I work in auto manufacturing in the US. Not directly making cars but making parts that go into cars.
The amount of work we’ve been doing is insane - overtime pretty much every day for the past two months to keep up with orders.
But that makes no sense. All these cars we’re helping to produce, who the hell is buying them? Nobody has money for a new car. Most people in my city seem to be driving cars that are at least a few years old rather than brand new.
I do the math in my head and it doesn’t make sense. Who is buying all these cars? Are they even selling? It seems like a scam of some kind.
For every ten people who don’t have the money to buy a single new car, there is one person who has money to buy ten new cars.
I’m exaggerating a bit here, but my point is that more and more the economy is geared toward a shrinking minority of people at the top with a lot of disposable income who consume most of the “luxury” goods, while everyone else has nothing to spare because it all goes to various forms of rent and just trying to survive.
This is dead on. The top 10% of “income earners” contribute 50% of consumer spending. But as you imply, they don’t buy 10 cars, 10 homes, 10 refrigerators etc. The model is unsustainable, but we knew that already, that’s the we’re here
Also, if cars stopped being made due to their lack of demand, the business would close up, and the capitalists who run that particular industry would have to find new labor to exploit.
I’m thinking of fossil fuels sales.
You’re not wrong. A family not far from me have two adult children living at home. I’m sure they contribute to family expenses, but the house and property are mortgage free. The pop worked his backside off and only recently retired. One adult child won a tidy lottery and couldn’t think what to do with it, and has three vehicles parked on the lawn.
You may be catching up with old shortages and refilling inventories.
See, they claim it’s to “build up inventory for two days” but this goal seems unattainable and also hadn’t been attained prior to me working here. Allegedly they hadn’t worked OT for some months before now too which is why I don’t buy that excuse.
For as long as I’ve worked here we’ve never been two days ahead of schedule.
Maybe they’re trying to flog out some last minute production for end of year accounting reasons, or (worse) because of the upcoming plant closing that they haven’t told you about yet
I doubt the plant is closing as it’s also the corporate HQ. It wouldn’t be closing unless they were moving buildings or shutting the whole company down, and they wouldn’t be able to hide either of those things.
depends on what cars they end up in but one common source of a fleet of cars is rental car companies.
Yup. Also government cars and corporate cars.
Overtime daily for 2 months? Sounds like some manager bullshit to me.
Maybe. I can at least vouch for the plant manager; he hates the overtime too as he’s required to come in and since he’s salaried he doesn’t get overtime pay.
It’s more likely a corporate decision.
Hence the manager bullshit. This is probably trying to hit a performance target. Poor manager has to “come in”! Oh no!
I was on an engineer project where the team had to do a month or so of 6-7 days/week to hit our “important” deadline. Once the project was completed quite a few of us were made redundant.
Lesson learned: never fix anything unless you create two more problems that need fixing.
I sincerely doubt the plant manager is behind it. He isn’t the one releasing orders nor does he create the schedules.
I get a feeling this is some bs to bolster the year numbers for either the shareholders or the president to be honest. Everything else ist failing. Or do these parts go intoilitary vehicles as well? We are moving towards ww3 so maybe its dual use stuff?
No this is all civilian/personal vehicle stuff. They’re common cars too; not luxury cars.
Very interesting. I can only assume that theyre filling up the halls to push some numbers and lessen the recession figures.
Edit: oh and to split the working class so industry workers dont align with the others.
