[quasi]

Originally Posted by Great68

I'm getting the sense that blame is being placed on the employees for the "unsustainable pensions" tanking the companies.

It's a benefit of employment and the the companies agreed to provide it. It's not the employees' fault the company couldn't perform and manage their finances well enough to account for it.

It'd be like the company I work for now going under and then blaming all us employees for taking them up on the RRSP matching program for causing it?

I agree to a point but I wonder if it has anything to do with automation and improvements in technology making it cheaper and easier to build the cars?

Say they build a more atomized plant in Mexico that can be operated by less skilled labor making less money what's the benefit to paying a high wage with a huge benefit plan to other workers? They still have to compete with the other auto manufactures and provide vehicles at the lowest price possible to get as much market share as they can.

Remember when all the projectionists went on strike for like a year because they wanted to roll back their pay because changes in technology allowed them to have a 16 year old kid with minimal training do the same job? They sat out for a year until eventually they all moved on and were let go and it was all due to changes in technology.

I'm not blaming the employees for getting theirs but at the end of the day the bottom line really is the only thing that matters in business. You can try and be accommodating take less profits to keep your employees happy but eventually there is a tipping point where you go from black to red. The owner of our company really cares about his employees and does everything he can to keep us employed, heck he owns at least 5 different companies with 700+ employees and I get a call from him weekly to see how I'm doing but rest assured if we lose to much money over a long period of time he'll just shut down our office, he's done it in other locations in western Canada and honestly I don't blame him.