Word: buick
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...good thing the tennessee State Highway Patrol doesn't issue citations for high-speed pursuit of matching funds. By the time Lamar Alexander wheeled his red Buick Reatta convertible down Nashville's "Music Row," he could have been ticketed twice and would have been in danger of losing his license as he headed for his third fund-raising meeting of the day. The former Tennessee Governor got up before dawn that morning in New Hampshire, flew to Nashville and then addressed his 40 top local financiers at a genteel Governor's-mansion lunch. He later huddled with country-music star...
...General Motors strike that started at an AC Delco plant in Flint, Michigan has now spread to nine more factories that produce some of the company's hottest products. The walkout has idled 30,900 workers. Plants in Pontiac, Lansing, Orion Township, Auburn Hills, and Buick City, Mich., as well as Doraville, Georgia, Janesville, Wisconsin, Ste. Therese, Quebec and Oshawa, Ontario were closed or crippled. The plants assemble cars on which GM is banking heavily, such as the Chevy Lumina and Pontiac Firebird, as well as the popular Chevy Suburban and Blazer sports utility vehicles, says TIME Detroit bureau chief...
Finally, when it absolutely could not avoid adding workers, GM at Buick City and elsewhere turned to temporary-help agencies, which now supply blue-collar workers as well as stenographers, computer operators and other office hands. Once more the reason is economics: "temps" draw only wages, not health insurance and other expensive fringe benefits, and they can be used and let go as needed, without drawing the supplementary unemployment benefits GM and other companies must pay to laid-off regular workers...
...Roach: "The ((job-creating)) leader in this recovery is not IBM, not Wal-Mart, not General Motors. It's Manpower, the company that offers you a job for a week without benefits, not knowing where you're going to be next Monday." About the only way in which the Buick City situation is untypical, in fact, is that the workers finally rebelled -- and won. First, to hear them tell it, they literally worked themselves sick; by late September, more than 1,000 of the 11,500 workers were on sick leave. At that point, Local 599 of the United Auto...
Whether that victory sets any kind of precedent remains to be seen. Not many other workers have been pressed as hard as those in Buick City, nor are many as strategically placed to cripple their company's nationwide production by walking out. On the other hand, says Sinai, companies counting on their workers to be loyal may be in for a surprise: "Why would there be loyalty, given the way corporations have dealt with their workers over the past four or five years? At the first chance that workers have, they'll go looking for better jobs...