems.

Indeed, workers seem happy. Absenteeism is under 2%, compared with 13% at most factories. And this despite shorter break times. Big Three workers get an average 46 minutes of break time per day, compared with 20 to 30 minutes for workers at Japanese-owned plants. At GEMA the break time is cut in half, to two 12-minute breaks per day.–Source: Forbes, April 9, 2007
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Then and Now
Auto manufacturing remains one of the economy’s best paying industries. In 1986, the auto production wage was $9.59, according to the U.S. Department of Bureau of Labor. In 2004, that wage increased to $29.05. In 2006, $16.80 was the average hourly earnings for production employees in the manufacturing industry. Auto manufacturing wages are 80 percent greater than the national average for all manufacturing industries.
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What others are saying . . .
Detroit Three and UAW are bound together
The UAW and the Detroit Three, like an old married couple, are bound together for life, for better or for worse. They either find a way to prevail together, or they die together.—Source: Tom Walsh, Detroit Free Press, March 25, 2007
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A look at the competition
2007 Corolla at end of cycle, and it shows
I liked this car at one time. The Toyota Corolla was somewhat inexpensive, and it was for sure that it would easily outlast the payments. All that is still true, but the 2007 Corolla LE was such a disappointment that I wonder if I may have confused this Corolla with something else from Toyota.

As for the styling, forget-about-it. It is as dull as a plastic knife, and while we don't expect a sedan in this price range to be a head turner, it should at least have some sparkle.
The cutout opening that the passenger airbag is home to displayed some very poor fits, and we don't remember Toyota ever showing this lack of attention to details.
Not that Toyota needs any advice from me, but I remember General Motors when these same types of examples started to show up a couple of decades ago. Then it was the Japanese who were doing more for less. The Koreans will someday be looking at the Chinese for the same reasons. –Source: Ed Nobel, Chicago Sun-Times, March 22, 2007