Word: detroit
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...though, Chrysler is in the red (it lost $2 billion in the first quarter alone) and will soon be on its own, and the UAW's four-year contracts with the D3 expire in September. All eyes in Detroit are on how much Cerberus--a 15-year-old firm with a reputation for cost cutting--will be able to squeeze...
Like the other members of what is now called the Detroit Three--the traditional Big Three moniker having been rendered obsolete last year when Toyota sold 2.5 million vehicles in the U.S. to Chrysler's 2.1 million-- Chrysler has long pledged to take care of virtually all its U.S. employees' medical expenses when they retire. Faced in recent years with stagnant sales and rising health-care costs, the automakers have been ratcheting down those benefits (mainly by requiring co-pays and contributions) for retirees without union contracts. Then, in 2005, General Motors and Ford persuaded the United Auto Workers...
...through the financial statements of the Detroit Three, however, and you can easily conclude that they are money-losing retirement and health-care organizations just masquerading as money-losing carmakers. Consider General Motors, which supports three living retirees for every worker now on the job (at Chrysler the ratio is 1.3 to 1). GM long ago lost its status as the nation's largest private employer, but it remains the biggest private purchaser of health care. Investors value GM's business at $18 billion; the fund it has set aside to pay for employee pensions is worth more than...
...Detroit Three complain frequently about the cost that health care in particular adds to each car they produce in the U.S.--at GM it's $1,600, at Chrysler $1,500, at Ford $1,200. But the cost paid in management attention and focus may be even greater. The single greatest stroke of Rick Wagoner's seven-year tenure as GM CEO, for example, was probably his well-timed decision to use $18 billion in mostly borrowed money to shore up the pension fund in 2003 (yes, $18 billion does seem to be something of a magic number here). That...
...Detroit got into this benefits predicament because of a not entirely conscious policy decision by Washington after World War II to encourage corporations to provide health care and pensions (most other affluent countries gave government a bigger role) in lieu of inflationary wage hikes. During the decades-long economic boom that followed, this system worked spectacularly well--especially for employees of Detroit's prodigiously profitable Big Three...